Shane Watson is a columnist for the Sunday Times Style magazine and is a contributing editor to Easy Living and Grazia magazines. She is also the author of two novels, The One to Watch and Other People's Marriages.
And Other Midlife Dilemmas Solved
SHANE WATSON
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Copyright © Shane Watson 2009
All rights reserved
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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-190859-5
For Tris
Introduction
1. Am I Good For My Age?
2. What Do I Do About My Friends?
3. Am I Turning Into My Mother?
4. Is It Me, Or Is Everyone Showing Off?
5. Should They Have Written To Thank Me?
6. Can I Be Single And Happy?
7. How To Meet (The Right) Man After Forty
8. Now You Are A Stepmother
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Not long ago, I was mobbed on a visit to my local beauty parlour. ‘Oh, it's you!’ cried the receptionists, when I gave my name. ‘Tell us. How did you manage it? You are our heroine!’ The women sitting in the waiting room lifted their eyes from their glossy magazines, cocked their soon-to-be-threaded eyebrows and craned forward, eager to hear more. Passing girls in white gowns and flip flops, cotton wool woven between their toes, paused between appointments. Therapists (or is it technicians? I never know) poked their heads out of softly lit, scented rooms to see where all the clients had got to. Meanwhile, I turned to face my audience and began the story at the very beginning. (I should have been struck dumb by this frenzy of attention, but something similar had happened just the previous week at a party, and I was beginning to get used to my new role.)
In case you are not aware of the reason for my iconic status among certain members of the female population it is this: I got married, for the first time, in my mid forties. Tah dah! Not only that but I met the man I married in my mid forties. This, as you will know, is a rather different deal to, say, tying the knot in your forties having cohabited since college; or getting married for the second time – neither of which is any comfort to the terminally single. I am, in other words, the statistic-defying exception to the rule, a beacon of hope for the single woman who hadn't planned to be single indefinitely.
What's more, I have spent a significant part of a long career in journalism writing about being single. Not just the occasional gap between boyfriends, but long-term single for great tracts of my thirties and all of my early forties. I am not just a surprise late finisher; I was the spokesperson for the fulfilled single life for roughly fifteen years. The advocate of no compromise. The one who wrote an article entitled ‘Why I'm Glad I'm Not Married’, and more than I can count on the subject of the normal, and even desirable, state of living on your own. I had the mostly white apartment with the Polaroided shoeboxes, the glamorous jobs on fashion magazines and newspapers, and the ‘full and active' life including yoga classes, spa breaks and plenty of journey-of-discovery holidays. Women I barely knew would call me up when their relationships ended to ask for tips on being single – I'm not even kidding. That's how contentedly, professionally manless I was when I met The One. So, it follows that people (mainly unattached women) are curious to know: How did it happen?
Not just how did it happen, but how did it happen to me? I'm not an heiress or a beauty. I haven't had my teeth done, or any part of me tweaked (apart from my hair, which is dyed to death and going a bit the way of Donald Trump's). I'm a very average cook, borderline slovenly, terrible in the mornings. (I could go on, but this probably isn't the place.) And we all know that, while it is possible for a woman in her forties to meet a man, she is now competing with Russian models, and superfit yummy divorcees (who look thirty, even if their passports say they're forty-four), and kids, and women who have been reconditioned from their roots to their toes by genius plastic surgeons. In other words, if someone like me can do it, then anyone can.
All of which explains how I came to be sharing the significant factors that led to me finding The One, with a roomful of strangers in white towelling robes.
And that was when it hit me that the problem of how to meet a man is just one of a whole host of new dilemmas facing women in their thirties and forties. Yes, women have been this age before, but not like this – not in a climate where aging is taboo and we are expected to be bikini fit into our sixties, and have fabulous style, and smart careers and hot sex lives and emotionally fulfilling relationships with everyone we know. Those women in the beauty parlour wanted to hear my story not because they were all looking for a man, but because they were conscious that this stage of our lives has changed beyond recognition and we're all (attached or not) trying to make sense of what it is to be a grown-up female in the twenty-first century when no one knows what the rules are any more.
