The Fashion Trend I Finally Learned to Embrace in My 60s

I used to be smug and skinny. Not anymore.

By
Published October 03, 2024
gif illustration of woman walking her dogs wearing stretchy pants
Amber Day

I divide my life into two epochs: “BS” (Before Stretch waistbands) and “AS,” as in After Stretchy and After Skinny and After Sixty-Five.

During my BS era, I refused to shop at Chico’s, J. Jill or Talbots or any store designed for women over 40 because I was an arrogant size-2 thin person who could wear slim skirts and pants with zippers. I had managed to hold onto my flat stomach until I was 65 — the result of an anxiety-fueled metabolism and a newsroom job that kept me click-click-clicking in heels for 10,000 steps a day for decades.

The skinny me believed Karl Lagerfeld when he declared in 2013: “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life, so you bought some sweatpants.”

I suspect the late designer equated “control of your life” with the ability to maintain a highly disciplined diet. He lost 90 pounds in 2000 when he woke up one morning and decided he wanted to fit into the slim-cut designs of Hedi Slimane for Dior. He endured a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet — not for health reasons but for toothpick-tiny trousers.

“There is nothing worse than looking longingly at clothes that you would like to wear but that are definitely too tight for you,” he wrote in his 2005 book, The Karl Lagerfeld Diet.

Like Karl, I was smug and snarky when I was slim. Perhaps that is the price for not eating enough cake.

Or perhaps I was just afraid. An elastic waistband meant the End of Sexy, I feared, the end of my ability to “lure the male gaze,” as my friend Pati says. Perhaps I feared the inevitable Evolution of Man: we come into life crawling in our moisture-wicking pull-ups, and we go out the same way.

Then I turned 65 — and my midsection popped like a can of Pillsbury crescent rolls. Three years and 15 pounds later, I am too curvy for Karl but also too old to care.

I’ve lost my will to zip.

Now I look longingly at carefree clothes with elastic waists or drawstrings or wrap-style waistbands. Not sweatpants, mind you, and not leggings — no, no, no. I have not admitted defeat, Karl! I don’t wear “athleisure” clothes for anything but exercise, and I find that trend so tired, so tedious and so 2020.

Let's not confuse my “AS” epoch with a trip to Frumpy Town. My pants are pull-ups, but I’m still pulled together.

I’m particularly enamored with bohemian brands that employ “free sizing” — one size that fits most, say sizes 4 through 14 — and can be adjusted as a woman gains or loses 10 pounds.

I got rid of every pair of jeans with a zipper, and now I rock pull-on jeans with barrel-shaped legs and cropped styles with wide legs. As cool weather approaches, I’ll add close-to-the-body ribbed tops — but I never tuck in. Vests and cropped sweaters that hit at my high hip provide the right camouflage for my bouncy belly and the right proportion for my flowing pants and skirts.

If you’re confused about proportion, look at the Free People or Anthropologie websites, or ask Robin Cohen, the owner of Boutique W in Newtown Square, PA. Robin does useful “how-to-style-an-outfit” videos on Facebook for her many customers who are transitioning from work to retirement and freeing themselves from tight pants, one billowy bottom at a time.

“One of my customers said, ‘I went from structured suits to Eileen Fisher separates to Magnolia Pearl (a one-size-fits-most hippie-chic brand),'," Cohen says. “She just turned 70, and she decided: ‘Magnolia Pearl is me, and I’m never going back'."

Another one of her customers is a nurse who has started investing in pricey Magnolia Pearl pieces for her future retirement, like a 401(k) for her closet. “She has pieces with the tags still on because she’s saving them,” Cohen says.

You don’t have to be 60-something to embrace the elastic waist and the whole philosophy of “free sizing.” My daughter, Kate, 37, went to middle school with a creative fashion designer, Christina Coniglio, whose year-old brand Coniglio Palm Beach is all about bright and happy pareos that wrap around the body and stretch with you.

“Free sizing is the future,” says Christina, who grew up with her five siblings in Palm Beach. She left her job as senior design director of the girlie brand LoveShackFancy when she was seven months pregnant — and now, the ruffled pareos she wrapped around her pregnant self are still in her closet and in her two stores and selling as fast as she can make them. 

As Coniglio wrote on Instagram: “My goal is to dress the entire family. Pack a family suitcase and share the entire time. It’s new, it’s different, it’s fluid, it’s shareable, it’s one size and it’s impossible to define.”

Made in India from colorful silk or cotton, her clothes, she says, are “generational cool” — good for every chapter of a woman’s life, from teen to grandma.

We still care about how we look, no matter our age, though as Robin Cohen says: “It’s just a different form of caring. It’s about saying, ‘I don’t care about being a size 2 anymore. I’m comfortable in my own skin'."

That’s my ultimate Aspirational Strategy for my “After Sixty-Five” epoch — embracing my own beautiful, cuddly, ever-changing elastic waist.

Do any of you wear pants with elastic waists? Let us know in the comments below.

Jan Tuckwood is an award-winning journalist who was associate editor and revenue content director of The Palm Beach Post for 30 years. She’s also a former fashion editor of The Denver Post, and her work has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Glamour magazine, among other publications. She is the editor of five books, including the official history book of Palm Beach County, and she is the co-author of Too Young to Be Old, the 2022 memoir of Diane Gilman, HSN’s “Jean Queen.”