Clothes For Our New Phase

 By Erica and Karen

It is about time that designers conceived of clothing for people like us. Women, that is, who have retired from careers that required them to dress rather formally every day, women who remain involved in the world, women who are re-envisioning how they want to look. We know some retired women who are pleased to wear sweat pants and athleisure outfits all day long. We are not among them. 

We are styling a new, disrupting idea for retirement. We are now free to experiment in ways we could not before. We work, hard, on what we have chosen to do, but in circumstances more under our control. We are no longer constrained by convention, and can experiment with what suits our age and mood. There are many of us out there. We would like some re-imagined clothes.

We are not designers, of course. But we have a lot of experience--decades--wearing excellent things. We have always valued clothes because of the messages they send about us, and how they make us feel. We love skillful draping. We know what clever seaming and tailoring can do for our figures--ever more important as gravity has its way. We know how fine fabric feels on the hand. We love elegant interplays of color and texture, metallics and chiffons, in casual and party clothes. And we love the newer fabrics--so silky and yet so hardy. (Like eberjey--great PJs in fabulous technofabric.)

So we call on you, designers. Come talk to us. Consult with us. We will tell you about the image we want to convey. We can talk about sleeves, and hemlines, and shoes, and jewelry. We will tell you how we spend our days, and describe clothes that would fit well into our new routines. We want to make an indelible impression, an image that will convey, elegantly, that we are full of life, full of experience, living fully, and still living in the world. 

In the meantime, ladies, who are your favorite designers?