When I was a kid, my mom made many of our clothes. Partly out of necessity but also because she loved to sew. Sometime around third grade, I noticed that my classmates wore only store bought clothes, like real Levi blue jeans.
The only “jeans” I had were homemade, made of thin denim plastered with large berries like Strawberry Shortcake might wear. My mom must’ve thought I looked darling in them, but compared to the Levi’s kids, I felt lame. I remember staging a tantrum and refusing to wear the pants to school one day, and the bus was almost at our stop. My mom warned that if the bus passed me by, she wasn’t giving me a ride to school. So I pulled the strawberry denim on, bawling my eyes out.
Eventually, I got my first Levi’s, and there was no going back to handmade attire. In the 1970s, most girls wanted Guess and Jordache jeans. Then in high school and college, Limited Express held us spellbound. One summer in the ‘80s, I made $2.30 an hour scooping hard ice cream in a barely air conditioned mom and pop shop. It took me the entire summer to save enough to buy a winter coat from Limited Express. I was a slave to fashion. The brand and the style meant so much to us in our late teens and early twenties.
Fast forward to age 60, and I’ve just snagged a few nice shirts at Kroger. Yeah, the supermarket. This was my first Kroger clothing acquisition, and it felt a little bit wrong. My 21-year-old self would’ve been embarrassed. She would’ve assumed that only a drug addict or an unwed mother with four children would shop for clothing at Kroger. I mentioned this to my classy patient today while I was scanning her, and she got all excited. “I shop for clothes at Kroger, too! Do you know the Dip brand? I love their Dip line.”
Kroger actually has clothing brands in high demand? I was shocked. When I told my fashionable coworker about our grocery store apparel conversation, she piped up, “Me, too! I buy clothes at Meijer.”
Apparently, we women in our fifties and sixties are not afraid to admit that we shop for clothes in stores that also sell oranges and frozen pizzas. What happened to us between our youth and now? Did we get wiser and decide to invest our money in stocks and real estate instead of in the trendiest brands? Did we have kids, and their needs came before our desire to shop at Nordstrom? Do we prefer to travel and check off places on our bucket lists rather than indulge in clothing? Did we find mates who will love us even in supermarket styles? Whatever happened in those intervening years, it’s so nice to know that I’m not the only woman in the store with a tub of ricotta and a brushed fleece hoodie in my grocery cart.
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