Fashion trends come and go, often faster than we can understand them. One year everyone seems to wear oversized sweatpants and sneakers, and the next year an entirely different style appears out of nowhere. Looking at these changing fashions, I sometimes wonder not only how trends are created, but also why certain clothes suit certain people at certain stages of life.
Having grown up during Japan’s designer-brand boom, I remember the excitement of fashion very well. Yet as I have grown older, I have begun to feel that clothing reflects something deeper than appearance alone. What matters is not simply what we wear, but whether the clothes match the person, the occasion, and the atmosphere surrounding them.
This is not really a story about fashion itself. It is more about age, character, and the quiet connection between outward appearance and the life a person has lived.
Yesterday’s topic about sweatpants unexpectedly attracted a lot of attention, which suggested that many people were curious about that seemingly strange style.
Fashion trends always come and go, so I imagine that the current sweatpants look will eventually fade away as well.
And what will come next? I have absolutely no idea.
Apparently, new designs are first introduced at some sort of fashion collection and then spread into everyday society a year or two later. I sometimes wonder whether those sweatpants styles had once walked proudly down the runway at the Paris Collection or somewhere similar.
I am not especially interested in clothing myself.
That said, my youth happened to overlap perfectly with the golden age of designer brands in Japan, so I did care about fashion to some extent back then.
Comme des Garçons, Men’s Bigi, Men’s Nicole — there were probably many more, but now they remain only as pleasant memories from a distant past.
Looking back on those days, I sometimes feel that no matter how elegantly a person dresses, if there is nothing substantial inside, the result ends up looking rather shallow.
Perhaps things are a little different for women, but for men especially, I think that is often true.
A suit only begins to look natural on a man when some gray starts appearing in his hair, not when he is barely past twenty.
Of course, this may sound outdated now, since we no longer live in an age of suits. Still, I think clothing has its proper timing, and every situation calls for attire that matches its own TPO — time, place, and occasion.
People are free to wear whatever they like.
But that freedom also reveals something about the way they live and the atmosphere they carry around them.
Perhaps clothing is ultimately that kind of thing.
What people wear may change with fashion, but the atmosphere behind the clothes tends to reveal who they really are.
Vocabulary for Learners
- fade away — 廃れる、消えていく
- golden age — 黄金時代
- designer brands — デザイナーズブランド
- shallow — 薄っぺらい、中身が浅い
- gray hair — 白髪
- outdated — 時代遅れの
- attire — 服装（ややフォーマルな表現）
- TPO (time, place, occasion) — 時・場所・場合に応じた振る舞い
- reveal — 明らかにする、にじみ出る
- atmosphere — 雰囲気、空気感
