8 years can be quite a difference in fashion preferences IMO. My wife is 5 years younger than me and I can easily see it.
I will note that I almost never go out in a dress shirt and nice chinos, and very few of my friends do. I’m a jeans and t-shirt (or sweater) sort of guy. I even feel somewhat silly going out in a polo shirt (my normal work wear is a polo shirt and chinos… In the summer - dress shirt and khakis in the cooler months). I will note for fancier casual stuff I have done the polo and blazer… which isn’t bad. I’ve also done the t-shirt and suit thing.
I disagree a little with the OP. There are still fashion trends now, they just don’t last very long. This is probably because clothing is proportionally much cheaper than it was in previous decades, and social media makes fashion ideas spread much faster.
Right now here in Shanghai, there is a trend for women to wear oversized clothes. To the extent that I, a muscular 6’3 male, have bought a TShirt and a vest for myself that was in the women’s part of the store. One was marked size M, and one was size S. Size S for a Chinese woman fit me.
And I’m sure this trend will be gone by next year. It looks awful for one thing, but also I’ve seen several trends come and go as basically a yearly thing.
I should add too that it’s a generational thing.
If you want to see women in oversize clothes, it will generally be very young women 16-24 years old.
So for me, as a middle aged man, I don’t notice many of my peer group wearing these new fashions.
But it would likely have been the same if I had been middle aged in, say, the 90s.
A polo shirt and chinos is kind of a funny combination. People have been wearing them basically since the 30s (earlier for chinos). But depending on the style, cut, fabric, etc, they can make you look like The Great Gatsby, an extra from an 80s film, a frat guy, your dad, a 15 year old or like you just wrapped up your shift at Best Buy.
Absolutely nothing wrong with The Gap (ask Steve Kornacki - who ended up causing a run on Gap chinos). It tends to be a far more stylish American contemporary brand than J Crew or Brooks Brothers (the later which, no offense, is old white guy brand)
But are they DOMINANT trends? Like I’ve said in great detail above, my point is not that fashion is completely dead and that there are no trends. It is that there is a greater offer of styles than in the past and it’s easier and, apparently, more socially tolerated to avoid the latest trends and have your own style than in the past. I was wondering what had happened to make this state of affairs possible.
Agreed - trends, to whatever extent they are still important, are definitely more the purvey of the young, and probably were in the past too (though I maintain they seem to have affected the style choices of “everyone”, not just the young, more in the past than they do today). The Prague trend I mentioned in my last post of trousers with cuffs ending right at or just above the ankle is more visible on girls/women in their late teens-20s than on women in their 30s/40s, as far as I can tell.
True, the same can be said of the business suit. A suit today is not drastically different from what it was in the 1920s, but certain elements, such as pattern and color, size and cut of lapel, single or double breast, have varied so that you can in many cases pinpoint what era a suit comes from. Some of the trendiest suits today, as far as I can tell, have long narrow lapels not unlike a tuxedo. Polos were a VERY casual item of clothing in the 1930s; today they are “business casual”. A plain white t-shirt has existed since the 1890s or so, but originally it was a piece of underwear and took a while to become acceptable as labor / casual wear. Now it’s acceptable as workwear in many places.
Well I would agree there are more styles and it’s more socially acceptable. The degree of domination though, is still debatable.
In the popular imagination, if we were to go back to a specific part of the 60s and go to the UK, say, virtually every girl would be wearing a mini skirt. But have trends ever been dominant to that extent?
I can only really speak for being a young person in the 90s and it was certainly not the case that everyone dressed like vanilla ice
The “fashion police” in general often seem to favour bold colours, impractical items, expensive and hard-to-source things, small sizing, arbitrary rules and increasing formality. Partly for the reasons in my first post. Ads still feature too many anorexics and retouching, but there have been very modest improvements.
Some pay attention. Many just do what they want. After Covid, even the high end places are calling “athleisure” the new look, as if that’s what they prefer. No one much cares what the “colour of the year” is or whether the mask matches the mittens.
My “business casual” attire has essentially remained unchanged since the mid-1990s. It’s chinos or khakis, button down shirt, and leather shoes. The biggest change I can think of over the years is that in 1996 all my shirts for work were solid muted colors whereas today many of them have patterns and some of them are brightly colored.
My casual wear hasn’t changed radically since I was in the early 20s. I still wear jeans most of the time but where I used to wear t-shirts back then I usually wear a button down shirt when out in public depending on where I’m going.
Huh. Seems looking at this zombie thread that my opinion on this topic has changed in the last year.
I’m now firmly in the camp of saying that new fashion trends spring up all the time, but they are not dominant the way they were in the past, and seem to have an indefinite lifespan. So it all just looks like a hodge podge.
Let’s just say she has very aggressive opinions on what I (well, everyone, actually) should wear.
Her opinions are very conservative, very dated, and dictated by antiquated rules (if there’s one person in the restaurant with a hat on, she’ll be bitching about it throughout your lunch).
This summarizes my original point. There definitely still are trends, but they are faster and more varied than in the past, more generic options and a greater variety of fashion are additionally on offer and it is thus easer (and apparently more socially acceptable) to “do your own thing” than in the past.
I don’t know (or care) about any fashion police (at 73, why would I?), but I do occasionally see people who I think could benefit from a visit from a community fashion nurse.
Fashion used to be dictated by a relatively small circle of “fashion Houses” (Paris, New York, and London) that could push things like “The New Look”. Some of this still exists and you’ll hear of things like “the colors for this year are charcoal, puce, and seafoam green”. But since then there has been a breakout of new fashions coming from new areas.
The majority of fashion has split along two lines: Conformity to a class and “power look” - such as the business suit for lawyers, government officials, and newscasters. And the casual look for people who realize that they really don’t need to keep up with this stuff - part of the “me” generation.
Fashion is a uniform… and the author Harry Turtledove made an interesting observation in one of his young adult books The Disunited States of America (?). To paraphrase: People in this part of the country wear a uniform to show their authority. In the other part they avoid uniforms because a uniform shows that they DON’T have authority, and have to conform to rules laid down from above.
I heard someone make this remark about the decline of the fashion houses:
In the 1950’s and 1960’s the fashion houses were showing women’s fashions suitable for cocktail parties, walking a poodle, and other frou-frou.
When women moved up in the ranks of the workplace, they tried to find fashions that would reflect their new status. Something that would make it clear they weren’t a secretary. And the fashion houses were showing dresses suitable for cocktail parties, walking a poodle…
