43 thoughts on “SNARK WEEK: Why Are Old Ladies Decades Out of Date?!?”

  1. I feel like I’ve read some books written in the 20’s and 30’s where a point is made of saying that a certain little old lady is like a relic of the Victorian era or something and they point out that she dresses old-fashioned. But even then it’s like “her hemlines are longer than normal” or “she uses too much lace” not “she has owned this dress for 40 years”.

    It’s a shame when tropes like this get overused to the point of absurdity. I thought that about the other trope article the other day – sometimes there is a valid reason to do something like that, but when it’s done constantly, it loses any meaning.

    1. That makes way more sense than the alternative. Maybe she still wears many layered underwear because she doesn’t want to invest in modern radiators since the technology was new and dangerous when she was young, or she covers up more skin out of older modesty standards+a different understanding of comfort, or the way she wears her jewelry is more Victorian than Edwardian, or she prefers a corset to a bra+girdle.
      Or she adopts some new things and leaves some alone, which seems far and away the most common to me. Changing your hairstyle and adopting that newfangled 1890’s asymmetry dress style seems like an acceptable change even though you grew up in the froofy 1850’s, but you won’t get caught dead in a cycling suit. Or maybe you will and you’re a cool older lady storming into town on a velocipede- I’d love to see that sometime.

    2. Exactly — a longer hem & generally dressing a bit more conservatively than the 20-year-olds is common for an older lady. But the extremes that movies/TV shows go thru are just wacky.

  2. I turned 64 a week ago, and I will not wear conservative—or just plain frumpy—“old lady” clothes! Ageism, especially regarding older women, is still omnipresent, and needs to be retired—permanently. Why would anyone consider fine older actresses like Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and others only fit to wear the costuming of—and thereby promulgating society’s prejudice—“old ladies”—when they perform period roles or modern ones?

  3. I think the further back you go, the less the old-lady-doesn’t-update-clothes trope makes sense. Since most people would either be making their own clothes or at least have a tailor/seamstress if they’re richer, fashions were constantly being updated. If a dress is an investment (and it was) you’re going to re-tailor or at least re-accessorize it with the new fashion. Maybe not as quick a turnaround as more modern (read: 19th c.) fashion trends of spring vs. fall collections but if you have the sewing skill and want to appear put-together and upstanding, not standing out in a crowd with wacky old clothes is going to make sense. Likewise if you’re rich, you’re going to want to display that by accessorizing and changing the fashion. (Even if you’re differentiated by an outdated style, like wearing 18th-century pannier-having court gowns in the 1810’s, you interpret those styles with the 1810’s high waistline, 1810’s hair, etc.) People buying clothes and wearing them out without mending or tailoring is something that happens more when you have post-Industrial Revolution textile production and cloth isn’t so big of an investment.
    I feel like there are ways to do this well, and it is something that is somewhat grounded in real life, but it’s so overused to such an odd degree. I think one thing is that since clothes took so long to make you wouldn’t have as many of them total, so you wear them out a bit faster (but mend them more often) because you wear them more times in a row, so it’s far less likely that a jacket or shoes you bought/made 30 years ago would even still be around. I don’t know if that’s really true or is provable though.
    Granted my observations only work in an era when you have fashion trends that change noticeably every few years, so let’s put the early cutoff date in the 14th century.

    1. Yup, & there’s so many examples in museums of older gowns being recut into new fashions — 18th-c. robe a la francaises were recut into narrower empire styles, for example. An older lady of means wouldn’t just keep wearing the old gown, she’d have her modiste remake it to look less outdated.

    2. Actually clothes could last an amazingly long time, though not necessarily with the same person or in the same social class. Here’s a fascinating item:
      https://www.amazon.com/Dress-Revolution-Northern-Society-Textiles/dp/B00N297QV2
      This jacket-and-skirt combo was bought from a Seine riverboatman’s wife as a disguise by an aristo fleeing the French Revolution; it is made of a silk-cotton brocade dating from the first decade of the 18th century and had been remade multiple times. When new it must have been very high-end informal wear; seventy or so years later it belonged to a working-class woman (perhaps her Sunday best?) and was still in good sturdy condition.

