We all have our favourite clothes. Sometimes clothes have been with us for so long, they acquire sentimental value. Often these items of clothing are our well loved jeans. Or maybe, larger versions of our well loved jeans. My husband has a Superman Tee shirt and frayed jeans he wore when I gave birth to our first child. Obviously he needed to wear the jeans and top for our second! Fifteen years later I was highly relieved when he finally gave into reality and gave the Tee shirt to our super hero loving son, the jeans had bitten the dust many years prior. Tom looks a great deal better in it as it is definitely made for a slim teenage boy. In the case of my husband, from my experience, many men, the nostalgic connotations’ of clothing, particularly jeans, is a significant factor. Women too can suffer from this affliction however, vanity usually overrides it. The big issue for myself, and every women I know is, that of moving on and letting go of a dated fashion mindset. Coupled with this is the letting go, and accepting of a new body image, or so I thought. The latter is no longer true however. The tummy tuck jeans I recently came across in a local boutique have totally changed my mind on this point. Tummy tuck jeans really do what their marketing copy boasts! The tummy tuck jeans do pull in your tummy. Tummy tuck jeans do stop muffin top. And most importantly for me, tummy tuck jeans are comfortable to wear. You are as comfortable in a well fitted pair of tummy tuck jeans as you would be in your jogging pants.
So what constitutes this mindset, why do we fix it at a certain point in time, and why do people with the wrong type of figure wear the wrong jeans? The only way of perceiving your own preconceptions and prejudices in regards to fashion is to be very honest and dispassionate. Take a snapshot, retrospective look at yourself in family photos’. Be warned this process will probably take considerably longer than intended. If you are anything like me, you are highly likely to get side tracked whilst peering back down memory lane. Try however to be disciplined and pull out a representative subset of family photo’s (with you in them of course), for each decade. If you are really brave go back to your early twenties.
The earlier you go back the better! What is a fashion mindset, by fashion mindset, I mean our preconceptions of what clothes suit us. These clothes and their style elements we happen to be wearing at the point in which our body image is honed will influence our fashion related decisions for the rest of our lives. The fashion industry knows this fact all too well. Have you ever wondered why it is that the clothes in M& S have gradually become more attractive to you? In your late teens and early twenties, this store, and their elk, contained only frumpy, middle aged clothes for our mums and dads. Sorry but we are now those mums and dads! They are still marketing to the over thirties, as they are the cohort of customers purchasing for family, home and their own fashion needs. Throw in a nice café and then tempting readymade meals with a bottle of wine and you can see why they are so successful in their strategy.
What these companies are doing, surreptitiously, is incorporating the fashion trends deeply entrenched into the over thirties ‘fashion mindset’, with the current, often rather unpalatable fashions. In effect, watering down the current trends by subtly blending them with what we (the older customer) actually believe is attractive. This is all reinforced by our preconception of what actually suites us. When they hit on a successfully blend, the clothing presses all the buttons that make us feel that we look the way we used to do!
The one item of clothing that no major store has really managed to corner in the fashion market is that of jeans. For many years now I have either looked good and felt uncomfortable, or looked awful and felt none restricted. Nothing makes you feel unattractive as much as poor fitting, unflattering jeans. Bring on the tummy tuck jeans. Tummy tuck jeans really are a revelation. They look good, as they have been tailored to meet the modern style elements. They flatter the female figure by a clever combination of fabrics and tailoring. If that were not enough, tummy tuck jeans are actually as comfortable to wear as jogging pants. No wonder I love my tummy tuck jeans!