in (kinda) defence of the blazer
this harmless garment shouldn't be setting the internet ablaze like this
Given that it’s considered one of those timeless items of clothing I dismissed as boring in my first post, you might be surprised I’m lodging a defence of the blazer. During the height of the preppy fashions that had a moment in the late 00s to early 10s, helped in part by Gossip Girl I imagine, I did buy one or two blazers which have since been absorbed into my mom’s closet. But as it stands, I don’t go out of my way to purchase them. If it doesn’t make me look like a greasy 70s glam rock star, like the Rod Stewart meets Freddie Mercury black velvet blazer I got from a charity shop eight years ago, then I’m not interested.
That said, I’ve watched this unsuspecting item of clothing receive an undeserved beating on Twitter lately. I’ve seen it accused of crimes that would make the track records of our incorrigible government officials look spotless. It’s all quite baffling really, but I guess that’s how the internet works right? Some trivial matter will capture the diminishing attention spans of various TL irritants, spurning hours, sometimes days, of pointless, loud and frequently mean-spirited discourse.
This was no different for the blazer (and in turn, the “rich auntie aesthetic”) which saw people provide occasionally funny, but consistently zesty quips on this inoffensive garment. A couple of years ago, we could at least blame ignorance for our foolish social media etiquette. Many of us genuinely didn’t know any better as we engaged in “edgy” banter that was often just bigotry masquerading as humour. Whereas today’s controversy merchants are likely to be just as woke as they are cruel, infusing their nastiness with liberal undertones that their forbearers couldn’t have dreamed of concocting. They also tend to direct their ire to entirely made-up individuals, demographics and situations, making their brand of bullying even more pathetic. And while the rewards for such behaviour are no longer as virally promising as they used to be, it doesn’t dissuade these individuals from continuing with their miserly antics. Because even a crumb of notoriety, however unsatiating, is still food at the end of the day.
Yet not even people’s bloodlust for online poundings explains why the blazer has become such a despised item of clothing. I’ve seen it being associated with soulless girlboss feminism, accused of sending bat signal to “bags” (also known as blessers) and blamed for encouraging the cursed return of business casual in the club, among other things. In my first post, I was adamant that I wasn’t going to wade into the discourse and that this newsletter would be the home of viiibes and viiibes only. Oops! I lied a little. While it appears as though I’ve gone back on the promises I initially made, I’ve found it increasingly important to be able to exercise flexibility and openness when it comes to changing my mind on my sturdiest opinions and beliefs. As much as I believe the plain black blazer represents a joyless and clinical approach to personal style that doesn’t equate to timelessness or work for me generally, I can still defend those who like it, or examine what the outrage towards it says about our relationship with youth culture and ageing. Plus, this subject has been squatting on my spirit like a demon resisting an exorcism so if you’ll allow me to rhapsodise a bit, I’ll be eternally grateful.
Like I was saying, I think much of the hostility towards the blazer has to do with the fact that a lot of young, beautiful women are supposedly sporting this garment in their Instagram fit pics and at the hotspots where monied men flock to meet them. Perhaps the most telling reason the blazer has incited so much ill will is that people believe it is ageing these women by the kind of years they ought to be guarding more responsibly. They want these women, who are usually between the ages of 19 to 25, to wear more “youthful” clothing instead of donning a piece of fabric that has, in their minds, earned the same age connotations as a set of dentures.
But seeing as we’re on the topic of youth, I tried to imagine what a younger version of myself would’ve made of this chatter. I’m certain that baby Khanya would’ve used this paragraph to wage a scathing attack on the ageism of these critiques. “We live in a patriarchal society that punishes women whose faces and bodies reveal the passage of time and the weight of gravity”, she’d have written, feeling immeasurably proud of herself for having indicted both the Patriarchy and Society in one pithy sentence. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have been incorrect or delusional for that observation, notwithstanding my youthful righteousness and clunky phrasing.