      1. That garment had one heck of a life story! I wonder then if my theory about wearing out quickly becomes more true with the boom of cheap factory-made clothing, or if it was ever true at all (and if so, to what extent).
        If your point about clothing lasting longer than expected is the case, the emphasis on mending and keeping up with the times might well be the sole causes of the conditions of clothes from this post-fashion pre-Industrial period. Specifically clothes having longer lives but each person having fewer clothes total. (Barring the upper-class tendency to switch clothes for different times of day/events)

    3. In the 70s my mom worked in a costume shop, many of which were 19C gowns and suits used by theater groups. They all were worn out under the arms. No deodorant, less frequent bathing, and no shaving took their toll! You’ll get wear patterns where you expect on anything that’s worn regularly.

  4. I think this is a case of “you can’t fix stupid.” Someone — probably producers — got the idea that you have to identify older women by their clothes to make the point that they are part of the past. Most of the women I know of any age wear what’s comfortable, but not out of date.

  5. One of my grandmothers always dressed impeccably in whatever was up-to-date for women her age (in the 90s and early 2000s, I remember some very nice pantsuits). The other does not take to change very well, and one of her blouses that she wears frequently, I can’t remember her not having, so she’s had it at least since the mid-80s, but the style looks a little more late 70s. Her newer things area bit more up-to-date, but she hasn’t done fashionable for a good forty years (she’s 93).

  6. One of the reasons why I LOVE Bridgerton is that they didn’t frump Lady Danbury and Vicountess Bridgerton. They dressed with style and set the fashion.

  7. In early 20C, I think some older women took a while to get used to the shorter skirts in mid-late 1920s, but that didn’t mean not accessorising in a modern way, even if they were still wearing longer (1918-early 20s) hemlines.
    For elegant mature woman in High Society, I suggest looking at the wardrobe of Queen Maude of Norway in 1920s-30s. She was very elegant into her later years (died at 68).

  8. IIRC, in “The Cat’s Meow”, Joanna Lumley’s character was of a certain age. She didn’t try to look like one of the young chickies, but she looked so damn fashionable!

  9. I’m 51 and recently cleared out a load of things that had come into fashion again as they didn’t fit me any more. I could easily make the wardrobe of my 20s, 30s or even 40s but I just don’t want to. Some things I still like, narrower cut trousers, very long skirts, high necked blouses, I find ways to make them more up-to-date – for example, the bishop sleeve is having a fashion moment again and I really like them, so I wear them. Other things, not so much. Dungarees came back into fashion and I refused to wear them first time round!

    I think you care less what other people think and are more fixed in your ways, and you know what you like and what suits you. This doesn’t mean you just abandon any notion of fashion or style. It means you adapt.

    Even if you wear ‘classic’ styles the trouser suit of the 1980s is going to look pretty laughable in 2021 (unless I missed a memo and they’re back in fashion).

    I also think that in the past, being fashionable and well-dressed was more important than now as it informed people about your place in the heirarchy, your marital and working status, etc. What film makers in particular don’t see to get is that while there were not laws per se, there were certainly excuses the police (in the UK for sure) would find to arrest women who looked ‘disreputable’ for things like vagrancy and under prostitution laws. Now if you went full Rachel from Friends in your 40s and wandered to the shops, people might think you were a bit eccentric but you wouldn’t be getting a virginity test from a police surgeon! If you’d been wandering about, say, London in 1880 dressed in 1850s fashions, the balance of your mind would be called into question and a trip to a mental hospital might be insisted upon. And really, that’s what this trope does in a lot of cases – it makes the older women less credible by making them look like they have mental health issues, but everyone’s so nice for tolerating them rolleyes

    Royalty might fossilize a bit (Megan Duchess of Sussex in particular railed against some of the rules, like always wearing tights/ pantyhose, not showing your shoulders or cleavage in your wedding gown) but even so, they still look stylish within the limitations.

