This article discusses the similarities and differences in how women in two different stages of life describe the relationship between fashion and age. The analytical approach is basically discursive, based on Norwegian teenage girls’ and adult women’s verbal accounts of clothing and clothing practices in conversational interviews undertaken in the late 1990s.
What is so dangerous about colours in women’s clothes? In this article the author is looking for answers in the book Skikk og bruk (etiquette), in ladies and fashion magazines dated 1999, and in interviews with women as well as in their piles of discarded clothing.
The author found that colours are considered dangerous because they break with the level-headed aesthetics of the middle class, and because they refer to gender in the wrong way. Economical and practical reasons, as well as the notion of colours as becoming, are used as arguments in favour of this self-inflicted asceticism.