It was surprising news that fashion designer Eileen Fisher is leaving her old love for a younger woman but those things happen. I sighed when I read that the New York designer known for her sophisticated styles and lush colors had decided to leave behind her Boomer sisters to go after a younger, cooler customer.

When I was young and cool I wasn’t an Eileen Fisher fan. When I got older and decided to occasionally treat myself I was drawn to Eileen Fisher. First by her models and then her clothes.

The models in Eileen Fisher ads were real women – high school principals and airline pilots. Some of them had silver hair and wore glasses. They looked brainy and fit and confident. They walked on the beach. They held books in their arms. They even smiled. They didn’t look angry and starved like other models. Nor did they stand pigeon toed in stilettos, like some porn star. They were grown-ups.

Eileen Fisher was one of us. She too favored classy but uncomplicated clothes, the kind you don’t have to yank on and adjust but that made you feel pretty and even hip. I liked what I read about her – that she gave her employees yoga classes and health and education benefits and helped women in poor countries start businesses.

Her clothes and marketing style portrayed women of her generation in a new way.

If you were going to describe a stylish classic American woman you might handily refer to her as an Eileen Fisher type.

Her models had both age and flair. Here was one shrewd business person who did not avoid the aging market but invested in it and celebrated it.

Imagine, then, our surprise to find that others thought her clothes had “as much style and shape as a burqa.” That’s what it said in a New York Times story that reported the Eileen Fisher line was trading in its traditional base to appeal to the youth market. This new line would be different from the old Eileen Fisher line that was “designed for graying bobos who dabbled in ceramics and had lifetime subscriptions to the New Yorker.”

Ouch, said this graying bobo - after I looked up the word “bobo,” which is a word coined by conservative columnist David Brooks, short for bourgeois bohemian. Bobo or not, I do not feel scorned by Eileen Fisher. I have enough of her clothes in my closet and really, in this economy I don’t see a big shopping spree in my future.

If she wants to go back to her drawing board — the new line is to include biker jackets and leggings – then she should. She’s 58, a good age to try something new.

But I’m just sorry that she feels like she has to go after the kids like everyone else. Maybe she’ll do great with the younger, cooler crowd who will one day say, “hey, where are those stylish black dresses and asymmetrical sweaters you used to make?” I’ll mostly miss the women in her ads who look like people my age and wear clothes that don’t require a full-length industrial strength undergarment.

She won’t miss me. I was not a heavy investor. I bought some sweaters on sale and once paid full price for a smart ivory colored jacket for my daughter’s wedding. I still wear it, mostly with jeans. My last Eileen Fisher score was a black linen shirt from a consignment shop in San Francisco. It cost 12 bucks and looks nothing like a burqa.

The headline writers say that Eileen Fisher is giving herself a facelift. Well, you know how those can go. Sometimes they work and sometimes they just make you look funny. Then there is no going back.

Tags: Boomer_women, Eileen_Fisher, Juicy_Tomatoes, Susan_Swartz, youth_market

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Aging, Fashion, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.