Dress Like You Have Diamonds at the Meeting of your Thighs
“Does my sexiness offend you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I have diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?”
— Maya Angelou, “And Still I Rise”
We have all read those articles, the ones that tell us what not to wear at our age.
“No self-respecting woman over someage would be seen dead wearing that”.
“Who does she think she is?”
Whenever I see such an article or hear such a phrase, I imagine a well-meaning recent college grad, sharing a run-down Manhattan studio with five other twenty-somethings while they all try to make it big, tapping out this stuff at top speed because it seems to sell. In other words, none of these articles can possibly be written by anybody with a smidgen of insight into what they are talking about.
Whether they make it in the big city or end up teaching middle school in Dubuque, the kids who write these articles will be fifty someday. If they are lucky, they will wear whatever the hell they want and nobody will remind them about what they wrote when they were wet behind the ears.
I prefer to derive my fashion advice from Maya Angelou, although I must take a bit of poetic license with her marvelous poem “And Still I Rise” in order to do so. I borrow a line from her poem about transcending sexism and racism, with the greatest respect, and add agism and fashion into the mix. Just for a moment, let’s make that “dress” instead of “dance.”
“Dress like you have diamonds at the meeting of your thighs”.
That is all the advice I need about fashion. Go ahead: Try it on and see how it fits.
“And still I RISE!”
