The catalog I throw away the day it arrives
There is a catalog that comes to my house four times a year. I will not name it, but it rhymes with Cold Water Creek, and the women on the cover are always wearing a tunic in a pastel color that does not exist in nature, accessorized with a chunky resin necklace the size of a baby's fist. They are usually leaning against a piece of driftwood on a beach. They are smiling like they have just discovered something. What they have discovered, I think, is that there is an entire industry betting that a woman of a certain age will accept a sack with butterflies on it because it is comfortable.
I am 72 years old, and I have opinions about clothes. I have earned them.
I taught high school English in three different schools across 34 years. I wore a blazer to work nearly every day of my professional life because teenagers are merciless and a good blazer is armor. After I retired, Frank and I moved to Scottsdale, and I had to figure out what 72 actually wears, in a desert, when the dress code is "don't melt." I did not buy a single tunic with butterflies. I did, however, buy a great many things that turned out to be terrible, which is how I learned what is worth keeping.
What follows is the list I wish someone had handed me at 60. The brands that work, the brands that don't, and the math on what any of it is actually worth.
The category problem
"Senior fashion" is a marketing category invented by people who do not wear the clothes. Women in their 70s do not want senior fashion. We want fashion that fits, that flatters the body we actually have, and that does not look like a costume. The category is the problem. The minute a brand decides it is making clothes "for seniors," three things happen: the colors get pastel, the silhouette gets shapeless, and the pricing assumes you will not notice that the fabric is 87 percent polyester.
Here is the thing. The brands that work best for women my age are usually not marketed to us at all. They are marketed to 45-year-olds with money, and we are buying them anyway because we have better taste and more patience.
The last few years have actually been good to us, though nobody planned it that way. Younger women started calling it "quiet luxury" and "stealth wealth," which apparently means well-cut basics in real fabric. Welcome to how we have been dressing since 1978. The cardigan you bought in 1992 because it was a good cardigan is now, somehow, a trend. Don't tell them.
The brands worth knowing
Here is my actual list, in roughly the order I shop them, with honest prices and honest caveats. I am not paid by any of these companies. I have, however, given several of them an alarming amount of money over the last decade.
Eileen Fisher. The queen of this demographic, full stop. A piece costs $150 to $450, the fabric is real (organic cotton, linen, silk, merino), and the cuts are made for actual 70-year-old shoulders and waists, not the 25-year-old's body the rest of the industry pretends we still have. The Renew program, where you mail back your old Eileen Fisher pieces and get store credit, is genuinely useful and I have used it twice. Caveat: the linen wrinkles if you look at it sideways, and if you wear too much of it at once you start to look like you teach yoga in Sedona, which I do not.
Talbots. The American workhorse that everyone underestimates. Skip the prints — most of them belong on a country-club napkin — and go straight to the classic blazers, the silk shells, and the Hampshire pant, which is the only pant I have found that consistently fits a woman with a waist and hips. Their lower-tier line has crept toward polyester in the last few years, and I am watching them carefully. But a good Talbots blazer for $179 will outlast a $400 designer one that does not quite fit.
Quince. The newcomer. Direct-to-consumer Mongolian cashmere at $60 to $120 a sweater, washable silk blouses at $50 to $90. I was skeptical. I bought one cashmere crewneck two winters ago to test it. It is still in rotation. Caveats: quality is not perfectly consistent (one out of four pieces gets sent back), the cuts run slightly young, and the customer service is the polite kind of useless. But for the price, it is the best deal in this category right now, and I will not pretend otherwise.
Boden. British, slightly younger-leaning in the prints (their florals are aimed at a 50-year-old on holiday in Cornwall), but the basics are very good. The chino, the merino crewneck, the breton stripe. Their sizing used to run mysterious, generous in some places and mean in others — but their US team has mostly corrected that. Worth knowing.
Land's End. I have been buying from Land's End for 30 years. Skip the swimwear (they have never recovered from 2006), skip most of the prints, and go directly to the pima cotton turtlenecks and the supima cotton Tate pant. Those two items have outlasted everything else in my closet. They are not exciting. They are reliable, and at my age I have stopped confusing those two things.
Vince. Pricier. $200 to $500 a piece. The cashmere is exceptional, the silk basics are exceptional, and a Vince crewneck I bought in 2014 is still the sweater I reach for first when I want to look like a person who has her life together. Skip anything labeled "trend" and stick to the basics.
J.Jill. Borderline. I include them only because they have a real petite line, which is rarer than it should be in this market. Some of their pima cotton basics are excellent. Avoid anything they describe as "boho," which is a word that should be retired entirely after age 55 unless you are actually Stevie Nicks.
Lafayette 148. The serious end. $400 to $2,000 a piece, and if you are flinching, I understand. But a Lafayette blazer is heirloom quality. I own one. I bought it for Carrie's wedding rehearsal dinner in 2017 and I have worn it to roughly every significant event since. The math on cost-per-wear, which I will get to, makes it the best clothing purchase I have ever made.
Cuyana. Bags, not clothes. A Cuyana classic leather tote runs $175 to $225, the leather is real, and it ages like a piece of furniture. One good tote replaces three mediocre ones, and I have proven this experimentally over six years of luggage.
The brands that get a polite nod and a pass
I will not roast them by name beyond what I already said about the butterfly catalog, but here is the short list of categories to walk past.
The pastel-cardigan industry (you know who they are) sells comfort dressed up as style, and the pieces fall apart in 18 months. Soft Surroundings markets drapey romance-novel-cover dresses that look like a costume of "older woman in a Hallmark movie." Chico's is better than its reputation if you are strict with yourself, but they have a tunic problem, and once you cross the tunic line you cannot uncross it.
