Janusz Noniewicz
DOES AGEISM LIE AT THE ROOT OF MODERN THINKING OF FASION? AN ATTEMPT OF OUTLINING THE QUESTION

Fashion and age sit uncomfortably together – this is how Julia Twigg¹ begins her book Fashion and Age: Dress, the Body and Later Life, one of the few works on the subject based on research and using a specific writing and research method. In my opinion, however, the quoted sentence can and even should be understood with a reference to everyday language. ‘I don’t feel good in it’ – we say or even justify our decisions when some outfit, some clothing, despite its – say – objective value (being fashionable, well designed, solidly sewn, made using quality materials, aligned with trends, looking good on the hanger), does not appeal to us in spite of all. We do not feel comfortable wearing it. And it would not be easy to find a specific reason why. Nothing’s pinching or prickling us, there’s no discomfort in purely physical terms, and yet we do not feel comfortable in it. And if we do not know, we cannot say why – it is probably a matter of style.

And vice versa. It seems that fashion could also say ‘I don’t feel good about you’ – about your body, your way of moving, your way of being, the environment you live in. This sense of discomfort between fashion and age can be mutual.

A question arises: who should fit whom and is such a fit necessary at all. Is it not better to give up fashion at a certain age? Yet, it would have to be a decision depending solely on us, because fashion will certainly not leave us alone by itself. Feeling uncomfortable with us, it will be bidding us to change. Change is the very essence of fashion, and the constant adaptation to it is its fuel. This applies to everyone who gets into its wheels: young and old, poor and rich, people of different genders and identities. ‘Fashion is probably the only sphere of human creative activity that does not care about survival’ – wrote César Moreno-Márquez in 2017 in the text Fashionable Proteus: Essay on The Euphoria of Fashion for Fashion’s Sake in an Age of Shallowness.² Fashion is by definition focused on constant change, and designing fashion is designing change. Does the discomfort between fashion and life expectancy lie in the contradiction that fashion demands changes, and man, along with the passing years, would rather avoid them? The inconvenient clashes between fashion and age do not arise from nature (fashion has no nature), but from superstitions that have shaped the understanding of both fashion and old age.³

In an article published in The Guardian in August 2015, Hadley Freeman asks why fashion hates old people.⁴ And she notes that there is no logic in this relation to old age. In fashion, old age begins at forty⁵ – says Freeman, while hardly anyone under forty can afford to buy expensive, luxurious clothes. Clothes designed for adults (even old people, according to the fashion counter) are shown on teenage models. Sometimes even 14-year-olds: ‘Sticking with just the ageism issue for the moment, this is clearly a ridiculous state of affairs. Forget about the moral issue – it’s not even logical. Only a very small percentage of women can afford to buy designer clothes and, of those, an even tinier percentage of them are under 40. And yet, designers still insist on having their clothes modelled by extremely young women – children, in some cases, such as 14-year-old Sofia Mechetner, who appeared in Dior’s couture show last month. Do many 14-year-olds now buy couture? Is this what the kids are doing in between WhatsApping and taking something the media insists on calling “hippy crack”? I’m going to go with “no” here, so quite why a 14-year-old should be held up as the couture ideal by a design house is beyond me. Honestly, they may as well say couture should only be worn by mermaids.’⁶

The 1960s’ youthquake made societies begin to perceive themselves as a community of young people, since youth was attributed with prag­matism, activity, strength, and vigour. These qualities, more abundant in youth than in old age indeed, were transformed into values. At the same time, as Butler notes, they were contrasted with features such as: contemplation, reflection, experience, and wisdom coming with age. Through the opposition of youth to thus understood old age, the features of old age were deprived of their positive meaning and characterised only as non-youth.

In fashion, the limit of old age is determined by the phenomenon of the so-called ‘generation gap’, especially its version grown out of the changes taking place in the 1960s. The generational gap manifested itself then in almost every area of life, becoming clearly visible in the style of spending free time, earning and spending money, listening to and performing music, artistic activity, spirituality and religiosity, but what matters for us is that it demonstrated itself ostentatiously in the appearance that embodied all these changes, as well as in generational belonging, which required the rejection of everything that had made up the previous generations’ world. In those times, youth not so much and not only demanded to be ‘invited to the table’, as it would come to sit at the table to its own liking and even jostled there.

