Nancy is one of my best buds. I’ve got a world of respect for how she has come to carry herself in the world. She’s a very successful professional with a fiance as charming as she is beautiful. Nancy’s also got a multitude of friends, and a beagle named Sam, who love her deeply. But seeing her in the second of what will come to be hundreds of dapperQ street fashion videos, showed me even more clearly what I admire about her. What you can’t help but see in this video is her hard-earned authenticity, radiating in a world that conspires to hide it.
Nancy will be fifty this summer. And as she said to one of her closest friends just yesterday, “Maybe 50’s will be my decade.” While she has struggled with as much fear as the next gal afraid of getting older, this video shows what men already know. That, in fact, we grow much more beautiful as we age.
I’m not saying this from some patronizing mid-30’s vantage point, but from two years behind her. I watch her in this video and decide I will finally cut my hair short — today if possible. I will wear more fedora’s. I will find more stars like Nancy. I will share their brilliance with my fellow dapperQ’s. And a larger world I believe may finally be ready for us.
PS: Here’s what the New York Times wrote yesterday about the Barney’s Warehouse Sale going on now. Nancy likes it because there aren’t salespeople around to make her search for fashion as awkward as it is in the typical menswear department. I wonder if Barney’s management knows that no customer service is better than clerks who’ve got issues with authenticity.
What keeps jumping out at me with all this DapperQ fashion is how many of the answers lie in the past. I haven’t decided yet why that is. Like the band inside the hat- brilliant. It seems so obvious once a milliner suggests it.
Oh, and women in their 40s and 50s? Hot.