I am not saying don't shop these places. I am saying that for every one piece you keep, you will buy four you regret. That is a bad ratio at any age, but especially at this one, when I do not have closet space for things I am not sure about.
What to actually wear
The brands are only part of it. The framework is more useful. Here is what actually works on the body of a woman in her 60s, 70s, or 80s, based on what I own, what I have worn out, and what hangs in my closet untouched.
The blazer or cardigan that does most of the work. One good piece you can throw over anything. Mine is a navy Vince blazer that is older than my youngest grandchild. It elevates a t-shirt. It hides a multitude of upper-arm opinions. Buy one good one before you buy three cheap ones.
The pant. Tailored, with a real waistband. Not jeggings, not leggings, not the elastic-waist resort-wear that lives in the back pages of every magazine. The Talbots Hampshire pant, the Eileen Fisher Tencel ankle pant, and the Vince trouser are the three I keep buying. Tailoring is the cheat code here, which I will say twice because it matters: a $80 Talbots pant taken to a good tailor beats a $300 designer pant that doesn't quite hit the floor right.
The blouse or shell. Pima cotton, real silk, or fine cashmere. If a label says "silky" instead of "silk," put it back. The Quince washable silk is shockingly good for the money. The Land's End pima cotton turtleneck is a closet workhorse. The Talbots silk shell, on sale, is a wardrobe foundation.
The dress. I have argued with myself about dresses for a decade. The conclusion: own one good wrap dress for actual events, and stop trying to wear dresses every day. The wrap dress works on almost every body, can be tailored, and looks like you thought about it. A daily dress habit at my age usually means I have given up on pants, and I have not.
The shoes. This is where the industry fails us most badly, and where I have wasted the most money. The real options: Naturalizer has actually improved in the last few years and is no longer your mother's shoe. Vionic builds the orthotic into the shoe so you stop looking like you are wearing podiatrist gear. New Balance walking shoes are for actual walking, not for pretending to be casual. And one pair of soft Italian loafers — J.Crew sometimes has them in a good year, or splurge on a Vince loafer if budget permits. Four pairs of shoes, in those four categories, cover almost everything I do.
The handbag. One good Cuyana tote, or one Coach Madison, or one Tory Burch I happened to find on real sale, beats five mid-tier bags from the mall. I learned this slowly. My closet learned it faster than I did.
The cost math nobody does
Here is the math I wish I had done at 50.
A $500 Eileen Fisher cardigan that I wear 200 days a year for five years is $2.50 per wear. A $50 H&M cardigan that pilled after the second wash and I wore twice before quietly donating it is $25 per wear. The cheap thing was not cheaper. It was just easier to walk out of the store with.
This is the kind of math that takes 30 years to actually believe in your gut. I did not believe it at 40. I believed it intellectually at 55. At 72, I live by it. Buy fewer things. Buy better things. Wear the same blazer to 80 events and let people notice — they will not notice, because the only people watching what you wear that closely are also wearing the same blazer.
The other piece of the math is tailoring. A good tailor in your zip code is worth more than a designer brand. I have a tailor in a strip mall on Scottsdale Road who takes in a Talbots pant for $22 and makes it look like Lafayette 148. That $22 plus $89 for the pant is $111. The Lafayette 148 version is $498. The math does what it does.
A word on sustainability, which matters more after 60 than at any other age. We have lived through the entire arc of fast fashion. We watched the Limited and Banana Republic become disposable. We watched the mall die. We watched warehouses fill with returned polyester. I am not buying any more of it. Neither, I suspect, are most of the women reading this. The Eileen Fisher Renew program, the Patagonia repair counter, the Cuyana "buy fewer, buy better" tag — these are not marketing. They are the actual ethics our generation has been practicing since we mended our own slips in the 1970s.
Frank's test
I was telling Carrie about this article on the phone last week. Carrie is 42 and works in interior design and pays attention to clothes for a living, and she said, "Mom, what is the rule? Like, the actual rule." I had to think about it for a minute.
The rule is Frank's test. Frank, my husband of 47 years, does not notice clothes. He does not know what Eileen Fisher is. He has never used the word "silhouette" in conversation. If I asked him what I wore to dinner last Saturday, he would, with great seriousness, say "the dress." There are six dresses.
But. When I walk into a room wearing something that fits, that suits me, that I feel like myself in — Frank looks up from his book and his face changes. Just slightly. He does not say I look beautiful. He almost never does, after 47 years, because we are past the part where you announce it. What he does is relax. He has seen me look at ease. That is the test. Not whether the dress is on trend, or whether the brand is right, or whether anybody on Instagram approves. Whether the man who has watched me get dressed for nearly five decades sees me settle into the clothes.
If you want a related read on the larger question of dressing for yourself versus for the room, I wrote about that here: a playful guide to feeling fabulous after 60. It covers the part I am not going to repeat now, which is that confidence is the actual outfit and the clothes are the accessories.
What I would tell my 60-year-old self
If I had to compress it: stop buying "senior" anything. The category is the trap. Buy three good pieces a year, get them tailored, and let everything else go. Skip the pastel cardigan. Spend the money on the navy blazer instead. Own a Cuyana tote and stop looking for the perfect bag in TJ Maxx. Get your shoes from people who design them for feet, not for fashion magazines.
And ignore anyone — any catalog, any salesperson, any well-meaning niece — who tells you what a woman your age "should" be wearing. I am wearing what fits, what feels like me, and what does not require an apology. I have earned that, and so have you.
The butterfly tunic is still arriving in my mailbox four times a year. It is still going directly into the recycling bin. Some catalogs are persistent. So am I.
