"Sometime around age 50, women start to let go of certain ideas about themselves and fashion."

"Up till then you can wear lots of silly or brash things, and if you are reasonably fit and attractive or consistently daring, it doesn’t really matter. You’re still with the tide. You are home free with your esoteric Pradas, your porkpie hats and coy Lolita socks, and no little voice is going, 'Heh-heh-heh, you’re too old for that.'"

No! Dammit! You will not take away my coy Lolita socks!

(Consistently daring? I wannabe consistently darling.)

Politics and fashion.

There's a nice article by Cathy Horyn in today's NYT about women who pick a style and stay with it (like the socialite who decided in the late 1950s to wear blue tinted glass day and night and is still wearing them and Ivana Trump with her giant beehive). Here's the political part:

To look at Laura Bush, with her neat, unvarying hairstyle and penchant for tailored clothes, is to wonder if she subscribes to Lady Astor's line: "What a boring thing it is to try to look pretty." But unlike her predecessor in the White House, who bobbed from style to style, Mrs. Bush found a look that suited her (now mostly from Oscar de la Renta) and stuck to it. She has managed to silence the conversation about her clothes, which is the boring thing.

The brilliance of being boring! Isn't what Laura Bush does (as opposed to what Ivana and that socialite do) the old dress-for-success approach that ruled in the 80s (alongside a lot of goofy, outrageous fashions)? And isn't it what men, en masse, have been doing for over a century? Pick out a plain uniform and be done with it.