There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes with hitting your fifties or sixties and realising that most high street fashion simply wasn’t designed with you in mind. Too tight, too short, too complicated. Labels that seem obsessed with a twenty-two-year-old body type and completely indifferent to everyone else. It’s not bitterness – it’s just a fairly accurate observation about how mainstream retail has tended to operate for the last couple of decades.
But things are shifting. Slowly, but they are. And a lot of that shift isn’t coming from the trendy brands scrambling to be “inclusive” in a press release – it’s coming from retailers that have been getting on with it quietly for years, without much fanfare.
Practicality Doesn’t Mean Boring
One of the more persistent myths about dressing for comfort is that you have to give up on looking put-together. As if the moment you prioritise an elasticated waist or a longer hemline, you’ve surrendered to some kind of sartorial defeat. That’s not true, and anyone who’s genuinely thought about it knows it.
Comfort and style have always been compatible, but for long time, they were only made compatible for younger buyers. A well-cut fleece jacket in a proper navy or burgundy looks perfectly decent, and comfortable trousers that hold their shape are, objectively, better than rigid ones that dig in after lunch. The idea that these things are somehow lesser is a marketing fiction more than anything else.
The retailers who’ve always understood this tend not to shout about it. Chums, for instance, has been selling clothing and footwear aimed at older customers for years, with a focus on things that actually fit real bodies and suit real lives. Easy fastenings, wider fittings, warmer fabrics – the sort of details that matter when you’re not buying clothes as a statement but as something you’ll actually wear.
What Most People Get Wrong About “Age-Appropriate” Dressing
The phrase “age-appropriate” has had a strange life. It started as a sensible enough concept – wear things that suit where you are in life – and somehow got twisted into a set of arbitrary rules about who gets to wear what colour or hemline length. Which is odd, because the original logic was about comfort and context, not restriction.
What actually tends to happen is that people in their sixties and seventies develop a pretty clear sense of what works for them. They know their proportions. They know what they’ll reach for and what’ll hang in the wardrobe untouched. That’s not a loss of style – that’s just experience doing its job. Honestly, most younger shoppers could learn a lot from it.
The frustration comes when retailers don’t keep up with that clarity. When someone knows exactly what they want – a proper waterproof that doesn’t look clinical, thermal underlayers that don’t add bulk, shoes with enough support for a full day on their feet – and the high street just doesn’t have it. That gap is real, and it’s been real for a while.
The Shift Toward Function-First Fashion
Post-pandemic shopping habits changed things for a lot of age groups, but particularly for older buyers. There was a noticeable move toward practicality – toward clothes that work for the life you’re actually living rather than some aspirational version of it. Catalogues and online retailers that had always prioritised function found their moment.
It’s worth thinking about what that means in practice. Slippers with proper soles so you can nip outside without changing your shoes. Tops with a longer back hem because that’s just more comfortable when you’re sitting. Nightwear in proper cotton rather than whatever synthetic blend costs less to produce. These are unglamorous details, and they matter enormously to the people who need them.
None of this is revolutionary. It’s just design that takes the actual customer seriously. And that, more than any trend cycle or fashion week moment, is what tends to build the kind of loyalty that lasts. Older shoppers aren’t easily fooled by marketing – they’ve seen too many promises that didn’t hold up in the wash – so when they find something that works, they tend to stick with it.
Which is probably why the retailers who’ve been doing this thoughtfully for years aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