However, this is the most fangless remark you could make about Blazergate. Of course, the insinuation that people shouldn’t want to look older than 25 is wildly ageist. In fact, I think it’s a real shame that ageism isn’t engaged with as a damaging and egregious form of discrimination until people reach the age where it starts to affect them. Even those of us whose politics lean left don’t appear to treat ageism as a cause worthy of rigorous analysis and organising, especially as it concerns issues of labour and fair pay for poor and working-class older people. Currently, mainstream discussions of ageism are the battleground for hot, rich 50+ supermodels and actors to bemoan the fact that they’re no longer booked for swimsuit campaigns, hired as damsels in distress or gawked at by strangers in the street. Perhaps I’m being a little ungenerous here, but those are the impressions I have so far. For these famous women, ageism is a matter that exclusively deals with the fallout of no longer being youthfully beautiful, offering them the platform to carp about getting older in the limelight with a dramatic sense of woundedness.
Then again, if I was pretty enough to have made a living off of how I looked, I too would feel swindled if the world put a stop to what I thought would be a lifelong trust fund. Even as a normal person with no real or urgent reason to be considered hot, I’ve obsessed over my appearance throughout my 20s, spending heaps of cash on skincare products that are meant to preserve my youth and routinising how I do my makeup, hair and nails, despite insisting that none of this is being done for the male gaze. Sure, I may not be interested in hearing the individual opinions of men regarding my appearance. But I also don’t mind the tiny rewards that come with being perceived as attractive. It’s not something I’m proud of, but like many feminists who are aware of the contradictions of beauty work, I haven’t tried nearly hard enough to relinquish, let alone reconcile, my attachment to it.
Age is a funny thign because if you’d told me the blazer would be considered ageing back when I was a teenager, I would’ve agreed with you, albeit with a puzzled look on my face. Dressing older was something that I wanted to do. In fact, I thought it was something that everyone my age wanted to do. Back then, ageing meant getting closer to freedom, money, independence, sex and a life that felt like our own. Because who, in their right mind, would want to own the clothes that belonged to a pimpled, insecure and cherubic pubescent girl? Why would anyone strive to replicate the trappings of teenage girlhood, a period where you’re constantly misunderstood, unheard and surveilled?
TL irritants are convulsing right now (Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels)
In the introduction to Fashion and Age: Dress, the Body and Later Life, social gerontology scholar Julia Twigg writes that “fashion and age sit uncomfortably together”, adding that while “fashion inhabits a world of youthful beauty”, age is considered “a time of greyness, marked by retirement from display or engagement with the erotic and style conscious”. Twigg makes an astute point about the friction between fashion and age, especially for older women, the book’s primary focus group, who are restricted in how freely and enthusiastically they’re able to participate in anything pertaining to fashion and style.
But even when a person is in the throes of youthful ignorance and sartorial soul-searching, the tension which Twigg points out still lurks in the wings like an eager understudy waiting for their moment to shine. As a person who’s still relatively young but not young enough to be the target demographic for most fast fashion campaigns, I’ve tried to silence the clock that keeps reminding me that my time as a fashionista is nearly done according to society. Because behind every clothing ad depicting young people as free, adventurous, experimental, hedonistic and environmentally and socially conscious is the anxiety that time is slipping away from them like sand through an hourglass (as Days of Our Lives fans would know). Behind the try-on hauls from upbeat influencers detailing their thrifted and fast fashion exploits across social media is the pressure to capture a moment of their lives that’s been earmarked as the best they’ll ever have.
Indeed, fashion is the playground of the young and consumeristic but it’s also a time-sensitive game governed by rules that can make it extremely daunting for its players. Young people are given a slim time frame in which to exploit the commodity that is youth, which might explain why people were offended by their peers wearing blazers. If the fashion industry is actively encouraging them to believe that this is is the only time of their lives where clothes can be playful, carefree and expressive, it makes sense for them to take issue with those who put on something that seemingly opposes those qualities and values.
But that fact alone doesn’t quite explain why the blazer specifically has attracted so much heat. Especially when Gen Z and Millennials have been partial to trends which glorify clothing that is affiliated with older generations (see the rise of the TikTok “Old Money Aesthetic” and the “Decade Dreaming” vintage communities on Instagram). Besides online subcultures, the enduring popularity of old-school items like brogues, kitten heels or any one of those high-waisted, belted trousers from Zara suggests that there is something about the blazer itself that irks people.