A symptom of this phenomenon was the youthquake in fashion.⁷ The term itself was coined by Diana Vreeland, editor-in-chief of the Vogue fashion magazine. Fashion turned then away from the bombast sophistication of haute couture aspiring to the high style – and turned towards the youth culture, looking for inspiration in the lifestyle it promoted.

That was precisely the origin of conditions for contemporary cultural ageism, not only encompassing fashion, but – one could say – dictated by it. The very term ‘generation gap’ refers to the lack of continuity between generations, a break, rupture, breach, or precisely a gap that separates two subsequent generations from each other; a gap that can be an insurmountable obstacle. Even more so when this abyss arises as a result of a cultural, generational earthquake.

Around that time, in 1969, Doctor of Medical Sciences Robert N. Butler in his article Age-Ism. Another Form of Bigotry published in the journal ‘The Gerontologist’ connected the emergence of the phenomenon of ageism with thinking about the generationally ordered social structure, where the term generation gap marks the boundaries between them. Butler believed that the very term generation gap was born of prejudice against old age.⁸ The generation gap is not so much an intergenerational boundary as breaking up with old age, fencing it off, refusing to age. From that moment on, we move only within the boundaries of youth. This gap marks the boundaries of space and the image of society.

In the pages of ‘The Gerontologist’, Butler describes a case of a social opposition to building in the neighbourhood – unfortunately, I do not find other terms than euphemistic in the Polish language – senior or retirement homes, as well as an opposition to the program of co-financing elderly people so that, despite the inflation eating up their pensions, they could continue living in their areas undergoing the gentrification process. Those cases revealed the middle class’s reluctance to allow elderly people to live in their neighbourhood. Butler’s text shows that residents of Chevy Chase – a north-eastern district of Washington – believed that the elderly should be placed in poor neighbourhoods. They also objected to funding any amenities that would make their neighbourhood more liveable for retired people. At the same time – as Butler emphasises – the research he analyses in his text concerned only the issue of age. They did not cover race, gender, sexual orientation, or other characteristics that could be the cause of discrimination.⁹

In this way, the generation gap, or even the generation abyss, began to shape the city space. It should be noted – which is not stated in Butler’s text – that children growing up in such districts would function in an environment devoid of old age in a common social space. They would not see old people on the streets, various images of old age would not be recorded in their heads – elderly people’s appearance, their ways of dressing, lifestyle, or spending free time. The generation gap or abyss is a break in continuity, but also in social responsibility for old age.

The 1960s’ youthquake made societies begin to perceive themselves as a community of young people, since youth was attributed with pragmatism, activity, strength, and vigour. These qualities, more abundant in youth than in old age indeed, were transformed into values. At the same time, as Butler notes, they were contrasted with features such as: contemplation, reflection, experience, and wisdom coming with age.¹⁰ Through the opposition of youth to thus understood old age, the features of old age were deprived of their positive meaning and characterised only as non-youth. The characteristics of old age – which I mentioned after Butler and which may be its value – were replaced with the features that were the opposite of those of youth: irrationality, passivity, weakness, and apathy. In this way, old age was turned into a disease. Diseases must be avoided at an individual level and combatted in social life.

Youth became then an independent political force which owned as strong a means as mass popular culture. Fashion was an important element of it. The fashion revolution that broke out in London at that time stems from the same sources as pop culture. Designer Mary Quant became its symbol by launching the miniskirt, shorts, and a PVC raincoat on the fashion market. Mary Quant showed her designs to the world on a 16-year-old model Twiggy, who quickly became the generation’s epitome of beauty. Globally popular and recognisable thanks to pop culture, the model was 168 cm tall, weighed 51 kg, and measured 31-23-32 (in cm: 79-58.5-81 – transl.); she had an adolescent figure and an androgynous hairstyle. All the features of a teenager were used to shape a modern body standard. Since the days of Twiggy, the adolescent – one might say, still unformed – body with all its physical immaturity, has become the ideal. It was no longer possible to grow out of such a body. Not only could it not grow old, it was not even allowed to mature.

