What do you do when your clothes no longer serve you?
I asked Lyn Slater — a former fashion influencer and the author of “How to Be Old” — about how to age, dress, and reinvent yourself without fear.
One day in 2019, Lyn Slater looked at the racks and racks of beautiful clothes in her New York City apartment — and despaired.
Slater was 66, a former social worker turned social media star. She had begun documenting her style on the blog Accidental Icon at age 61. Her sleek gray bob, omnipresent shades and slouchy, twisted Yohji Yamamoto suits gave her a funky hauteur — and hordes of admirers. Her Instagram (@iconaccidental) boasts some 770,000 followers. Designers flew her to Paris and London to attend their runway shows and fragrance launches. Brands showered her with gifts: purses, jackets and so many dresses in every color of the rainbow. She starred in campaigns for Valentino and Kate Spade.
Yet, at that moment, Slater had an overwhelming desire to go to her sewing kit, take out her seam ripper and “take all those garments apart, piece by piece.”
“I was lost,” Slater, now 70, said.
It’s a feeling that many women have experienced: the anxiety that comes with the realization that your clothes no longer serve you — or the person you’ve become.
Today, Slater calls herself a “reformed influencer.” She has culled her wardrobe, moved from Manhattan to an old house upstate — in Peekskill, N.Y. — and traded her designer duds for vintage Gap overalls and silk pajama tops. She has not posted #sponcon in two years. She spends her days gardening, chasing her two young grandchildren and writing.
Her first book, “How to Be Old,” explores this reinvention, as well as aging, creativity, fashion and identity. It’s part memoir, part guide to “living boldly” — and finding a sartorial style that will allow you to do so.
Slater wants readers to know that this is an exciting process, not a mournful one. “I have all the ages I’ve ever been to draw upon [in] thinking about what I might want to wear or even what I might want to do now at this age,” she said. “That’s how I come to the conclusion that being older is an additive process, not a subtractive process the way that many people view it. It’s not about loss. It is a privilege.”
You can read the rest of my story “Your Clothes No Longer Serve You — Now What?” in The Washington Post. (Here’s a gift link!) The story focuses on what to wear for your next act in life. But I wanted to share some more of our wide-ranging discussion that didn’t make the article here. Below, we talk about what beauty companies don’t want to tell you about aging, why Lyn has embraced overalls at age 70, and the insidiousness of “The Golden Bachelor.” Snippets have been edited and condensed for length and clarity. (Oh, and check out Lyn’s Substack, also called How to Be Old — it’s great!)
Wearable Art: In “How to Be Old,” you write about how at first you resisted being labeled as “old” or “aging.” How did you come to embrace that as part of your identity?
Lyn Slater: For me, my blog was for all women who love to think and talk about fashion. But two things began to happen. One is that the media made my story about me being old. It was kind of patronizing, because it was: Oh, look at this 61 year old. She's really cool and likes fashion. What a big surprise. Or: Oh, look at this 61 year old. She's really great at technology and social media. Oh, what a surprise.
And second: I was put forward as this very idealized image of successful aging, without being clear about all my privileges. I'm white; I'm thin; I'm educated. So, they were using me to tell a story about age that was not inclusive. I started to be confronted by a number of women saying, You know what? Age is not an illusion. Age has a lot of real barriers in real life and challenges. I began to be very uncomfortable with being used in that way to promote that [false idea of successful aging]].
There are these two polar extremes [of how the media presents aging]. One is that we're all disabled and demented and we're ruining all the generations behind us. But then there's the other one that is now much more predominant: the older person who is ageless, running marathons, highly resourced, 100% healthy, can do whatever they want, needs nothing.
Did you see that TV show “The Golden Bachelor?”
Wearable Art: Oh gosh, no.
Lyn: It's being touted as being such a liberating thing for older people. But the truth of it is, if you look and see who all the women are, they are all very fit. Most of them are thin. And I can tell you that they're probably spending at least four to five hours a day working on their appearance. Because at that age your metabolism is in the mud!
So in that first episode, you have all these babes, and out of the limousine comes a woman. She has frizzy gray hair, a house dress, and a walker. And she's walking towards the bachelor, and he very disingenuously says, "Do you need some help?" And she dramatically takes off what is a wig, takes off the house dress, throws away the walker — she's got a strapless [top], buff body, she does not have gray hair. And she says “Do I look like I need help?” And there you have it right there.
The danger is that if policy makers and innovators and designers [see this] and think that older people don't need anything, and that being old is [a choice], that means they will not get what they need. You will not get what you need as a younger person when you are older. And the burden will continue to be on you as an individual to buy things to make you young forever.