Everyone is looking for direction and answers to the big questions – Who are we meant to be, actually? What do we want, really? – as well as all those thorny, medium-sized ones, like: How should I look at fortysomething? Do men now expect a Brazilian? Is it possible to humanely cull your friends? Are people getting ruder or is it just me? We'd ask our mothers for the answers but they can't help because when they were this age no one would have dreamt of removing all the hair from their bodies, never mind sharing changing rooms with teenagers, or living alone in flats strewn with glittery butterflies and fairy lights. We are living in uncharted territory, in uncertain times and we have ony ourselves to turn to.
And then I thought, if anyone is going to address the modern woman's many midlife crises, it might as well be someone who has first-hand experience of most of them – and plenty of time to think about what it takes to make us happy – so here goes…
This question goes right to the heart of the modern midlifer's identity crisis – because the answer has to be, erm: that depends on where you are standing (and who's next to you). If you are at a ladies keep-fit class in Skegness, that's one thing. If you are waiting at the gates of an exclusive prep school in Chelsea, then that is another. There used to be a universal Good For Your Age Standard, back when Good For Your Age meant well preserved, considering how many years you'd been walking the planet. Now, how you rate on the GFYA scale depends on which micro planet you inhabit, and what the women in your world consider to be appropriate anti-aging maintenance. Is it regular exercise and plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, or more like regular Botox, plus the occasional bit of lipo? You might be one of the lucky few who looks naturally GFYA, but, lined up next to your smart friends with the dermatologists and personal trainers, it could be a different story.
So, take a good look around. (If you are on a bus, it doesn't count: you should be in your natural environment, among your peers – the people who dictate whether you are GFYA, or more like Every Inch Your Age.)
Plastics v NaturalsLet me tell you where I am to get you started. I am sitting in Tom's cafe, in Notting Hill Gate, where I used to live and still work. The Notting Hill, as depicted in the Richard Curtis film, was a kind of spangly village inhabited by quirky characters. Now, it's more like a first-class lounge at Geneva airport – the temporary resting place of the international financial elite, and their expensively bought wives. Here, GFYA begins and ends at thirty-six. Before thirty-six, that's what you are. After thirty-six, that's what you stay. In this environment, if you look forty-six in the conventional sense – a few grey roots, a tiny bit of a tummy, fine lines around your eyes, one or two age spots – it means you are either visiting the area to drop something off, or working for one of the thirty-six-year-olds. This is not just a high-maintenance postcode, it is one of those postcodes that makes you look like a bag lady if you don't play by their rules.
Every night I head south on the bus to Battersea, which is in an entirely different GFYA postcode. In my local cafe on Battersea Park Road, the definition of GFYA is having your own teeth and two separate eyebrows. You can roll out of bed and slop along there in your pyjamas and still get the once over from the chef just because you don't have a moustache and nicotine-stained blonde hair.
So, back to Tom's and the table of women sitting to my left. This is the conversation I overhear:
‘You need a project manager. You have to have a project manager.’
‘I know. Bloody architects. We saw you and your gorgeous trainer in the park, by the way.’
‘Isn't he fab. And he's got me on this incredible detox diet.’
‘You are looking good.’
‘Well, I found that two types of exercise just wasn't enough after the baby.’
‘I know what you mean. I might get Xavier to come to the house a couple of times a week.’
‘Or go to the club and do Power Plate. And they do great treatments there.’
‘Mmm. But don't, whatever you do, try Doctor Zebedee [name changed to avoid law suit].’
‘No, I wouldn't dream of going to anyone but my dermatologist. Although Jane's man is fantastic. He recommended the [indicates breast area]. Five pomegranate salads, please. And two fresh mint teas.’
These lunching ladies are pretty representative of affluent Notting Hill society, and they have their equivalent in every thriving city on the planet. They might look a bit undone by comparison with their New York sisters, and in Chelsea they'd have more jewellery between them but, still, these are the women who are raising the GFYA bar for each and every one of us. There are five of them, and they range from a gym bunny in Masai Barefoot Technology trainers and velour tracksuit, to a heavily made-up woman in a shearling coat and stiletto-heeled boots. The gym bunny could actually be thirty-six, possibly a lot younger; the rest of them are anywhere from mid thirties to late fifties. I would try to be more precise, but experience has taught me that it's too tough to call.
