All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go
Buddy and Romeo prepare for another year of disappointment
THIS WEEK:
Style and Grooming
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Our latest cartoon for Kappan
BEHIND THE PAY WALL: Dressed to impress
DiPerri here. I read a fashion forecast for 2025 that predicted baggy pants will be out of fashion. Great! Hopefully we’ll move past pajamas in public soon too.
If you hold on to your wardrobe long enough, it all comes back around. DiPerri’s is firmly stuck in 2014, which is the year Frega took it over and replaced the grandpa items he had worn previously. I still have several items from the early 2000s that I regularly wear and even a couple from the late 1990s. If you like your baggy jeans, great. Keep wearing them. If you never stopped wearing skinny jeans, congratulations. They’re [allegedly] making a comeback in 2025.
Personally, I think the fashion offerings in my lifetime thus far peaked in 2013 and style trends have offered nothing but a precipitous decline ever since. Generally speaking. Some specific items started going downhill much earlier. Like thick, quality, cozy sweatshirts probably reached their summit years earlier in 2004.
Much of the 2013 fashion high point was likely thanks to what Mad Men did to revitalize interest in mid-century design and fashion. But when the show ended in 2015, it probably took that interest and mainstream awareness of style with it. Banana Republic had a Mad Men line in 2011. It was a limited series but the influence reverberated through their store offerings for years (I know because this is where Frega used to work and she purchased virtually all of our clothing there from 2014-2018). During the pandemic years, many business casual and work clothing retailers didn’t know what they’d become and it was hard to find neckties (forget bowties, which were everywhere again in 2013).
The work from home revolution in 2020 destroyed modern fashion. Many kids wear pajamas and sweatpants to school and some people wear hoodies and leggings to job interviews. Business/business casual retailers did what they had to do to survive. J. Crew has sold sweatshirts for years and they fit logically within the store’s identity and brand. But when ath-leisure hoodies and leggings started appearing in Banana Republic in 2019/2020, it looked like an identity crisis.
Hopefully it’s not too late for Banana Republic. Maybe they’ve turned around! I don’t know though because we’ve largely switched to Loft and J. Crew for our business casual needs. Sorry.
It’s getting late in the post. What time is it? Five o’clock?
Let’s take care of that five o’clock shadow…
Did you like that transition? No? Rejected? Fine.
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Our latest cartoon for Kappan is in the December 2024/January 2025 issue.
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