Let Your Post-Career Style Announce Your Presence.

 By Erica and Karen

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

We like fashion. Fashion is fun. We love seeing the latest, in beautiful photographs and glossy magazines. Usually on people younger and skinnier than we are, but that’s life. What really matters to us is style. We know that fashion is there to give us ideas about how to articulate our style, which has evolved over the years but has always been very personal. 

Style is much more than clothes. It is a way of thinking, of walking, of speaking–developed over time. It is 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. Where we live, where we travel. Style is us.

We women of the Lustre cohort were pretty much obliged to invent our own personal styles when we entered the workforce. At first, many of us felt we needed to look like men, and act like men, and live like men. For a while, we signaled that by wearing navy blue suits with oxford cloth shirts and mannish silk ties. It was funky, and it was personal, but it was a failure of imagination. Too derivative. And a lot of those clothes didn’t really fit our curves.

After a while, most of us we realized we needed to come out as women. We needed to wear suits and dresses designed for women, shoes with heels invented for women, colors that express our womanly approach to life. We had to carry bags big enough to hold tons of stuff, but they did not have to be ugly brown leather clunkers. Big purple or turquoise totes worked just fine.

Our personal style really emerged after we developed confidence. Once we realized we were making ourselves accepted, we began to look the way we wanted to look. We wore pink polka dot suits to court—and we won. We wore elegant, slouchy silk pantsuits a la Greta Garbo to board meetings—and we were listened to. We created lives in which work and family vied for centrality every single day, and nothing was ever very balanced, but we lived them our way and our style broadcast who we were. 

We need all that style again, now, to create the image of who we are, now. That’s an image rather like the women we were before we retired, but freer and lighter. No longer in careers, but living purposefully, reveling in work and play and family. Our personal style is different now that we are no longer part of the beloved institutions where we worked. We can be even bolder in how we express ourselves and how we live and look.

Our style will change retirement. Fashion needs to catch up with us, just like it did in the 60s and 70s.

Designers, listen up. We are awaiting your elegant, cutting edge designs, your sustainable, fluid fabrics, your jewelled colors. We are fearless at this stage of the game, so play to our strength!