The Fleece - Ultimate Crime to Fashion - Uniform of the Middle-aged Woman
If you go to the website for any popular outdoor wear brand, you will be bombarded with images of all sorts of strenuous outdoor activities. Biking, mountain climbing, tight roping between cliffs whilst balancing a flame thrower on your head. You could easily think you had stumbled upon a tampon advert if there weren't so many pictures of men!
Fitting as this may seem, 'active wear' is presumably designed for such activities, the manufacturers are failing to advertise the primary use of their products: clothing every boring, middle-aged bastard under the sun!
Old women in particular are guilty of this, and like a uniform they don some sensible flat M&S shoes, tapered but loose polyester trousers resting just above, NEVER below the ankle, a short 'not too much hassle' hair style, and to top it off, the evil Fleece. The Women's Polarplus IV IA, pictured, is especially popular. Always in a sensible colour, nothing too garish.
This is perhaps the most boring item of clothing I have ever seen. Its lack of shape, style, or any redeeming feature for that matter, makes the fleece the ultimate dullard item of clothing. Why then are so many people wearing them? Perhaps old, fashionably challenged women are dazzled by features such as 'Interactive zip feature', and tricked into thinking this makes it a young, hip fleece. Be assured over 50's, there is no such thing as a 'cool, hip' fleece! In fact assigning words such as 'cool' or 'hip' to an item automatically voids it of these qualities.
I imagine that dullards are choosing this hideous crime to fashion for its functional warmth, but since it is priced at a whopping £70, you'd be better off cosying up in a far more aesthetically pleasing Pashmina.
If Vogue have any sense of social responsibility, they will be sending a copy to every last member of the Women's Institute ASAP.
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