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My house smells like the fragrance aisle at a department store. My twin sons are 19, and somewhere between waking up and walking out the door, they each empty half a bottle of cologne. The cloud starts in their bathrooms, rolls down the hall and finds me downstairs.
My father, who is almost 80, has a different problem. He owns a belt, he wears the belt, yet his pants still end up halfway down his backside. I let him off the hook because I will be there one day myself, hitching up pants I am sure are sitting exactly where they should be.
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I am stuck in the generation between them, and my sons make sure I feel it. When I bring them a T-shirt home from my travels, the verdict never changes. “That’s such a dad shirt. Kids don’t wear those.” Then a short seminar on why I have no style and should never buy them clothes.
Nobody escapes the ick. The judgment is rarely about the clothes, according to Lillian Rishty, a psychotherapist and founder of NYC Therapy Group, who also has a degree in fashion design. “What we often label as ‘bad style’ is really ‘style that doesn’t signal membership in my group,’” she said. “When a younger generation adopts a different aesthetic, it can feel unfamiliar or even threatening because it challenges the norms that an older generation has internalized as ‘correct.’”
“Growing up, my mother ironed everything, including tea towels,” said Pedro Okoro. “If your shirt wasn’t crisp enough to hold its own shape, you weren’t leaving the house.” Okoro, 59, grew up in Nigeria and moved to the U.K. in 1996. The Gen Z habit of trousers “hanging so low they appear to be in active negotiation with gravity,” as he puts it, strikes him as an insult. “In Nigerian culture, presentation is a sign of respect for yourself and for others,” he said.
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So when a friend’s Gen Z nephew arrived at a family gathering looking, in Okoro’s words, “like he’d been dragged through Lagos traffic,” he asked if the young man was OK. “Uncle Pedro, this is the vibe,” came the reply. The nephew looked at Okoro’s pressed Ankara print shirt and gave him the exact line my sons use on me. “That’s such a boomer shirt.”
Marcia Sherrill, 66, has spent years rejecting what she calls “dress your age” culture. At a party in New Orleans, she kept her outfit hidden under a full-length metallic coat. Underneath were sequin hot pants, lace socks and 6-inch Gucci stilettos. Her daughter saw it and was horrified. “What in the hell are you wearing? You are elderly,” she hissed.
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Sherrill looked at her daughter’s “dreary black cargo pants and black T-shirt costume and worn Birkenstocks” and shot back. “At least I am not dressed like the Grim Reaper. Why don’t you live a little?” Her daughter kept her distance for the rest of the night. Sherrill spent it collecting, in her words, “compliment after compliment.”
Patricia Valencia, a Gen X therapist from New York, had the style conversation with her 16-year-old daughter again recently. “I absolutely hate the way my daughter dresses,” she said. “Gen Z is desperately trying to bring back the ’90s California skater boy look, and it needs to stay buried.” Her own generation, she insists, has range. “One day we are Miranda Priestly; the next day, we are that Amy Poehler award show clip when she’s in a gray hoodie, chomping gum, slumped low, and wearing shades indoors while chucking deuces.”
Mark Friend, 52, has shared an office with every working generation for nearly 30 years. A few years back, a young colleague’s jeans were so wide at the knee that they swished. A boomer director looked down at them, back up, then down again, and said nothing. Then it was Friend’s turn. He wore a dark green waxed jacket to work, and a 26-year-old looked at it and announced, “That jacket is so ’94.” He nodded. “Exactly. That’s the point.” He still wears the jacket.
Not every ick ends in defiance. Some end in defeat. Millennials spent years perfecting the no-show sock, and Calle Foster, 38, was not about to surrender it. Then Gen Z brought back the tube sock, pulled to midcalf. Foster watched it happen and felt she was witnessing Gen Z “undo all of the fashion progress I thought we were making,” she said. She held out until a StairMaster session left her sock bunched under her heel while every Gen Z sock in the gym stayed put. She gave in. “I now own a 20-pack of Hanes all-white tube socks,” she said. “They cushion well, they don’t slip, and they survive a Chicago winter in boots.”
In Brad Jackson’s cigar shop, the worst offender is the older man who, as the 44-year-old owner puts it, “walks into a room and you smell him before you see him.” One customer arrived in so much cologne it was, in Jackson’s words, “like there was a weather system coming into the store,” and the rest of the room drifted to the back. It is the same cloud that rolls out of my sons’ bathrooms every evening. Jackson takes his share of hits too. His niece and nephew told him a fitted hat gave “old man tries to be young” vibes. He wore it out anyway, and a stranger complimented it an hour later.
None of these style moves are new. The ’90s skater look Valencia wants buried and the tube socks Foster lost to have both come around before, which is what interests Soneca Guadara, a celebrity stylist and image consultant. “Every generation thinks they’re reinventing fashion, but they’re often rediscovering it,” she said. She points to Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the ’90s standard for understated elegance that millennials and Gen Xers once dismissed as boring, and that Gen Zers now copy. “Her clothes didn’t change,” she said. “The cultural significance did.”
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Friend has a theory that covers all of it. The cringe, he said, has nothing to do with clothes. “Both generations can be right and wrong. They are simply from two different points on the same timeline,” he noted. Then he offered the one rule everyone could agree on: “If people can smell you before you open the door, you have taken it too far.”
My father will keep losing to his belt. I will keep buying my kids T-shirts that go straight to the back of their closet. My sons will keep emptying bottles of cologne I can smell from the other side of the house. And we will all think our generation has the most style.