This moment in fashion history is often recalled in the context of the fight against anorexia; however, the promotion of the rejection of bodily puberty is, in fact, associated with ageism. It is the exclusion of and discrimination against the natural processes of maturation and ageing.

In the case of fashion, such discrimination consists in depriving elderly people of their freedom of choice. And even of the choice itself. In the cited article from ‘The Gerontologist’ by Butler, ageism manifested itself in the planning of urban space. The unavailability or difficult access to services or care that the elderly needed forced them either to move to other, poorer neighbourhoods or stay at home under the care of third parties, which condemned them to dependence and invisibility in public space.¹¹

Julia Twigg’s interlocutors also talk about the lack of choice in the book Fashion and Age, this lack being related to fashion and clothing.¹² Regardless of whether they are in their fifties or seventies, they agree that the fashion market is designed to limit choices that would follow their needs. And it is not just about complaining ‘I can’t find anything I like in shops.’ The problem is systemic and related to the absence of the ageing body in the system of fashion and its communication.

Joanne Entwistle points out that fashion, beyond all its other functions, is a packaging for the body. The dynamics of this function is that it is the body that gives fashion and clothing life, movement, fills it, makes it no longer flat. Entwistle writes: ‘These are ways of cooperation, of mutual relationships between the body and dress.’¹³ Here, though we have to mention yet another dynamics of fashion design she is pointing out. She calls this dynamic the getting younger movement, which fashion contrasts with the human body’s natural dynamics of getting older.¹⁴ These are two opposite directions. The human body changes with age. Its shape changes. But clothing, especially from the fashion-related genre, does not cooperate with these changes. And even more – it requires making changes in the opposite direction. It should be clearly noted here that it is not only about the clothing sizes, but also about the styles shaped and propagated by fashion. Fashion refuses to cooperate with the naturally ageing body, but also with certain established cultural and social constructs of old age, recognising only its own ideological reasons.

Distinguishing youth from old age, culture attributes different features to them and creates their different images. This distinction does not necessarily need to include evaluation. And the currently popular word ‘inclusivity’ does not mean that one of these constructs defeats the other, requiring compliance with its own norms and image. Inclusivity is the consent to the existence of different ages: young and old with equal rights within one society.

Culture discusses clothing (meaning both specific clothes and styles) that does or does not befit old age. At first glance, it may seem that precisely such a division is discriminatory. That saying that something does not suit someone due to their age equals exclusion. But, as Twigg points out in the book quoted: ‘Often these principles, or perhaps rather images, are deeply internalised. And they seem to result not from external orders or prohibitions, but from individual internal beliefs.’¹⁵ The belief that we perceive these internalised views as succumbing to stereotypes also gives rise to ageism and ageism-based exclusion. Fashion seems to say that there is no place for people with such beliefs; that – in order to fit within the boundaries of fashion – you have to get rid of them, reject them.

One could ask here (and rightly so) whether this would not be a break with the body, a refusal to cooperate, turning away from it, and thus whether this proposal does not hide ageism. Of course, this would need a closer look because ageism can lurk anywhere. However, the main purpose of construction of the body in fashion is physical attractiveness, understood as sexual or erotic attractiveness. In fashion, as in culture, it is built from the features of youth.

One of the goals that fashion sets for itself and which it willingly declares is the unlimited possibility of self-expression. But fashion thinks about self-expression in the categories of youth. In the case of fashion, self-expression is a design of the future, its form is subject to constant change, it is associated with the search for oneself, with attempts to discover and express one’s own identity, not yet stabilised. The self-expression of youth contains the readiness to abandon today in favour of some tomorrow. Andrews writes, more or less, this: life is a story, fashion is an image; fashion does not talk about change, it is change; it is a moment supposed to seem like an unchanging eternity… for a moment.¹⁶ What is the role that clothes (fashion) can play in the story, what is their meaning in it? They are associated with identification, with self-identification, both at the individual and social level. ‘They are powerful memory objects entangling the events of a person’s life and can thus be used as a vehicle for selfhood’, Andrews writes.¹⁷ They belong both to people’s historical and social world, they talk about their privacy, they are an element of their intimate world. The question is: must the fashion of the elderly be oriented towards change and the future? Does it have to show the same as in the case of youth – that life is still ahead? In the case of youth, fashion as a storyteller is supposed to tell about the future possible story that it is able to initiate today, precisely with these and such fashion choices. In the case of old people, fashion, while remaining a means of storytelling, can depict and appreciate the story of life that has happened so far. Appreciate who I am, not who I want to be.

