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The year of being sixty two: the pleasures of clothes

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I like clothes but I don't like shopping.  When I was working and needed business suits and formal evening clothes I used to shop once or twice a year.  I would take a day off work and make a beeline for a particular shop or small group of shops.  A new suit, with both trousers and a skirt, tops to go with it in interesting colours and silky materials, shoes and boots, a new dress to wear for smart dinners: everything had to go with everything else.  I much preferred to do this shopping on my own.  A friend came along with me one year and was exasperated by the way, in her terms, I wouldn't "look at things properly".  "You shop like a man" she said crossly.  Certainly I don't like spending a long time thinking about it and looking at lots of alternatives.  It was important to look good and to get it right but in many ways it was like shopping for expensive school uniform. Nowadays I can wear what I like.  Mostly, living up a hill in the mid...

The visibility question

It is a truism that women of a certain age become invisible.  You hear it again and again.  The phenomenon even spawned a response in the blogosphere where older women posted photographs of What I Wore Today, trying to reclaim the right of the older woman to be interested in clothes and style and what she looks like.  Occasionally I would stumble upon one of these posts, rarely perhaps and only because it was written by someone I read for other reasons, such as the thoughtful and erudite posts of Materfamilias.  Recently Mater posted about a certain disaffection with the idea  of these posts and it got me thinking about why I had never wished to join in. I like clothes.  I am interested in the way I look.  But I also find clothes deeply boring and am far more interested in what I do than in what I wear.  What is going on here in my head?  Do I think the older woman is truly invisible and if so do I care? When I was young I was reasonably ...