    I really hope that passing 50 doesn’t mean I have to stick to what came into fashion this decade because we’ve all spent most of it indoors in loungewear and it does not suit me!

    1. The point about fashion showing where you belonged in the social hierarchy (moreso in the past than now) is SO important. The older women characters that are shown in movies/TV shows as out of date in fashion as a trope of “they’re old-fashioned in their ideas” wouldn’t work in the period — they’d be considered at least a bit unstable & of unsound judgement, which really undercut some of these characters in their stories.

      1. I agree. I think old ladies in old clothes is just a lazy movie-maker way of saying “Stuck in the past”. Exceptions can be made, like Bridgeton, where the Queen is in the most magnificent clothes in history, emphasizing her fabulousness.

  10. Not precisely a historical observation, but the older women I knew at church tended to dress in a particular manner, They did it with care, and attention. Under no circumstances could I imagine a woman in her 20s dressing like them. But the sort of uniform that they adopted was ALSO definitely not the clothing of their own youths. I think that what is fashionable is, of course, influenced by your peer group, and it is possible for multiple peer groups to exist at once. So I think Frock Flick designers may be rightly getting that older woman and younger woman don’t dress in the exact same way. The mistake is not understanding where to find that older lady style because they may only be looking at fashion plates aimed at young woman.

    1. Not the exact same way, certainly, & period images show that. Often older women dress more conservatively / more covered up — the Regency portraits I included here are a good example. These women’s clothes are in the same general lines as were popular at the time, darker / more subdued colors, fichus tucked around so there’s no cleavage, they’re wearing caps & simpler hairstyles, but they aren’t 20-50 years out of date. The 1995 Pride and Prejudice shows older women (Lady Catherine, Mrs. Bennet) in the same empire-gowns, but not as dewy, light, & filmy of attire as the young ladies. It can be done ;)

  11. Pig fiesta, ha ha. That is my take on the 2005 P&P exactly. I think they spent their screenwriting money on the livestock.

  12. Reading this reminds me of two things. One, a passage from “The Age of Innocence” where Wharton describes posh New York society’s love of wearing outdated clothes. A pair of sisters in particular have been wearing their late mother’s things for the past 20 years.

    The second are costumers and costuming groups who look down on middle aged or older people wearing period fashionable attire. They don’t explain why it’s bad past “mutton dressed as lamb”

  13. I think that what the film portrayal of older women and fashion/style is missing is that before the emergence of youth culture (roughly in the late 1950s), adult women would’ve set the fashion. Not teenagers. Adults. In almost all of these examples the mature/older women are wealthy or stinking rich and living in society where they have an image and status to uphold. The obvious way to do that would be through fashion, not dressing in decades old styles, but showing that they have the money to follow the fashion.

  14. The dressed-back-in-time trope,in my opinion,doesn’t make sense for people who might have been making their clothes themselves.Still it would be more logical for the characters to recycle out of date fabrics and trimmings(like excessive lace on Regency apparel,overturned tight cuffs and centre front opening in Tudor era,Greek key in bustle era,lace chemisettes to go with 30s gowns,smooth satin for 40s etc)than literally wearing old clothes.Headwear is a great way to convey the idea,if they do it right.Of course it requires other characters to be dressed very accurately to evoke the difference,but productions are lazy.

  15. Mrs. Musgrove in the 1995 Persuasion is wearing fashions that look like they belong in the early 1790s, at the very latest. The setting is explicitly 1814-1815.

    1. She does wear more up-to-date clothes when they are in Bath, I believe. And none of the other older women wear out of date fashions (Lady Russell, Mrs Croft, Lady Darymple). I think it could be argued that she wore her older, more comfortable dresses while at home in the country. Or, in her case, it’s more of a way of showing the Musgroves as country people?

