I’ve always been interested in why people wear what they wear, and I’ve come to two conclusions.
First, fashion choices are not random. What we wear makes a statement about what we really think.
Second, fashion is driven by the generational perceptions of what is important in life.
I chatted with another woman in a medical clinic waiting room a few years back. She watched as a teenaged male bent over at the water fountain. Even though his teeshirt was too long, his pants still drooped down around his hips to uncover some kind of colored underwear. (Thank goodness for Fruit of the Loom, at least!)
“Humpf,” she said, straightening her nice collared shirt. “When I was a girl we tried to look our best when we went out. We tried to show that we were hard-working, respectable people. Now the kids don’t seem to care how they look.”
Surveying the boy’s garb, I could tell that he did care very much about how he looked. He had probably spent a great deal of time selecting the teeshirt emblazoned with an offensive logo and the jeans that he had to keep hitching up. He just didn’t care what a couple of old duffers like us thought of his choice because it wasn’t made for us. He chose those clothes to impress his peers.
Young people today aren’t interested in impressing older people, because, frankly, we don’t matter much in their scheme of things.
They care more about impressing those of their own age, largely because they spend more time with their own generation. Most of them have been brought up, not at home with adult parents, but in day care centers and kindergartens starting at age 3 or before. So their sense of style is developed not by looking up toward what “respectable” adults are wearing but out toward what their more respected peer group is wearing.
In fact, their fashion choices are often made in rebellion against what adults wear. As a generation of parents, maybe the Baby Boomers and the Gen-Xers have let them down. Kids are tired of our divorce rate, our tarnished morality and the disfunctional adults in their families.
They don’t want to be like us, so they don’t want to dress like us. Their dress styles through the years tend to correspond to the alarming trends they see around them at any given time.
Jail house attire — a remnant of which we saw on that young man at the clinic— began as a protest against the fact that at one point this decade, 20 percent of all American black males 18 and over were in jail, where belts are not allowed and pants hang too low without them, where shower shoes are the footwear distributed to slow down the progress of anyone who hopes to make a break for it, where shoe strings are taken away, like belts, to prevent suicide.
The youth trend that most infuriates older adults now is best described as “hot.” This style features lots of skin, lots of cleavage, lots of compression and little of anything else. Like proper underwear. This is one of the saddest trends to me. The message here is that nothing matters except sex, and age 12 is old enough to be putting it out there.
But I wonder if the “hot” style isn’t a reaction against the false modesty of a society that wants teens to cover up while watching the bump and grind of their adult musical idols who “take it all off” at family shows like the Super Bowl. And aren’t adults in charge of producing those entertainments?
And maybe younger parents, who wore protest clothes of their own, are so “cool” they don’t care what their kids wear. Short skirts and bare midriffs for girls must have Mom and Dad’s approval. Otherwise, where would their girls get the money to buy these styles?
But maybe the saddest style is what I’m seeing now: “Don’t care.” Teens and even adults are just sliding into old shorts and faded tees to go almost anywhere, including church, which used to require a little dressing up. Faded, picked leggings and a wrinkled shirt that isn’t long enough to cover the lumps and bumps are the fashions of choice these days, even for Mom. It isn’t poverty that dictates this style, it’s emotional depression — so many people just don’t care anymore.
It started with Covid and continued into all the social and political demoralization that has followed. It’s as if most people have given up, and it shows in what they choose to dress in every day. Our clothing choices now say, “I don’t care what I wear and I don’t care what you think about me. I can’t be bothered.”
That’s a sad commentary on our mental and social state. It’s also a sad commentary on where we’re going— which looks like back to bed, if the pajamas and fuzzy house shoes worn in public places are any indication.
It kind of makes me worry about the future of our society, but maybe that’s because I’m just one of those old duffers who doesn’t know anything.
