Thursday, December 17th, 2009...8:38 am

#146: Don’t Dress Up. I Mean, Don’t Dress Down.

Jump to Comments

articleInlineEverything boomers do is bad.  You know that, right?  Not only are boomers selfish, greedy, boring, and disgusting, but, worst of all, they’re deeply unfashionable.

Witness today’s incredibly offensive piece in the New York Times Style section on Dressing for Success, Again.  It wasn’t enough for the writer to make the point that young men are (theoretically, anyway) wearing pin-striped suits and wingtips ala Mad Men; he had to contrast the supposed nattiness of the Evil Young against the 55-year-old “worst-dressed man in the room.”  The new dressing-up, according to the Times, is nothing less than an enlightened revolution against boomer slobbiness.

Gee, just when I was about to think it was okay to wear pajama pants and Uggs to the theatre.  Seems to me it was the boomers, as young professional bucks in the 80s, who wore Gordon Gecko suits and starched white shirts to the office.  And our youngers who pioneered ripped jeans and untucked shirts and running shoes, not to mention free-range Labradors and indoor basketball courts, at work.  Who practically viewed a necktie as a noose.

You see what’s happening here: The Evil Young are changing the rules yet again for the sole purpose of making us seem foolish and unattractive and very, very wrong.  We dress up; they call us convention-bound and uptight.  We dress down; they say we’re clueless slobs.

If David Colman, who wrote the Times piece, weren’t so blinded by ageism, he might have been able to focus on the real story, which is that men have felt increasingly free to embrace their feminine sides, to care more about style and grooming, to take time off to be with their kids or fall in love with someone smarter and more successful than they are.

But why dig that deep when you can just gun down daddy?  And why pander to the only constituency that still gives a shit about reading your newspaper when you have to try so hard to prove you’re not over the hill yourself?

Colman ends his piece by urging moronic boomers to do what he says they’ve always idiotically done: jump on yet another age-inappropriate trend, albeit this time the laudable one of wearing argyle sweaters with plaid pants.

“What’s the worst that could happen, Pops?,” he writes.  (I swear I’m not making this up.)  “Someone might think you are 10 years younger?”

No, a-hole.  i could spend over a thousand dollars on the janky outfit on the cover of the Style section, and then you could turn around and tell me Springsteen tee shirts and baggy jeans are back in.

Blog Widget by LinkWithin