Category: Fashion And Age

Age Appropriate: back on the front burner at last

8/28/2017

This is so exciting! This project took a detour over a year ago as I realized that it would require not only additional research, but also some serious re-thinking of the structure of the book.

You may remember this image:

The original plan was a fairly straight-forward cultural history of clothing for women over fifty, similar to what I had done in Pink and Blue for infants and toddler clothing. But the story would not let itself be told that way.

You see, we don't start "aging" at fifty; childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age are also part of the journey. Learning to be female is not a weekend workshop or even a four-year-degree program. It is a lifelong process of being led into each life stage along a path shaped by cultural beliefs about aging and gender. So I revised the plan.

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The half-size mystery solved

2/22/2017

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As mysteries go, this will never enjoy a BBC production. After all, it features no bodies, no stolen jewels, and no charismatic detective. Just an aging professor, dressed in well-worn L.L. Bean basics, trying to figure out what happened to the women's clothing range formerly known as "half sizes".

Sears, Roebuck & Company Spring 1970 catalog.

Half sizes were designed for "mature figures" -- women with fuller, lower busts, waists that were larger in proportion to bust and hips than "Misses" sizes, and shorter from neck to waist than "Misses" or "Women's" figures. Half sizes were seldom sleeveless, and the sleeve seam and upper arm were roomier. Skirts were usually longer than other size ranges. Shoulders were more rounded. In other words, half sizes were for postmenopausal women. Until they disappeared in the late 1980s.

Of course, I mean that the size range disappeared, not the women for whom it had been desired. Half Sizes were replaced by Women's Petite.

I am still tracking down the exact change in standards, but it is clear that the dimensions and proportions changed, not just the name.

Sears, Roebuck & Company, Fall, 1988 catalog.

So what? Why should anyone care?
Here's the thing. If sizes associated with age (half sizes) do not exist, women over fifty must select clothing from the remaining size ranges based on the size, shape and proportion of their bodies. This sounds like a good thing, but there's this reality: we are not all Helen Mirren. We are also not 20-something plus-size models. Some of look like this, or will, if we live long enough:

Figure from Margaret Swisher Larmour, “A Study of Body Measurements Relating to the Fit of Clothing for 65 to 74 Year Old Women,” 1988.

And so, I wonder, how did the elimination of half sizes change the ways in which older women see themselves? As baby boom women age, what options will we have, and and what will we choose?

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Age Appropriate: back on the front burner at last

The half-size mystery solved

Jo Paoletti

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