Last week, in the spirit of indiscriminate friendliness – the practice of which is as close as I get to religion – I invited the internet out dancing. Predictably, among the cheerful chat my Twitter request provoked there was an obligatory dash of inexplicable, incandescent fury. I try not to mind these messages, preferring to think of them as energy flashes – the web runs on high emotions (love, hate, lust, LOLZ, mawkish sentimentality…) – and the occasional fuel spill is inevitable. Someone shouting YR DOGSHIT LAVERN in response to a benign status update on social media is the equivalent of your hairdryer blowing a fuse.
Anyway, I was told to act my age. Which struck me as interesting, because I was. I'm 36. In 2014 that makes me a retired young person or an apprentice middle-aged person, maybe both. I'm part of the hipster diaspora, created by a consumer culture that doesn't want me to stop wanting things.
The conflicted nature of my chronological position was precisely what made the idea of asking everyone within earshot to come dancing droll enough to post. Clearly I was implying that I was young enough to want to go out and tear up a dancefloor but too old to bother to do much about it with anything other than my thumb. As we all know, the moment your house becomes nicer than a nightclub is the tipping point between youth and adulthood. For me, that happened long ago.
I mention this because while nightclubs are still for the officially young, fashion is getting better at catering for those of us who are sitting astride the ungovernable pushmepullyou of middle youth, unsure which way to go. The new watchword to look out for is "contemporary". A longstanding fashion adjective in the United States, contemporary fashion is a nascent – but potentially lucrative – category in the British market. It sits above the high street price point and at the low end of the designer one. It isn't midmarket. The difference between contemporary fashion and midmarket fashion is, well… fashion.
The pursuit of new trends (tempered by a certain amount of age-appropriate sophistication) trumps the idea of "classic" style. These are clothes for those of us who no longer live in the land of the young but for whom it is still home.
Whistles is the first British brand to market itself as contemporary, and the popularity of imports such as J Crew and Michael Kors has been growing apace (while Net-a-Porter stocking Kate Moss's sellout range for Topshop suggests the boundaries between high street and high end may blur further). What it means for your wardrobe is that covetable clothes you can actually wear will be available as long as you keep shopping. That's the trick – whether it's being played on you or by you is a question of perspective.
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