While in the case of youth, fashion – so to say– replaces life, is a form not yet filled with content, an attempt to establish what does not yet exist, old people’s fashion can benefit from their experience from past events. It can be a real story, not a promise. A work of art, not a trailer.

Identity is not only what we declare. It is also what has been shaped and grounded by our experiences, choices, and decisions. And such an identity could also become embodied in fashion. Provided, however, that identity is not understood as embedded exclusively in the body. It is very possible that the fashion of the elderly should care less and less about the body.

One could ask here (and rightly so) whether this would not be a break with the body, a refusal to cooperate, turning away from it, and thus whether this proposal does not hide ageism. Of course, this would need a closer look because ageism can lurk anywhere. However, the main purpose of construction of the body in fashion is physical attractiveness, understood as sexual or erotic attractiveness. In fashion, as in culture, it is built from the features of youth. Ageism in fashion is also closely related to the feeling of loss of sexual attractiveness.

‘You have to be careful when you get to my age’ says seventy-year-old Carol, one of Andrews’ interlocutors, ‘I always have to have something with long sleeves and I always wear very long skirts. I don’t like showing my legs.’18 This confession, no matter how much it stems from the speaker’s personal beliefs, also indicates the cultural relationship between the body and clothing (fashion). Somebody may not like showing their arms or legs regardless of their age, or they may refrain from doing it out of a firm belief that it is not appropriate at a certain age. That the ageing body deviates from social or cultural norms of beauty, attractiveness, or even femininity. Especially if femininity is identified with the sexual attractiveness of youth. In this case, ageing leads to a void that nothing can fill. With age, a person ceases to be a woman – as cultural stereotypes, exposed in fashion, seem to speak. After femininity there is only old age, and instead of self-expression – comfort understood in an ageist way. Clothing for old people is no longer in fashion and begins to perform protective functions.

Andrews points out that the materials used to design and sew clothes for very young (infants) and very old people are identical.¹⁹ Comfort becomes more important than image. However, the feeling of comfort as a goal of dressing may be associated with the belief that the old person’s body is sick. That it encounters increasing difficulties in everyday functioning, that it no longer has the strength for uncomfortable, image-based fashion. Such clothing is therefore intended to serve a tired and easily fatiguing body.

Fashion does not think that clothing can be a memory and reflection. And yet this is where it could move from words to deeds, focusing more on individual style than on dictating trends. Individual style dictated perhaps less by trends and more by what has been preserved. What we would like to preserve, what connects us to what once happened, and what once happened connects to who I am today. And it does not need any changes anymore. In our wardrobe, old people’s wardrobe, we can find things that should be thrown away, which we can get rid of, because they are an expression of trends that have passed and the return of which we no longer look forward to in the dimension of our individual life. But there are also clothes we want to preserve. Because they ceased to belong to fashion to enter our lives instead, and often even to shape them. And they do not have to be a collection of museum memorabilia. They can become a dictionary from which we will build our individual expression. Not on the basis of nostalgia, an attempt to make an impossible return to the past. It is not about sentimental memories. But it is about the fact that they belong to the experiences that shaped us, therefore they are present in our lives and in who we are today. But that would require a redesign of design itself.

Since fashion is made of style, not clothes, what stands in the way (fashion’s way) of working on many different old age styles? Making them equal to the styles of youth. Build these styles not on novelty, but on memory. Not on the pursuit of change, but on old people’s identity. What prevents fashion from expressing these values? How much better it would be for everyone if we lived in a society where old age is present and presented as a worthy culmination of the efforts of a long life already lived. The presence of old age in fashion does not have to be justified by anything other than the fact that, simply, there is old age.