Lack of new and exciting fashion trends seems to be one of the fallouts — or benefits, depending on your perspective — of the pandemic.
Of course, this is just my personal observation. And I can’t say that “observant” is the first adjective that friends and family use to describe me. (My husband used to ask me why I was being rude and not acknowledging people we knew when we met them on the road while driving to and from town — until he realized that I was apparently genetically incapable of recognizing anybody’s vehicle.)
Still, I do like to people-watch; and now that pandemic concerns have eased, I’ve had a chance to get out a bit (between snowstorms, that is) and capitalize on that hobby. And despite my general inattentiveness to detail, I am not blind.
For starters, I see a blur of color as people pass by —and that color is generally gray. Gray has been a trend ever since it took over our walls, living room furniture and plasticky wood-like floors even before the pandemic. The difference between home fashion and clothing fashion, though, is that home fashion is now moving away from gray and embracing color.
Clothing designers — or clothing consumers — apparently have not gotten that memo.
And then there is the matter of leggings. I have a friend who observed that no one — not one single person — looks good enough in leggings to wear them in public as a replacement for pants. I would probably qualify that statement and say “almost” no one — but, in general, I have to agree. Apparently, the at-home days of the pandemic encouraged this fashion faux pas to proliferate and persist.
Have you been shopping recently for shirts or dresses or even coats? It seems to me that the styles are not particularly fresh or exciting.
A person can shop the sales racks and be as in fashion as if buying something new. It doesn’t help that another casualty of the pandemic is the continuing and accelerated death of brick-and-mortar stores.
New hairstyles also seem to have taken a hiatus. In 10 years, we’ll look back at this time period and be unable to pinpoint any particular hairstyles unique to this time period. I haven’t even seen any new hair accessories of note.
One benefit of the pandemic, though, is that people seem generally inclined to brush their hair — for the camera, at least.
Of course, my powers of observation, never keen to begin with, also might be a casualty of the pandemic in that I had little chance the past two years to exercise those powers, but I do think they’re keen enough to observe that, in a literal sense, we’re now venturing out (going out and about and socializing) — but in a figurative sense, at least where fashion is concerned, we’re not venturing out, not at all.
Maybe it’s the pandemic, which perhaps squelched creative development by squelching in-person brainstorming sessions. Maybe it’s the economy and lack of money to invest in new looks. Maybe it’s just the winter blahs — that is certainly the root of all evils at the moment.
Hopefully, the most recent blast of icy weather this week will be the last blast of winter. If so, even if that eventuality doesn’t necessarily result in new fashion looks, it will at least result in a new outlook.