Style, Then and Now.

By Erica and Karen

Fashion fades. Style is eternal. So said Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent. 

We like fashion anyway. Fashion is fun. We subscribe to various newsletters, like this and this, read news reports, and often marvel at what the designers come up with. We’re also interested in the business of fashion, because it reflects societal and cultural trends in ways often akin to art. And of course we like to see gorgeous photos from the Oscars and the Met Gala showing divine evening creations we covet but have no need for. Yet.

But what really matters to us is style. For one thing, we can achieve style at our price point. Fashion is there to give us ideas about how to articulate our style, but fashion is not personal to us unless we make it part of our style. 

Style is a way of thinking, of walking, of speaking–developed over time. It is about making choices, with confidence, that reflect who we are, what we want, and how we project our image. Our hair, our makeup, our sunglasses, our watches. Our books, our politics, the plays we like, the plays we don’t. Our homes. Our favorite recipes. Our travel destinations. Style is us.

The women who joined the workforce when we did had to invent personal workplace styles, because there was no prototype for the new breed of working woman. At first, many of us felt we needed to look like men, and act like men, and live like men, in order to fit in. We wore (and designers offered us) navy blue suits with oxford cloth shirts and mannish shoes with little heels. That was a failure of imagination on the part of the designers, and, in retrospect, a bit cowardly on our part.

Happily, that phase did not last. We decided to come out as women. We wanted, and designers eventually gave us, workwear designed for women. Diane von Furstenberg’s wrap dresses were a game changer. So were curvy suits styled for our bodies. Colors. Shoes with heels. We always had to carry around lots of stuff—papers, of course, but also a change of shoes, makeup, kid’s stuff. Large men’s briefcases were the wrong shape and looked clunky. So we found colorful totes. Big ones.

Once we realized we were going to be in this world for the long haul, and that people had come to accept that women could think and act as well as men—if differently—we began to look the way we wanted to look. We wore pink polka dot suits to court—and won. We wore elegant, slouchy silk pantsuits, a la Greta Garbo, to board meetings—and people listened. Work and family vied for centrality every single day, and nothing was ever balanced, but we lived our lives our way, and our style showed it. 

Here we go again. We have to invent our personal retirement styles because there is no prototype for the new breed of retired career women. We don’t want to look, or act, like men any more now than we did before. We still need color and style and fun in our clothes—and in our lives generally. Now, we want to convey an image of experienced, elegant and purposeful post-career women, an image that will open doors and minds. Again.

We still use fashion to stimulate our thinking about style, and we still enjoy the style journey! We can’t wait for designers to catch up with us.