Is is more difficult to impress an oldie or a rookie?
In general, it's the rookie. You wear one little funky thing and they're all a twitter, they compliment, almost help you preen yourself, keeping an eye out for what you're wearing. Almost as if they don't want you to ruin your outfit in some kind of vicarious way. It's easy to admire. It's very easy to look at someone else and ask yourself "why can't I...." or "could I....." or whatever. Envy or admiration: we sit on a fence and teeter between the two and it becomes very easy to slide into criticism. Call it our competitive spirit where we can't have and therefore we tell ourselves "oh I never wanted it anyway".
This is the part where we see all of those "do or don't" lists in tabloids and the like. Usually you see the more experimental, unusual outfits being criticized for nothing more than looking different. When there's no point of comparison, how can you compare? How can you say that a swan looks good on a person when you have no other swan to match it up to? It's where the rookie can go wrong. Because we're no longer picking apart what works and what does not, we're just plain shocked and when you're dumbstruck and can't compute you can't be coherent either, can you?
But the oldie, the expert, the wise old man and maid, they seem to have seen it all. Whatever you do, ol' lady Jane's seen it twenty times before and each of those were ten times better than the last. We all crave attention in some way, and I assume that we crave favourable, complimentary attention as opposed to rejection or other forms of negative expression being directed to us, so we seem to want to impress or stand out in from of the oldie's eyes. No matter how many sequins it takes. This can be frustrating. We have what we have, we all own what we own and there's no way you could possibly own
exactly what everyone else likes, wants, or is wowed by. If you work with what you own, can it turn into something else? Can the back of your closet be better than the front in terms of testing the patience and eye of the oldie as well as tempting the rookie?
A staple can be boring to some, yet completely magnificent to the same some. The challenge comes in defining (redefining?) how we present it to the same some. The rookie matters because no matter the level they are always the same. The oldest of the old is also the youngest of the young (just like you can either be really late or really early on a trend yet in retrospect no one can tell the difference) and the cycle of the oldest old and the youngest young is unending.
Part II: What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet...and for that name, which is no part of thee, take all myself.
