I'm beginning to think there may be more than 10 myths needing to be busted with regard what to wear after you reach age 50. For today's post, I'm going to be talking about one of my most favourite categories of garment: the cardigan.
Myth No. 5: Cardigans fail to flatter older women because they lack any structure that could help to disguise any lumps or bumps. Choose a jacket or a blazer instead.
The most important thing to notice about this particular myth is that it isn't really older women who might benefit if they were to avoid wearing cardigans. Assuming the end objective is to appear reasonably polished, larger ladies of any age may indeed need to pick their cardies a bit more carefully than smaller ones. Really, the trick is to look for cardies with a bit of structure to them, by which I don't necessarilly mean to suggest cardians with jacket-like features such as colars or set-in sleeves although these can suit a mature figure extremely well. Something else to think about is where you're intended to wear your cardigan, indoors or outdoors. The pick on the right would be about the right weight for an outer garment to be worn with a scarf during a European autumn and without one during a European spring. (In Singapore, it could work over a short sleeved or even a sleeveless blouse as long as you intended to remain in an air-conditioned room all day. It would be too hot to wear otherwise, I think.)
There are other types of cardigan that are intended for waifs and only for waifs, of course. As my good friend and favourite shopping buddy Lynda will tell you, I am invariably drawn to chunky, over-sized knits of the kind shown here. I don't know what it is about them exactly; I find them curiously romantic, particularly if they should happen to come in cream. I used to wear these big, hefty, man-styled sweaters when I was in my late teens/early twenties and couldn't afford to keep the central heating on for anything more than an hour or two a day. |
For all that I am so strongly drawn to these things, Lynda has trained me to accept that I look like a bag lady in this particular type of cardigan. This is not so much because I am older that the owner of the waif-life torso shown in this photograph but because I am a good few dress sizes larger than the waif. Whether you're top heavy, bottom heavy or a perfecty proportioned hour glass, my advice woud be to accept that you must inevitably end up looking like your own pipe-smoking Great Uncle Charlie in this cardigan. Happily, there are lots of other cardies we might choose to wear.
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Please Note: Whenever I venture out into the virtual shopping mall that is the Internet, I find an increasing number of the images that turn up come from AliExpress.com, a site I personally have yet to purchase anything from. I did find this really helpful article about how to ensure a happy experience on this site, which brings together so much cool-looking and apparently very reasonably priced stuff, it makes you wonder if it isn't just a clever scam and you won't ever receive whatever goods you've paid for. I look forward to hearing from anyone who has ordered something from AliExpress or from any other save-$$$-by-buying-directly-from-the-people-who-actually-make-the-stuff websites.