I am not one of the above types. I have not had a teeny breast boost or a bit of Botox (I once had Botox in my armpits, but that's another story). I am a member of a gym, though I hardly ever get there. I once paid for the moulds to whiten my teeth, only I couldn't get to sleep with them in, so that went out the window. I tried laser hair removal but then it turned out you can't have it if you get eczema (plus you need a six-figure salary if you want to see it through to the bitter end). I do get my hair dyed and my eyelashes tinted, I still buy clothes in Topshop and I am sometimes seduced by beauty products that promise to lift, tone and rejuvenate. I am as age conscious as the next person, in short, and I would like to stay looking as youthful as possible for as long as possible. I just don't want to undergo surgery or get my face syringed every couple of months in an effort to achieve that.
The women in Tom's would consider my attitude to be somewhere between social suicide and sluttishness. Meanwhile, there are plenty of women in my world who are even less anti-aging conscious than me – albeit not as many as there used to be. We are the Naturals (that's how we like to think of ourselves, anyway). They are the Plastics.
Aging used to be an accepted part of life – something women faced together, with a shrug and a Rich Tea biscuit. Now it is an ongoing bushtucker trial in which these two tribes are pitted against each other in a struggle to determine which will be the ultimate winner. Naturals have common sense on their side (potential health risks, the futility of trying to hold back the years). Plastics have an arsenal of lizard spleen and caviar extract and the whole nip/tuck repertoire, plus the time and the money to see us and raise us. It is war.
Are you one of them or one of us?
This is how weird things have got. Not long ago you would bump into a girlfriend who you hadn't seen for a while and you would talk about mutual friends, men, the credit crunch, giving up coffee, whatever. Now you get the preliminaries out of the way, fast, and then you are straight into the Where Do You Stand On The Big Issue conversation. It goes like this:
‘You look great!’
‘I look old!’
‘You so don't!’
‘I do! It's all starting to happen.’
‘Tell me about it. Don't be tempted, though.’
‘Have you?’
‘Botox. Once. Didn't like it.’
‘Really?’
‘Just didn't feel right. And where do you stop once you've started?’
‘I know.’
‘Everyone around us is having stuff done. And they all have that look.’
‘I know. Shiny. The light just bounces off them.’
‘They look weird, actually.’
‘I'm just not going there.’
‘No, me neither. My sister had her tits done recently.’
‘You're joking! But she's…’
‘Normal. I know. But she's got this young boyfriend. And she has had three children, so…’
‘The one thing I might be tempted to have, eventually, is an eyelid tuck.’
‘But that's a proper operation!’
‘I won't, obviously. I'm far too squeamish, apart from anything. But they say hooded eyes are the most aging thing of all…’
It is amazing how often you can have this conversation, and, as a matter of fact, you are guaranteed to have it with every significant female in your life at some point. You might not think of yourself as shallow and appearance obsessed – you may never have had a discussion about lip gloss or looking after your cashmere – but this is entirely different. The Will You Or Won't You conversation is really about revealing your colours and pledging your allegiance to one or other camp, because instinct tells us that this decision (to syringe or not to syringe) represents a fundamental parting of the ways. It is the beginning of a schism in the ranks of women – and we have to know who is on which side of the divide.
And here's the reason you need to have the conversation with everyone, and it gets repeated all over town, day after day: you just can't tell who is going to turn out to be a Plastic and who is a guaranteed Natural. There is no automatic rule that smart girls, or the women you respect, or feminists, will be Naturals. It isn't possible to say so-and-so would never go there – she's too fun/sexy/earthy/political/vegetarian. You might be able to say she would never fiddle her tax, or date a married man, or wear fur, but you can never say never when it comes to those stop-the-clock procedures.
This, in a nutshell, is why women are so mixed up about aging: the new rules have made us insecure but, far worse than that, they have alienated us from our own sex. In almost any area you care to mention you can say exactly where your girlfriends stand – on drugs, politics, thongs, waxing, the importance of sex, power showers versus baths – but aging has made us doubt each other's characters. It has fundamentally messed with our sense of sisterhood. We trust no one.
