My daughter looked at my new tennis sneakers long enough to form an opinion, then delivered it: “I’d never wear those. I’m not … 50.” I told her neither was I (there may have been a shriek), put them back in the box (never so fast in my life), and made a mental note that 14-year-olds don’t run focus groups. They deliver verdicts, and they don’t take questions after.
Here is what she has not yet reconciled: she wears Asics. The very shoe that has been standard equipment for 50-year-old men doing errands since roughly 1998, now laundered through enough fashion roundups to count as cool again. She chooses wired headphones over AirPods because the cord now reads as “intentional” instead of “failed Bluetooth connection.” There are Croakies in her drawer. Calf-height white tube socks are not a bit. They are simply what she wears, several days a week.