Here's me celebrating the return of a style I've been missing and here too are a whole bundle of experts who assure me that, at 50, I'm too old to be allowed to enjoy 'Mom Jeans'.
OK. So maybe the first thing we need to do before deciding what is sartorially acceptable after one has celebrated one's 50th birthday and what isn't is to think about what the term 'Mom jeans' was originally intended to convey. It hasn't ever been a term designers tend to include on the garment label; one would be more likely to describe the jeans in the picture on the right as 'high rise, straight leg' than as 'Mom', for example. Just recently, I've noticed boot cut, slim boot cut and even flares all being described as 'Mom jeans', thus I conclude that the single defining feature of what the fashion commentators currently consider to be a Mom jean is that it sits at the waist instead of close to the bikini line - i.e. a fit that is way more flattering for real live women of all ages, not just for twenty-somethings, as was the case with the skinnies, but also for Moms. Welcome back, I say, and a hearty 'Well, duh!' to whichever commentator I was reading the other day who mentioned that raising the waist line on a pair of jeans helps to lengthen the appearance of the wearer's legs even without the addition of towering platforms/heels. I've been complaining about how low-rise waist lines work to shorten the appearance of the wearer's legs at least 10 years already, I reckon, a phenomenon that's been particularly noticable here in Singapore where a lot of girls seem to me unwilling to be honest with one another and/or say when they think a friend could improve her look. Or maybe it's that the shops have been so over-stuffed with low-rise garmets, you'd need to opt for made to measure in order to find anything else. One thing I would say to older women with regard to high-waisted jeans is forget about trying to style them on the same way you might have 25 or 30 years ago, before they went out of fashion. Even 21-year-old blogger Hannan Louise styles her Mom jeans with platforms that add length to her legs, and that's three quarters of the battle, in my opinion. |
Myth No. 4: Anyone who is old enough to remember the days when jeans were anything other than low-rise and super skinny cannot hope to get away with Mom jeans even though Mom jeans are so much more figure flattering than low-rise ever was.
Read the next post in this series here.