And everybody lies. The celebs who say, ‘I certainly wouldn't rule it out,’ (read, ‘I've had some and I'm having more.’). The others who admit to a bit of Botox, (read full facelift and eyelid tuck). The women you know reasonably well who nod earnestly, their brows reflecting like wet marble, as you rant about the insidious pressure on us all to be totally crease-free. Even your close girlfriends have started lying to you, in case you happen to let slip in front of their husbands that they are having fillers. There is no precedent for this wholesale deception. We used to share everything – the state of our sex lives, the name of our hairdresser, the tiny tucked-away hotel that will be ruined for sure if everyone gets to hear about it – but the possibility of sneaking ahead in the race to stay young has made us (some of us) sly and secretive. (Did I mention that men are oblivious to the curse of cosmetic procedures? However often you jab them in the ribs and alert them to another set of handlebar cheekbones, however often you roar, ‘Oh, for God's sake, will you look at that! Look at the light bouncing off her! Look at those…! Don't they make you feel physically ill?’ you will never get quite the gagging response you were hoping for. They just don't find the treachery of our sex quite as terrible as we do.)
This is why getting old feels like it's a bigger deal for us than it has been in the past. It's one of the reasons anyway. Here are some of the others:
Somewhere along the line, celebrities, models and women with senselessly rich husbands (women who get traded in if they don't stay looking the same as the day they married) got confused with regular people. Now we are all judged by the standards set by Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman (though she's starting to look weird, no?). Obviously not everyone is expected to achieve Hollywood perfection, outside LA, but we've learnt from the pros that age is very bad for business. You go to an ordinary civilian party in Shepherd's Bush and people are checking each other out like model bookers at a casting: ‘Oh! She looks old. Doesn't she look old? Oh dear, oh dear.’ What they mean is, ‘She should look thirty-six. Why doesn't she look thirty-six? She may be fifty-two, but really… what can she be thinking of?’ Looking old has become sort of grubby and negligent – like failing to brush your teeth or wash your hair. Don't you take care of yourself? Don't you change your underwear? Haven't you got any pride?
We are more scared of getting old because old people have been outlawed. They aren't welcome. Anywhere. Not in fashion stores. Not in bars or restaurants. You go to a fabulous place of any description – a gorgeous hotel, a spa, a boutique, a party – where are the regular, grey-haired old people? Nowhere to be seen. When did you last notice one of them at the next-door table, or rifling through the sale rail? (Sometimes a grey-haired, Genuinely Old But Amazingly Well-preserved Person will be given a glamour outing – like that ancient model in the Gap ad. But that's a headline-making event.)
Those who don't cheat can't avoid comparison with those who do. If you are a Natural, you are pretty confident, most of the time, that you don't want to look like a waxwork. But what you forget is that compared with the reflecting foreheads you look like the world's worst insomniac. They might look weird and inhuman but next to them you look crumpled and saggy and ill. And should you get yourself into a situation where you are outnumbered (like any situation in LA, for example) suddenly you are the odd one out – the knackered old crone who let herself go.
Plastic surgery or youth worship, or both, has actually altered the way we look at people's faces. Get Jules et Jim out on DVD and you'll see what I mean. Jeanne Moreau, famous French beauty, thirty-four when she made the film, looks… quite old. She does. Gwyneth Paltrow could have played her teenage daughter.
Finally, you no longer get that second chance to turn heads. The thing about being good for your age, in the old, unassisted sense, is that it was something everyone could achieve, regardless of how good-looking they were. You might be a fairly ordinary twentysomething and then, in your forties, come up on the inside (What glossy hair! What fabulous skin! What a neat little figure!) and pip the hot girls at the post. I was looking forward to lining up at the starting gate with the lookers and seeing if I couldn't edge up the ranks a bit myself. Why not? And no woman has ever begrudged one of her kind for being naturally well preserved: on the contrary, youthful beauty attracts envy, but those who age well win their right to be admired, fair and square. Or they did. The Botox culture – apart from creating a whole new set of criteria for looking good, based largely on ice-rink-smooth complexions – has usurped the naturally well preserved and denied them their moment.
