Musings from Middle Age by Kerre Woodham

Author:Kerre Woodham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

18

Moving with the times

The next time you have a few hours to yourself on the weekend, go through your wardrobe. Anything you haven’t worn for five years put to one side. I don’t care that it was a hideously expensive designer dress you bought to celebrate the fact that you’d dropped ten kilos on the Atkins diet and, for a brief moment in time, you were a size 10. It’s been five years since you last wore it; five years since you were last a size 10. Don’t let it hang there, reproaching you for your extravagance and your inability to starve yourself into an unnatural body size. Either flog it off on Trade Me, take it to a recycling shop and sell it or swap it for something equally gorgeous but that actually fits you, or get back on the Atkins diet.

If you have too much of one colour, particularly black, resolve to try on blue shirts next time. Or red dresses. Or purple jerseys. The only people who can get away with wearing black day in and day out are the uber-cool women who rock Zambesi and Nom D. They probably did English Lit or Law at Otago back in the eighties and would have hung out with the indie punk bands down there. They’ve found a look that works for them and they’ve gone with it, although the ripped fishnet stockings have been replaced with artfully distressed designer leggings and the Doc Martens have been ditched in favour of $1200 Ann Demeulemeester boots. I think they look great and I would love to be able to adopt that look, but it only really works if you’re lean and louche.

These Dunedin chicks are the exception to the rule that you need to overhaul your look once you get older. Generally, most of us need to take a long hard look at our hairstyles, our make-up and our wardrobes as we move from our thirties into our nearly fifties. A girl who looked great in the seventies as a provincial version of Stevie Nicks isn’t going to look quite so fetching at fifty with her long, lacy hippy skirts and her dyed blonde hair falling halfway down her back. If she experimented with different looks, she might find that those hippy skirts have been hiding great legs that would look fantastic in well-cut pants and that she needn’t give up the leather and lace effect, if she got herself a stylish wee lacy shirt to go with the pants.

I remember the very first day I met one of my best friends. I had been selected as a potential applicant for the Wellington Polytech journalism course and I was instructed to get myself from Hamilton up to Auckland and sit in a room with another 199 other people and be put through a battery of tests. Pre-selection tests were going on all over the country and from around 600 would-be journalists, just sixty would be chosen. All a bit nerve-wracking, really, for a sixteen-year-old convent girl with minimal experience of life.

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