Going Retro

Looking at what the designers are strutting as the new trends, there is no mistaking the retro look. My mother used to say that there’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to fashion, just variations. She was right. This year’s crop of the latest designs seems to have found new ways of adapting styles popular decades ago. Perhaps there is a certain comfort in nostalgia and it is affecting more than fashion at the moment.

Retro is also a television trend this season as old popular shows are being retooled as it were. I suppose networks are trying to interest a new generation in the successes of yore. Originally some of these shows were excellent, but like the rest of life, not all of them.

 I suppose that point of view is the result of my having lived some less-than-pleasant work experiences over the years. How can I forget a remark made by my male boss during a meeting where I was the only non-male. I overheard him ask a colleague: Do we really need a woman here? And so it went.  Nostalgia unearths scars.

That was almost three decades ago, yet it still stings. To him, women had no business in a man’s world. Unfortunately, some older men still subscribe to this way of thinking and those who are single look for women who will essentially wash their clothes and make their meals. Of course, a case could be made that it was their mother’s fault, but I digress.

Thankfully, things have certainly changed for the better. Today, men of my children’s generation have evolved and do not discriminate against women in the workplace or anywhere else. They treat them as equals, as partners, no matter what the context, and they share equally in the running of the household and the raising of children. Most of them, anyway.

That can only mean the world is on the right path.