Old Ladies Wear Clothes, Too

Seventh Ave. to Old Ladies:

DROP DEAD!

by Patricia McLaughlin

"Is the garment industry missing out on a profitable market niche? Or are women past 80 truly impossible to please—and 'notoriously cheap'?”

Here’s an email from a reader who’s been shopping for her 80-something mother and mother-in-law. She’s “appalled ... specifically when buying pants.” Everything is “polyester, lacking in style and imagination.” Everything has an elastic waist. And nothing fits because “these women have mostly lost a tush but gained a tummy”—but the people who make their pants don’t seem to have noticed.

Whose fault is this?

Appalled has read that many older women “have plenty of money to spend on clothes” if only they could find clothes that fit, but she’s not so sure: The older women she knows “are notoriously cheap and reluctant to pay for better quality fabric, tailoring, dry-cleaning, etc.”

Sounds familiar. My 88-year-old mother, as I may have mentioned, still thinks you should be able to buy a nice blouse for $4, just the way you could in 1960. Like Appalled’s mother and mother-in-law, she lived through the Depression (the one before this, I mean) and World War II rationing (“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. . . .”). Women of her generation have a whole different take on spending money.

It doesn’t help that lots of them don’t have that much of it to begin with. The old reliable AT&Tstock their husbands left them isn’t worth what it was 40 years ago. (Even less since the stock market’s protracted swan dive.)

Another factor: Women in their 80s probably have a more realistic view of what clothes can do for them than the rest of us do. Even now, somewhere deep in my subconscious there survives from my fashion-magazine-bedazzled girlhood a suspicion that the right dress/scarf/shoe/haircut will entirely transform my life. My 88-year-old mother still loves clothes, but she doesn’t expect them to change her life and (maybe for that reason?) expects to pay less for them.

Also, I suspect that older women are less suggestible than younger customers. Women in their 80s could care less that this is supposed to be the year of the ruffle or the splashy print or the peep-toe pump or the neon color. They already know what they want: a shirtdress or a cardigan or a graceful low-heeled shoe in 10.5AAA or something in periwinkle blue.

And they’re fussy. They expect quality—linings and interlinings, fastidiously smooth seams, matched stripes, etc. Most of them grew up among accomplished needlewomen. They know how clothes should be made.

So maybe it’s no wonder garmentos aren’t falling all over each other to compete for their business.

Here’s another reason: Marketers prefer to acquire customers they can count on to keep buying their products for a lifetime. Invest in recruiting a 15-year-old to your brand, and you can look forward to many decades of purchases. With a 90-year-old, not so many.

Then, too, in case you haven’t noticed, our culture stigmatizes aging. And people in the fashion business are especially sensitive to stigma. Cool matters to them. Most of them got into fashion in the first place because they’re exquisitely attuned to what’s cool. Making $10,000 dresses for hot young things to flaunt on the red carpet is cool. So is making “fast fashion” for 15-year-olds.

Making nice dresses for old ladies, on the other hand, is about as cool as manufacturing surgical appliances. Once I asked a classroomful of eager young fashion design and marketing students if they could imagine going into business to dress women in their 80s and 90s. Talk about appalled. They couldn’t’ve looked more appalled if they were peering through the gates of hell.

It gets worse: Besides not being cool, making clothes for older women is not easy. After 80 or 90 years, the average female body doesn’t look much like the perfect, perky 34”-25”-36” dressmaker’s dummy they teach you to dress in Patternmaking 101. With age, as Appalled points out, the abdomen rounds out, and the buttocks flatten—sometimes to the point that ready-made pants fit better when worn backwards.

Lots of older women come to feel their high necklines are choking them, and switch to V necks because, with age, they carry their heads further forward and their shoulders roll forward to widen the back and narrow the chest. The waistlines and bust darts of their dresses seem misplaced as spines shorten and condense, rib cages expand, and busts fall. Their waists thicken even if they haven’t gained weight, so only elastic waists fit.

Ten or 15 years ago, when many manufacturers of women’s clothing were still relying on body measurements collected from (young, fit, pre-junk-food) recruits to the World War II WACs and WAVES, Seventh Avenue didn’t have a clue how to fit older women. Now, thanks to progress in anthropometrics (the science of measuring human bodies) it’s entirely possible to make clothes that fit 80- and 90-year-old female bodies. But—probably thanks to the cool factor--there’s been no stampede to do it.

All that said, the shopping opportunities for older women are not quite as bleak as they’re made out to be. No company I know of is advertising clothes designed for the “Senior Silhouette” or the “Dignified Dowager.” But many manufacturers and retailers are incorporating new anthropometric data, and making clothes to fit more than one body type.

Lands’ End just introduced a new 1-2-3 Fit system that offers three different fits: #1, Modern Fit, has tops that are fitted through the body and pants with a lower waist; #3, Traditional Fit, is the opposite, with loose-fitting tops and pants with waistbands at the natural waist; #2, Original Fit, is somewhere in between: Tops are neither fitted nor oversized, and pants have waistbands that hit just below the natural waist.

Lots of manufacturers and retailers provide similar options, especially in pants and jeans. The problem is figuring out—and then remembering—which fit is which: Are you a Ryan, a Jackson or a Martin (Banana Republic)? An Audrey, a Margo or a Lindsay (Ann Taylor)? A Yellow, a Red or a Blue (Lane Bryant)?

All these inscrutable names make JCPenney’s straightforward approach look like genius. Penney’s makes pants in three nearly self-explanatory fits (straight-fit, curvy-fit, modern-fit) and three waistline options (at-waist, below-waist, well-below-waist).

Because shoppers complain endlessly about clothes that don’t fit, you might assume that clothes that fit perfectly would make them happy. No such luck.

Lands’ End makes custom-fit jeans and khakis for women, and J.C. Penney’s makes custom-fit chinos. But a pair of pants tailored to fit the older woman’s flat backside and rounded abdomen may still not look right to her—or to her daughter-in-law. A perfect fit may only serve to call attention to “figure faults.”

The ideal fit not only fits, it flatters: It makes the body look perfect—or better, anyway.

It’s just a question of tracking it down.

Reprinted courtesy of Patricia McLaughlin © 2008 Patricia McLaughlin