A styling idea that Zara will most likely steal if they haven’t already. (Cottonbro/Pexels)
When I thought about other factors that could be driving the online distaste for blazers, economic anxiety and a disillusionment with adulthood came to mind. While I’ve talked about how fashion’s time-sensitivity drives anxieties around getting older, there’s also possibility that for some young people, the blazer represents the failed promises of bootstraps capitalism. Now I know this idea veers into the bland and reductive thinking produced in those whiny “everything is late capitalism” essays and books, which writer Rachel Connolly eviscerated in an excellent piece for The Baffler in February 2020.
But judging from the backlash towards the green smoothie-drinking, forever-journaling, blazer-clad women of the “That Girl/Clean Girl” aesthetic, there does appear to be a tangible fatigue and anger towards those who refuse to be discrete about their ambitions. At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has seen people lose their jobs, question the acceptance of certain work practices and trigger mass strikes, protests and the arrival of the “Great Resignation”, it’s no wonder there’s so much hostility towards a garment which seems to glorify a defective careerism that’s still being championed by older generations.
Now this is the part where I say that while I appreciate the psychology behind people’s grievances towards the blazer, I still find them silly and embarrassing. Because yes, we all fear ageing. Yes, capitalism is cruel, relentless and punishing. And yes, the world seems especially scary right. But also, these fears and frustrations aren’t new. Every single generation has had to contend with conflict, crises, disappointments, economic precarity and violent certainty. None of those occurrences explain or justify the loathing towards blazers.
The nati-blazernites may have a point though lol. (Cottonbro/Pexels)
I’d actually like to talk about the disillusionment with adulthood because I think a number of us chronically online Gen Zers and Millennials are terrified of growing up. Or rather, because adulthood has been exposed as a monotonous, boring, demeaning and financially draining sham, we’ve resorted to infantilising ourselves in speech, dress and behaviour to avoid it as much as possible. From a fashion perspective, what distinguishes this return to childhood from the Youthquake of the 60s is that while childlike motifs, themes and elements were being incorporated into clothing back then, people still wanted to be adults out in the world. While they held the same scepticism about the capitalist striving required to achieve certain markers of adulthood, they still wanted to get out there and be grown folks, which isn’t what a lot of us want for ourselves.
It’s well known that Gen Z and Millennials have been forced to prolong our adolescence by staying with our parents to save money (though this practice is a norm in many parts of the world), embarking on costly post-graduate studies to escape the disappointment of working life or maintaining hobbies and interests that we had as children and teenagers. In no way am I shaming us for having experienced the financial difficulties caused by stagnant wages, high unemployment and a lack of career growth, as writer Whizy Kim identifies in “For Millennials, The Dream Of Adulthood Is Dead” for Refinery29. Nor do I think dressing whimsically and imaginatively, something that shouldn’t just be the province of children FYI, is a telltale sign of arrested development.
As we push back against 9-to-5 work culture, establish our own markers of adulthood and dress in a way that pleases us, I ask that we refrain from ridiculing people for wearing items of clothing that we’ve dismissed as passé. Let us not allow the powerlessness we feel at the hands of the system to enable discrimination against older women who have, mind you, played a crucial role in shaping fashion and style since time immemorial. Finally, can we all just accept that everyone has their own style journey which may look different to our own? Not everyone is interested in maintaining the illusion of youth and agelessness in their appearance and that’s more than okay - it’s actually preferable in my books!
Besides, sometimes the girls just wanna cosplay as a fabulous older woman with a tasteful home, quiet and supportive partner, grown ass kids with good careers and a Siamese cat named George Eliot. Some of them want to pretend like they spend their weekends attending glittering soirees draped in bespoke vintage from the golden age of haute couture. The beauty about fashion is that it can serve as a canvas for the private fantasies of the human imagination, granting us a sense of escape and reverie despite how grim life can get. And with that, I urge all of you to take a breather and let the girls wear whatever the hell they want — even if it’s a dull ass blazer!
**Cover photo: Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels
**H&M, Zara and all these little multi-national fast fashion brands better run me my check because you’d think I was the biggest fan of their lousy stock the way I’ve rambled on and on about blazers here.
**In all seriousness, if you are going to buy a blazer, might I suggest you go secondhand if you’re in the financial position to do so. Visit a dunusa, charity shop, vintage store or online thrift portal because I can guarantee you the quality will beat the itchy pieces of fabric you’d get from those giant multi-national brands. Alternatively, if you can get a locally made one at a department store, that would be great too. Or if you have the skills to make your own, have at it!