Forever Cool

Sherrie Mathieson's Forever Cool is a very good book to have in your armoury if you're part of the baby boom generation.

I come in just at the tail end of the baby boomers, and this book is really aimed at people over 50, but it still has plenty of style advice you can follow if you're any age above 35 or so.

Mathieson is a good choice for a book like this because she's not only a stylist but also a costumier, which means that if she's asked to pick out clothes to illustrate 'frumpy housewife' or 'little old lady', she knows just how to do it. Her eye is unerring, and unforgiving too - this book is packed with 'before' mistakes and 'after' solutions that ably illustrate the kind of mess that clothes can get you into once you hit middle age. Some of her transformations take 10 years off the models.

She sets out her agenda in the introduction, and I'll quote here, because I think she's bang-on: "When we think of youthful, we think of words like active, energetic, vibrant, vital, dynamic - ideally, the way we feel. The aim of this book is NOT to make you look young....my goal is to help you achieve a style that implies youthfulness. A youthful spirit is what we're after." This is a fabulous approach to both life in general, and fashion and clothing in particular.

She also confronts the issue of ageing head on: "If you have always relied on your physical appearance for your sexual identity...you may be tempted to choose inappropriate or provocative clothing in order to get yourself noticed. But if we can put our self-worth, health, and fitness first, we can set a new benchmark for ageing gracefully that is both positive and enduring."

Dressing well while remaining age-appropriate is the balancing act most of us are trying to pull off once we hit 40, and it can sometimes be tricky. No-one wants to dress in classics ALL the time, nor to look frumpy, nor - horror of horrors - appear muttony.

Mathieson deal with all of these issues, and also covers the various clothing areas where people make particular mistakes: sportswear (no more crappy tracksuits because people can actually see you), casual clothing (casual, not slovenly), business clothing (how to dress like a woman, not a man in drag), eveningwear and occasionwear (an area guaranteed to make any woman with fat upper arms just want to kill herself), accessories and grooming. She picks out the common mistakes people make in their look, and tells you how to correct them. Fundamentally, it is a book about style, not about fashion.

Importantly, the book is heavily illustrated with photography rather than line drawings, and the people featured are real people in various sizes, shapes and ethnicities, and with an age range from 20 to 75. This makes the information (mainly caption-based) far easier to assimilate. This is also the only book I know of that deals with men's clothing as well as women's, so you might like to leave your copy lying around for your other half if you want to get him out of those ghastly patterned sweaters from the 80s and clothing so baggy you could fit three of him in there.

Forever Cool is one of those books from which I got a great many tips and which I dip into every now and then to remind myself how not to look like an idiot. In my view, it's well worth the purchase. 

Available at: Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk