What My Mom Thinks About Why Nobody Dresses Like Betty White Anymore

What she said: "It's because of Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda is the reason none of us dress like that anymore."

No buildup. We were talking about the Golden Girls, specifically about how Betty White and the rest of them dressed like women twice their age on a show where they were supposed to be vital, funny, and fully alive. Polyester blouses. Shoulder situations. The general aesthetic of a woman who had already decided that part of her life was over. My mom watched this and apparently filed it away until she had a theory, which she now has.

The theory: the Jane Fonda fitness era changed the picture. Fonda released her first workout video in 1982. She was 44. She was in a leotard, on television, demonstrating that a woman in her mid-40s could be strong and present in her body in a way that had not really been modeled before at that scale. And then she had a clothing line. People bought it. People wore it. Not just to exercise, but because the clothes existed and they looked like something a person who moved might wear.

My mom delivered this with the confidence of someone presenting findings at a conference she organized. No citations. No hedging. Complete conviction that this is simply what happened.

The thing is: the timeline holds up. The Golden Girls premiered in 1985. The characters were in their 50s and 60s and dressed accordingly, because that is what women in their 50s and 60s looked like in 1985, before the Fonda thing had fully worked its way through the culture. Bea Arthur was 62. Betty White was 63. Dorothy and Rose and Blanche and Sophia were supposed to be women who had arrived somewhere, and the clothes said: arrived and stopped.

Whether Jane Fonda is personally responsible for the course correction is a matter of interpretation. Whether a woman in her 40s in a leotard on a VHS tape that sold seventeen million copies shifted something about what midlife was allowed to look like: that part seems harder to argue with.

What we take from it: she is probably right. Jane Fonda did something in 1982 that changed the frame, and we are all downstream of it. The polyester was not destiny. It was just what happened before someone showed up and showed a different option. Noted. Thanks, Jane.