Absolutely tucked

What if a t-shirt but a mullet

There are the hot moms, and I don’t mean it in the furtive search-terms acronym sense. I mean the women at the playground who don’t look like dishevelled decrepit versions of their adorable offspring. The women who are at least 5’7” with excellent posture and naturally blond hair they added some tasteful highlights to and always, always, a white t-shirt half tucked in, in the front only.

It took me a while to put together that the women with the look had this t-shirt thing in common, as in I only noticed this weekend. It’s of a piece with center-parted hair, and an overall appearance that’s not so much a maximalist Kardashianic no-stone-left-unturned but this is a woman who works out and gets cosmetic dermatology. She has washboard abs, despite kids, and uses the front-tucked look to showcase this.

It would appear that I am behind the curve on this trend, as a google of what Twitter has taught me is the “French tuck” leads to posts from not particularly avant-garde websites from like 2019. There is even a Lands End guide.

Today I almost went out in a pair of cutoff shorts purchased pre-kids and rediscovered in a heap at the top of a closet. I had noticed them up there the other day and thought, how frivolously I’ve been spending lo these years, buying shorts, when I already had shorts. Well. I could technically get into these shorts and as a strict measurements question they were not the wrong size but they were just… wrong. The inseam was insufficient for my current age? lifestyle? style-style? And why had I ever imagined cutoff shorts—thick denim, for summer—were a good idea?

So I changed into some jeans (not actually so hot out today) and tried tucking in the front of my shirt, but not the back, to see if it transformed me into one of those women. Maybe? It’s one of those things that, like the center-part (which my hair won’t do), involves spending nothing but can bring you up to date and make you look like you exist in the modern world. I know, no one wants to say they want that, no one over 12 wants to be like everyone else but I’m not sure I want to look fossilized in 2009.

I’m also not sure I have it in me to remember to do a special and tbh slightly awkward-feeling thing with my t-shirts. Uniqlo makes these all-cotton-but-for-the-waistband pleated shorts that are basically tailored-looking pyjama bottoms that allow the wearer to look preserved in the amber of 1994 but with the elastic technologies of the 2020s. But wait I think I figured it out, the front-tuck allows you to wear pants/shorts with the secret elastic at the back! Mystery solved, onto the next item.