Question: Do you have swag or do you dress well?

Hywel Owen answered on 16 Jun 2012:

Most people like to look smart and well-dressed, and there is a lot of peer pressure at schools for people to dress a certain way. But really, that’s all just surface. While it might seem important now, you will look back later and wonder why you took fashion seriously. I’m old enough now to have seen today’s fashions *twice* before already! To me it’s all just a distraction from real things, actually doing stuff that matters. In most professional jobs you should wear reasonably smart, clean clothes (a suit for men for some jobs) but apart from that no-one really cares.

What’s interesting – and depressing – is just *how* much people care about clothing these days. When I was a student, only in the early 1990s, fashion was just not a big thing – people wore fashionable clothes, but it wasn’t a big thing in their lives. And there wasn’t this enormous wall of advertising trying to make everyone dress the same like there is now.

For example, I went shopping for shoes for my young daughter the other day. I couldn’t find a single pair of shoes that wasn’t pink. I found that very offensive, i.e. the assumption that girls should only wear that colour. But at the moment boys’ things are all blue, and girls’ things are all pink – I guess that means if you have more than one child you have to buy two sets of toys instead of one, right?

A few things that might be interesting: only 30 years ago (when I was small), boys and girls dressed *the same* until about the age of six. Many boys wore dresses until the age of 3. And until the 1970s, pink was a boy’s colour, and blue was a girl’s colour. Go figure.

A bit about the history of pink:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html

And this is a great campaign website:
http://www.pinkstinks.co.uk/