      1. It depends on what you mean by “up-to-date clothes.” Persuasion 1995 is the greatest Jane Austen adaptation of all time, with costuming that is bested only by the 2020 Emma, but it still contains an example of the trope mocked in this article. Yes, it was undoubtedly an artistic choice rather than a “mistake,” but I notice that Alexandra Byrne didn’t repeat it in Emma with the poverty-stricken Miss Bates, even though most costume designers probably would have.

  16. Even though I’m by no means a costume expert, I spot this tired old trope and am annoyed by it. Minor Spoiler Alert: This trope was tweaked to weird effect at the end of Atonement in which an elderly Vanessa Redgrave was wearing the same style clothes, hairstyle, and maybe jewelry that her character wore as a pre-pubsescent girl (portrayed by Saorisie Ronan). I think one of those elements would have been sufficient to convey that her character became frozen in time based on the trauma of her past, kind of like Miss Havisham. But employing all three–dress, hairstyle, and jewelry–was overkill in my opinion.

  17. Queen Mary and, in later life, the Queen Mum did look a bit frumpy, and their evening wear did sometimes seem like it was of a different era, in part because they used the tiaras and pearl chokers of their youth. But any woman of means would have had her dresses recut, not to look like the most extreme of fashions but something dignified. Even Queen Victoria changed her silhouette, even when hiding out in deepest mourning.

      1. Because her figure has changed – duh! I don’t agree with you on any of this – clothes were handmade and extremely expensive hence older ladies would more than likely have re-worn gowns from an earlier decade once they had found a cut that suited them. I‘m sure the mutton dressed as lamb saying was as true then as it is now. Older women don’t want to dress like their daughters, unless they’re Madonna.

        1. Yes, they were hand-made and extremely expensive – but virtually all the expense was in the material, which was (in the days before power looms) relatively speaking far more expensive than today, whereas even the most skilled dressmakers’ labour was relatively speaking dirt cheap. With this in mind, gowns were made in the full expectation that they would be repeatedly made over. For example, no shaping at all was put into the skirts of gowns: where the centre front and centre back of the gown bodice dipped to a point, or the front needed to be shorter than the back, the extra material was simply folded back, not cut off. So you could detach the skirt from the bodice, press it, and have a complete length and width of fabric to re-use.

          And several of the 18th-century gowns in the V&A, when first purchased by the museum, were found to have been altered for wear in the 1790s by detaching the skirt and reattaching it a couple of inches higher up on the bodice, to get the now-fashionable higher waistline. This one, for example: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O13815/gown-unknown/),But, significantly, the bodice itself wasn’t cut short or in any way tampered with; clearly the owner foresaw the possibility of waistlines coming down again and wanted to retain the option of altering the gown back. Which the V&A did – and I bet they’re sorry now, because it would have made for a really interesting example of historical garment adaptation if they had displayed it as donated.

          And as for minor adaptations to keep up with the mode, there’s the famous example of Mrs Papendiek’s repeated re-trimming of her puce satin:
          https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=od1EAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT230&lpg=PT230&dq=mrs+papendiek+puce+satin&source=bl&ots=X1XIfEK28M&sig=ACfU3U2DhkI_9J4qhmudATmlinjHgoThGA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjDz9TV38XuAhVFtXEKHWCdAGwQ6AEwA3oECAcQAg#v=onepage&q=mrs%20papendiek%20puce%20satin&f=false
          Charlotte Papendiek would have been around 47 when she first had that puce satin made, and kept revamping it for at least seven years.

  18. I agree it’s a trope intended to show that the previous generation is ‘out of touch’ with the ‘modern’ generation who is highlighted on the screen. But if Grandma is content to dress 20 years out of date, why would it only be 20 years? If a person really hated change, why not 40 years out of date? If my aunt has kept her beehive hairstyle from her favorite point in time (and she has), her teen years in the 60s, but updated her wardrobe, wouldn’t a more accurate representation be a modern-dressed older woman with an old-fashioned hairstyle? Or are we to believe that these rich old ladies who can afford to update their wardrobes insist on wearing something they bought 20 years ago until it wears out? And why hasn’t it?