One thing's for sure, aging isn't what it used to be.
The PlasticsWho are they?
There are degrees of Plastics ranging from the serious pros (Cher) to your friend who has had Botox, but honestly only in her forehead, and she's never going to do anything else. Some Plastics you readily forgive, and even enjoy – like Lulu – others make you want to scream, like Faye Dunaway (surely the naturally preserved sixtysomething Faye had to have been better than this?). It's given the Academy Awards a new lease of life, though. You used to sit there in front of the TV checking out the dresses and the on-loan Bulgari – now you're spotting the latest casualties: ‘Oh… she's gone. She's gone. Is that… God, it is… she's gone. That's if you're a Natural, of course. If you're a Plastic, you're taking notes.
The Procedure Princess
Depending on when she started, the PP is either a dead ringer for Pete Best – half boiled egg, half cat – or she's like Demi Moore, an airbrushed, rejigged, streamlined and reconditioned version of her former self. You can't deny that the new army of procedure princesses coming off the conveyor belt look good, but you can't help straining to see the joins.
The Pincushion
So far, she is steering clear of actual surgery in favour of anything and everything that doesn't require an overnight stay. The pincushion looks decidedly spongey and puffy on certain days of the month, shiny and taut the rest, but, like all Plastics, she appears to be unaware of these drawbacks.
The Plastic Natural
Often she's married to someone older, who gets off on her barefoot and braless aesthetic, and the deal is that she is the breath of fresh air in their otherwise high-maintenance existence. Naturally, the PN cannot rely on nature alone to give her that youthful, fresh-faced edge, so she has a secret maintenance regime that involves plenty of Botox, teeth whitening and, lately, some smart lipo. She's as high maintenance as the rest, she just deliberately messes up her hair after her £60 blow-dry.
Philosophy
Anything is preferable to facing the fear. The Plastic wants to be employable in a glamorous job. She wants to prevent her husband leaving her for a woman who looks like she looked the day they met. (It's like that in Plastic world. And he's having a hair weave, possibly a moob job.) Your lesser Plastic has some underlying reservations, which are all health related. Your committed Plastic would eat the still-beating heart of a kangaroo if it was guaranteed to give her a smooth, wrinkle-free throat. But all Plastics think of their procedures as harmless little tricks, no different to a great bra or a magic under-eye concealer.
Years ago, I interviewed several of Harley Street's finest plastic practitioners, back when Botox was something that we still thought was for freaks and women with clinically low self-esteem. Apart from the fact that they almost winced (one did actually wince) when I said I wasn't personally interested, it was revealing because it taught me Plastics see the world differently. One of the surgeons, eager to demonstrate how much better a woman could look for a faceful of Botox and fillers, asked his favourite Pincushion to step by for my approval (she was somewhere in the building having something done – no surprise there). This woman looked younger than her forty-seven years, but she also looked distinctly uncomfortable in her skin. Like it was someone else's. I wanted to say, ‘Yes, no lines. But she has a prosthetic head,’ only what would have been the point? She was blissfully happy, proud to be paraded by her maker. He was incredibly smug and genuinely impressed with his handiwork. In Plastic Land beauty looks different.
Downsides
Looking very weird. Or totally unrecognizable. Apparently Plastics do not mind this, but their children and pets are suffering the effects. There is now a book, written by an American plastic surgeon (My Beautiful Mommy) to help children deal with the trauma of waking up to find their mother has traded bodies with someone else. For the dog who thinks a stranger is in the house, nothing as yet.
How do they do it?
How much time have you got? There are so many anti-aging procedures you could give up the day job and still have trouble fitting them all in. But even a half-hearted Plastic has weekly commitments that will include Boxtox injections, Restylane or hyaluronic acid injections, face peels, carboxytherapy (for stretch marks and bums), laser hair removal, maybe some smart lipo for saddlebags. And you know what they say: the more you top up one area, the more the others look like they're in need of work.
The NaturalsWho are they?
Naturals are realists, purists, sceptics, refuseniks, women who don't think about their looks much and women (moi included) who think there has to be more to life than obsessing about your marionette lines (and who, more to the point, recognize that if we have to add line-plumping to the list of things we need to do in order to compete, we might well combust). Naturals are also quite confused. Sometimes we assume the moral high ground, other times we feel like those women who are still using sanitary towels seventy years after the invention of tampons.
