Culture

In New Zealand we seem to be living in the time of choice, so why do we limit our outfits to clothing that will blend into a crowd?
Why do girls enjoy oversized off-the-shoulder knits with black tights; why do boys save up for their Lower jeans and black t-shirts? It seems that there is such a thing as too much freedom. Perhaps we are lost. Thank goodness there’s a solution. When the little sheep are lost and frightened, who can they look to but the wise fashion shepherds?
 
 
These shepherds are NOT the quick-to-come, quick-to-go It Girls - no. They are the old dames who dress because they love art, love style and most of all love wearing whatever they can dream up next. Vivienne Westwood is one of the greatest designers of our time, not solely for the fashion label she created, nor because she clothed the punk subcultural wave, but because all she creates, she very much is. We see a now 70-year-old diva with a tangle of orange hair, painted lips, laughing in an advertisement with her good friend Pamela Anderson. She slaps judgment in its pink flushed face, but she also sets a style standard that many of us crave or obsesses over.
 

The website and my visual shrine Nowness recently posted a short video of beautifully aged women who the fashion world bow down to. When my friend and I watched it, we fell in love with their way of being, how they costumed their day-to-day performance. There is Iris Apfel whose eyes blink at you from behind her famous huge owl spectacles. There is artist Ilona Royce Smithkin looking charmingly eccentric with extended orange eyelashes. What is central to these women’s layered, elaborate and beautiful dress is that each piece is stitched with its own little stories. Their outfits are creative, certainly, but what is most important is that they are wearing their lives AND they are consistently doing so every day.
 

Fashionable older ladies adorned with glorious brooches, tailored coats, ironic prints and token glasses are the people that we should pause, consider and be influenced by. We don’t necessarily have to worry about dressing as near to the oddball line as we can without crossing it; it’s not about that balance. But it is about being bold and slightly more eccentric and individual. Avoid splurging on cheap nothings and wear outfits that carry your stories within them.