Fashion hits the streets
06 May 2015
We chat with five seriously fashionable seniors about embracing their personal style, taking risks, improving with age ... and why you should never wear bell bottoms or big shoulder pads again.
More is more
Glennis Murphy, 60
My personal style is eclectic. I like a mix of modern and vintage. Back then, clothes were built to last and made with attention to detail. The fabrics were often better quality too.”
“What I hate about today’s fashion is it’s disposable. It’s cheaper to throw out than to get dry-cleaned. That’s what I like about vintage – you’re reusing and loving something that’s been made and loved by somebody else.”
“Have fun with clothes. Just go for it and enjoy yourself. I can’t stand being drab. I need colour in my life. You need to have more fun the older you get.”
“I’m not as outrageous as I was as a teenager, I used to take pleasure in annoying my parents as much as I could. In the late 60s, I wore maxi coats with mini dresses and hot pants. When I got married, people thought I was going to wear something totally mad, but I went down the aisle in a white dress. I did think about wearing velvet knickerbockers, but my mum made me take it off.”
A personal reinvention
Peter Berliner, 61
“I have always loved clothing, but four years ago, I went to the Fifties Fair in Sydney and had a complete change and reinvented myself. I’ve really immersed myself in that world. It was such a beautiful period in time in men’s and women’s fashion.
“Vintage clothes have a lot more meaning, I think. The fabrics were different and sometimes manufacturers won’t ever do those same patterns or fabrics again, so they’re really special if you can find them. I’ve had people come up to me and offer me insane amounts of money for my shoes!”
“You don’t get to 60 and think, ‘I’m going to let it all go now’. In fact, I think that’s probably the time of your life when you need to look after yourself even more.
I still keep physically active – I dance West Coast swing and I do pilates and krav maga (an Israeli martial art). I’m really fit for my age and I think that it’s really important because you feel better about yourself. I’m not obsessive about it, but I do need to keep active and busy.”
Make the latest trends suit you
Sue McFarlane, 57
“My mum was a singer and when she was on stage, she’d wear make-up and beautiful sequinned dresses. So from way back then, I’ve always loved fashion.”
“I think I’ve gotten more quirky with my fashion. When I was a mother, I tended to be more conservative. But now, as I’ve gotten older, I like to funk it up and experiment more with different looks. I like modern designers, like Alice McCall and Sass & Bide. Obviously, you can’t wear the same things that young girls do, but I do like modern designers that are age-appropriate and not boring.”
“Because of my size, the challenges for me are finding really nice things that suit me and my age. As you get older, the labels for you tend to have big, dowdy clothes, whereas the designers that have small sizes tend to do clothes for really young people, like midriffs.”
“My biggest fashion regret ever was a perm I had back in the 80s. And the big shoulder pads, too!”
“I think other seniors can go with the current trends if they want, but you just need to change them to suit yourself. Don’t think that once you get to 60 years old that you have to start dressing like a dowdy old-age pensioner!
An Italian sense of style
Phillip Gennusa, 57
Being Italian, it’s in our DNA to care about clothes. Even when I was little, I remember my sister telling me to dress up because you didn’t want the neighbours to see you look scruffy. We took pride in how we looked. It’s always been like that in my family. The money wasn’t there, but we were always well-dressed.”
“I do remember years ago when we all wore bell bottoms. That was such a daggy fashion moment. They were tight around your waist and crotch and down to your knees. Then there was such an excess of material at the bottom!”
“To me, a lot of people now have lost their way about how to dress. There’s less elegance. People tend to wear t-shirts and shorts or jeans and sandshoes wherever they go.”
Sarina Gennusa, 56
“In Italy, an older woman can still get whistled at on the street because men don’t see her age as being a barrier as to whether a woman is attractive or not. Over there, you can be well into life and still be admired because you take good care of yourself. But here, you can be judged on being too old to wear certain things.”
“Seventeen years ago, I had breast cancer and a mastectomy. I’ve always been fortunate in my life in that I’ve had a normal weight and could wear whatever I wanted. But when I had breast cancer, that was the first time when I couldn’t do that. It became difficult for a long time for me, to the point where I lost interest in clothes for a while. It sent me into hiding initially. It made an impact on my life, not just health-wise, but mentally – it can really drag you down if you let it. But you’ve got to be positive and I adapted and I changed how I dressed and felt about myself.”
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