I made a note a few weeks ago to write about this topic, and was reminded of it today when I was making my way out of Wawa with my lunch. There were two guys, an older guy in a sport jacket, and a younger, say 25, one in t-shirt and jeans. They both struggled to keep open the door for me.
I was just thinking it was one of those crazy things that happens when several people get clogged up in an entryway, but then the guy in the t-shirt called me “sir”, and I was reminded of this clothing issue that I mentioned.
Basically, my wardrobe is a mess. I don’t have any clothes that I would really like to wear, and it leads to issues such as what I’ve just described.
For example, work attire is “business casual”. So I wear the khakis and plaid shirts to work. Now, I’m not really interested in investing a bunch of money in clothes that nobody is going to see me in and that I don’t enjoy wearing, so when I go shopping for work clothes, I usually just pick up a few generic brand shirts and pants that fit. Who cares, right?
Well, I’m guessing that my no-effort-wardrobe makes me look older, because I keep noticing people behaving around me as though this is the case. Yeah, yeah, I am getting older, but these types of things don’t happen to me when I’m dressed in non-work clothes.
I wonder, as an extension of this, if any of my clothes really look like how old I feel. After all, I didn’t think I looked old with my business casual apparel. What if the clothes I like to wear make me look old, too?
I call into memory the images of women (women in particular, because it’s more obvious) whom I’ve seen or met who have been wearing somewhat frumpy clothing. And I wonder if they know that they look older than they really are. I wonder if they’re just comfortable in their clothes, or if they think that their clothes make them look young, or just what motivated them to wear those particular clothes.
And it’s not exactly that I’m worried about looking “old”. It just seems odd that the image I’m giving off doesn’t match the way I feel at all.