Wearable Art: God, that's really bleak. But it’s true. There is something dangerous about telling women, Oh, J. Lo looks like this at age 50, so you can and therefore should too.
Lyn: I follow a lot of young women writers, and they are blowing up youth and beauty standards, they are blowing up motherhood, they are blowing up this idea that everybody should have children. They are just critiquing, and making transparent, the structural issues that women have [to face]. I think that we — as older women — owe it to these younger women, who are being so brave, to tell the truth about aging.
So, are we going to show a different version of aging? Like the fact that I'm 70 years old, and I'm having my first non-academic book published? Isn't that a story about age that you as a young writer would rather know could happen to you?
Wearable Art: The way you dress now seems to be showing a different version of an aging woman, one who isn’t hiding her age or trying to look younger, but is authentic and true to your style. And now that involves overalls. Why overalls?
Lyn: Overalls are about work and getting things done. Currently, I am restoring an old house. I am taking care of my [17-month-old] grandson. I'm writing. I’m out doing things in my community — I now write a column for our local paper. Overalls feel like, OK, I’m getting work done here.
Whenever I wear them around now, there will be a young person, at the coffee house or wherever, and they're like, “You look so cool.” It's not like, look at that stupid old woman wearing overalls. When your clothes fit with your personality and your personhood and your goals and who you are in the moment, then you don't look foolish — everybody thinks you look great.
Wearable Art: Your grandmother and mother had very different approaches to dress, especially as they aged. Your grandmother saw getting fully dressed as a way of keeping her dignity; she wore a girdle and slip and bracelets and makeup even if she didn’t plan on leaving the house. But your mother got rid of her clothes, particularly as her dementia progressed.
Lyn: My mother was a housewife in the ‘50s. I think if my mother had been born 10 years later, she would have been an arch feminist. But because of the time and the place that she was born, she always had to put her desires aside for others.
So at the end of her life, she was like, before I die, I just want it to be about me. I want it to be about what I want. There are many people who have dementia that try to take off their clothes. But to me, for my mother it was such a rebellious act. It was her statement of how she wanted to be as she was dying.
I don't have a dying statement yet. But it’s interesting — a lot of younger journalists have been interviewing me [about this book], and one asked, “Do you think about dying a lot?” And to be 100% honest: given what's happening in the world right now and in our country, I really don't even think about death. I am up at night thinking about what kind of world is there going to be for my two grandchildren, who I love?
Wearable Art: Part of your work as a social worker, as a professor, as a writer, and even as an influencer is engaging with others. How are you hoping your book will engage with people?
Lyn: I’d like people to know that you can come to a point in your life where you realize that you went down a wrong road: you can take ownership of it, you can take responsibility for it. But it doesn't have to define you, and you can recreate and move ahead.
I think reinvention comes from two motivations, which are in the book. The first motivation was really, for me, to express myself creatively. It was probably a form of self-care, because the world of social work is very heavy with a lot of issues. And it came from this really delightful, creative-expression kind of place.
A second reinvention came from a darker place, a place where I was deeply unhappy, where I had sort of lost my capacity to think critically and was in this whirlpool, which I think many people find themselves in. Because with social media, it's so easy to get in that space. And so that too — that place of discomfort and pain and loss of self — can trigger reinvention.
I would also like to start some conversations about social media and the impact of it. And [promote] a more realistic view of what older life is like. There's a million conversations I would like to see happen. But I can tell you right now, one of them is not how to be an influencer.
Wearable Art: I’m not elderly, but I still really identified with much of what you write about in the book: that feeling that you are not the person you once were, and that maybe the way you are living and dressing and acting is not longer reflective of who you are or who you want to be at this point, and how that can really be destabilizing.
Lyn: You know, even when I was 40, I would have these ideas or mood boards of everything I wanted to do, but I never had a mood board about how I would like to see myself as an older woman. And the interesting thing is that if you start young and plan for it and see it as the possibility that it can be, you're much more likely in your health and in your retirement to have it. But if you're spending all of your time being afraid of it — I've seen this figure that women spend a quarter of a million dollars just on products to stem the effects of aging.
Wearable Art: And those products don't even really work!
Lyn: Good soap and water and moisturizer and sunscreen: If you do that when you're in your 20s and do it through the rest of your life, you're gonna be really good.
Wonderful... I've always wanted to be an older woman exactly like Lyn!
This is a wonderful interview! inspiring!