Since reading How Do 50+ Women Become Visible? at the blog Privilege, I have been ruminating on this quote:
… people are hard-wired to make sense of other people by matching them to a known visual pattern.
(Really. It keeps coming back up.) 😉 Mainly my thoughts have been colored by the question,
what known visual pattern am I representing to be suddenly getting “old” comments?
So I wasted my afternoon spent a little time researching the psychological principles behind perception, recognition, and grouping. And there is alot that pertains to what to wear.
The quote referenced above was prefaced by a story in which the over-50 author and her daughter go shopping together and are greeted with much greater friendliness by the sales staff than she, the author, receives alone. Having myself only recently started receiving any recognition at all when shopping, I don’t know that salespeople are friendlier to young people as much as they recognize a mother-daughter pairing as a buying unit.
What follows the quote is a highly entertaining collection of style archetypes among 50-75 year-old women. What scares me most about them is how many of them are associated with doing stuff. Like, “don’t look at me and expect me to do all the work just because my hair is grey!”
Because somehow, even though it is pretty, my hair is perceived as grey; grey hair is the defining visual feature of “old”. Now I just need to figure out what the defining visual feature of “ageless platinum blonde” is 😉
In the meantime, I am seriously considering biffing all my gray, or at least the light gray tops. The principle of similarity states:
when objects look similar, people tend to group them.
You know, I missed all that stuff about the association with doing things. Will have to go back and reread.
I’m trying to think about who is platinum blond. Not the Fifth Avenue gals who have a different blond.
Childhood towheads, of course. The Scandinavians in our imagination? In actuality, I think they might have more with brown hair. I was trying to figure out whether there were natural platinum blonds well into mature adulthood. I was wondering if a messier hairstyle implied naturalness and I see platinum blonds divided fairly equally between messier and more structured and hip – asymmetrical, etc. One thing that may take women out of the aged category might be hip sunglasses. If you wear those metal frame mirrored glasses i think that catapults you into little bit rock n roll. I think these work loads better than bright colored frames that easily make one think of Advanced Style.
That is actually a really good suggestion, about the sunglasses. That is one of the thoughts I had too, that maybe I need to get new glasses more often. I do like the daily glasses that I have, and I am loathe to get the same thing everyone else has, but my sunglasses are pretty old. They are still cool, but really classic style. They are prescription, though, so they are super comfortable. I suppose I don’t strictly NEED prescription sunglasses since I can see without glasses. Hmmm. Something to chew on.
There are a fair number of really young, “bottle blondes”, whose hair can be mistaken for mine at a glance, gals in their early 20s. That is a little uncomfortable. The messy thing I hadn’t thought of, but I definitely think what you said goes for unstyled hair. Structured and hip would be really hard for me to pull off, I think, cuz structured and grey is a completely different thing: on the continuum from traditional and matronly to severe IMO.
I notice that the glasses frames in the photo you posted are dark. Wouldn’t that be the equivalent of having a lot more contrast between your complexion and/or hair or eyes? Would upping the amount of contrast between the pieces in your outfits or within a print or perhaps even the space of a print and its background give a younger look? We tend to think of grey haired women as wearing lower contrast outfits, I think.
That is an interesting observation, gray haired women being associated with lower contrast. I will have to pay attention to that.
Since my eyes are brown, I use my frames to amplify the natural contrast between them and my skin and hair. I think it looks more natural on me and suits my personality better, although I realize I am not quite certain what aspect of personality that is. I have had lighter frames in the past, but not since my hair has been this white.