Are Irony and Maturity Mutually Exclusive?

From The New York Times:

First go the knees, then goes irony. Sometime around age 50, women start to let go of certain ideas about themselves and fashion. Up till then you can wear lots of silly or brash things, and if you are reasonably fit and attractive or consistently daring, it doesn’t really matter. You’re still with the tide. You are home free with your esoteric Pradas, your porkpie hats and coy Lolita socks, and no little voice is going, “Heh-heh-heh, you’re too old for that.”

Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that you are not Helen Gurley Brown, the miniskirted octogenarian. You love your youthful ideals but draw the line at being a slave to them 50 years on. Saying goodbye to short skirts and flimsy tops is actually liberating.

Irony is harder to part with — for the simple reason that many of us who are now in our 50s grew up with that kind of cerebral fashion and were happy to have clothes that made reference to ideas, worlds, that only those in our orbit could understand. Our mothers (mine, anyway) did not see the point in adopting flannel shirts or rummaging through Goodwill bins for just the right filthy cardigan.

And why would they? Grunge and deconstruction, which provided a counterpoint to the slick, aggressive fashion of the late 1980s, were our peculiar trip. My mother always preferred her own rose-colored glasses. “Can’t you be a lady?” she would say with a sigh. She thought women should look beautiful, while I pondered the meaning of Miuccia Prada’s “ugly beauty.”

Nothing conveys that struggle better than Madonna’s attire last month at the Costume Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum. In addition to wearing a taffeta hair bow that poked up like rabbit ears, she had on a bright blue minidress with a romper hem and a pair of swashbuckler boots that noticeably left a crack of skin showing at the top of her thighs.

Although the outfit was plainly a riff on exuberant Paris fashion — it was designed by a host of the event, Marc Jacobs of Louis Vuitton — many people took the excessiveness seriously. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that some members of the low-brow media on the steps of the Met didn’t get the joke. But, in any case, they thought that Madonna, who is 50, looked like a nut.

In my opinion, Madonna did indeed look like a “nut,” although the culprit wasn’t so much age as it was the current incarnation of Madonna: humorless and brittle, and certainly not one you would expect a light-hearted wardrobe gesture from. If Patricia Field or Betsey Johnson had donned the ensemble, both of whom are older than Madonna yet infinitely more fun-loving, less eyebrows would have been raised.

I think we all have the right to go gently into the crazy bird lady stage, regardless of what society thinks. I remain, however, unilaterally against pigtails over the age of 10.