    Sometimes I rather suspect it’s a cheap trick by the wardrobe department, who can’t be bothered with attempting to dress an older woman’s body — they have gowns available in that actress’ size from a previous generation and just decide to use it.

    1. PS: Also meant to add that I first saw Anne Reid play a blood-sucking (literally with a straw) alien on Doctor Who, so I find it impossible to take her seriously in anything else at this point. The instant I hear her voice, I flash back onto the Moon and see her with the straw.

  19. I have read (but I can’t remember where, sorry) that in the late 18th century there were some parts of Continental Europe where it was acceptable for ladies at a certain time of life to cease following fashion and continue to appear in decades-out-of-date styles, but that this was not the case in Britain. Here’s a quote culled from Norah Waugh, a letter written by an English lady in 1754:
    “One thing is new, which is, there is not such a thing as a decent old woman left, everybody curled their hair, shews their necks, and wears pink, but your humble servant. People who have covered their heads for fifty years now leave off their caps and think it becomes them.”

    Of course, that may have been more a question of what fashions were felt appropriate to different ages and marital statuses (unmarried girls vs married ladies vs widows/old ladies) than whether it was appropriate for older ladies to follow fashion at all.

    And there are scraps of evidence of women deliberately not following fashion. Here’s a silk jacket in the Snowshill Manor collection, which has been drawn and described by both Norah Waugh and Janet Arnold: http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1348744
    The silk cannot be earlier than the 1760s (flowered Spitalfields silk is very easy to date closely as there are so many surviving dated pattern-books), by which time those pleated cuffs were already about a decade out of vogue. That jacket was made for (or even by) a woman who could afford the finest fabrics but simply chose to use them for an outdated garment. Maybe she found the fashionable fan-shaped cuffs just trailed in her morning tea and buttered Sally Lunns?

  20. Completely agree with you. Whilst older women (and men!) can often be seen to have their “own” peer-group style / interpretation of what is fashionable (e.g. longer skirts, higher necklines, darker colours) it generally is congruent with the current fashion.

    As for everyone saying “oh, but remember, clothes were so expensive back then!” in refutation. Yes, clothes were. However, what most people don’t realise is that it was in general the cloth that was expensive, not the sewing that turned it into a garment. The sewing was not at all the valuable part (indeed, was frequently the least valuable part) of the garment. Hence, re-trimming and re-making garments was an expected part of a garment’s lifecourse. Indeed, 18th C dresses in particular appear to have been sewn in a way to facilitate remaking. See: https://themodernmantuamaker.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/1-nightgown-new-made-a-practical-investigation-of-eighteenth-century-clothing-alteration-part-1/

  21. Yes!!! This annoyed so much in Downton Abbey; good to see this trope highlighted. My mother and mother-in-law are 69 and 78, respectively, and they don’t dress in clothes from their youth in the 1960s through 1980s.

  22. My grandma still wore 1950 style clothes in 1980. My sister hair are still like Melanie Griffith’s in Working Girl. I still consider “trending” some of my 90s clothes.
    So yes, sometimes we “old ladies” are a bit confused about what fashion is hehehehe

  24. Well, I fit this trope. I’m 55 and buy all my clothes secondhand, and I ignore fashion completely and buy what I like: narrow trousers with high waists; shirts that button all the way up; chunky woollen jumpers, and in summer very long dresses. I like natural fabrics and bright colours, and I never wear heels or make-up. So it does happen!

  25. One thing to note about Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton: The real queen did hold onto her side-hoops -at least for Court formal wear- well into the Regency fashion era, to the point where the fashion plates showed some ludicrous early 1800’s high-waisted gowns worn over hoops, for your Court presentations. So, we viewers are spared the worst of the HA fashions but get the realistic “old lady set in her fashion era” sense.

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