Anti-maintenance Woman
Hard line AMs shave rather than wax, don't bother with pedicures or manicures and their only anti-aging strategy is a hair dye once in a while. A lot of people assume that fresh-faced types with unbrushed hair are AMs, but that's like assuming that because Kate Moss scruffs around in Minnetonkas she's low maintenance. It's hard work looking naturally undone past the age of thirty, and Anti-maintenance Woman tends to look more frazzled than fetching (though ten years ago she'd have looked absolutely normal). AM Woman gets away with it if she is a) skinny, b) glamorous, in terms of her job or connections, or c) attractive. As a matter of fact, she can end up getting more attention than her Plastic peers – but not often.
Old-fashioned Girl
She looks after herself, eats well, loves a beauty treatment, can't resist an anti-aging product, lives to get her hair done, but she's not going to fall for the serum that restricts body-hair growth or the eyelash-elongating formula. Also she's a firm believer in dressing to disguise the parts of your figure that you don't want to advertise, rather than paying someone to vacuum them away. You wouldn't have any trouble guessing her age, but you might think she was doing okay.
Everything-but-the-syringe Girl
That's me! Well, not quite everything (hate facials, hate eyebrow threading and I have definitely grown out of charlatans with inflatable pressure boots and magnetized water), but that leaves plenty of options to play with. I've been hosed down and wrapped in seaweed and buried in clay and colonically irrigated and Hollywood waxed and walked on by Thai ladies and presented with a special washcloth by Eve Lom. For the money I've spent over the years I could have bought a small château in the Loire, but that's fine by me. Part of being a Natural is accepting that this stuff can make your day; it just doesn't stop you getting older.
Philosophy
Sometimes being a Natural seems like common sense (who knows what the long-term effects of Botox will be?). Sometimes it feels like a point of principle (what does it say if we're too scared to let anyone see what we actually look like?). Other times it just seems that the alternative is selling out, and starting to think like the sort of woman who would sleep with anything to get her hands on a Mercedes SLR. But, mainly, to be a Natural you just have to feel in your gut that you would rather look old than scary, and believe that you have every chance of looking better than your Plastic contemporaries down the line. (Something we forget about the Plastic look is that in a way it is aging, because having it at all suggests you have crossed a threshold. It's like joining an exclusive club that, nonetheless, is a club for people who can no longer cut it.)
Still, no one's saying the lot of a Natural is easy. Your faith is tested roughly once a day. It is rocked every time you see Sharon Osbourne on the TV (Britain's most successful midlife makeover… what a top-quality facelift that is!). Sometimes Naturals can feel smug, of course – especially in the presence of someone whose Restylane lips have gone pufferfish on them – but other times we're not so sure. In a showdown with a woman who is considering defecting to the Plastics, sooner or later she will say: ‘Tell me. What exactly is the difference between injecting your smile lines and dyeing your hair, or whitening your teeth?’ And sooner or later you will think, I give in. What is the difference? Why am I even taking this stand?
It's not unlike what happens to Donald Sutherland and company in the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. The real people start out determined not to fall asleep and get turned into zombies, but then they get so worn down and bored of fighting they simply haven't got the energy to resist any more.
Downsides
You are aging at a normal rate in a culture where that is becoming as eccentric as living without electricity. The Plastics used to be the big joke, but now mocking them is like laughing at people using BlackBerries: they are just too commonplace, and the work has got too good. Also, it's all very well taking a position against cosmetic procedures if you look like Isabella Rossellini. But if you look like you, can you really afford to take a stand?
How do they do it?
The sensible Natural, who has no agenda and an average amount of vanity, says no to the white coats, scalpels and syringes, and really pulls out the stops in every other department. But the secret of being a successful Natural is knowing what not to do.
Looking GFYA: Know Your StyleWe eat better, exercise harder and are more health conscious than any previous generation, with the result that there are now plenty of thirty- and fortysomething women who can dress like Kate Moss if they want to. Not only that, but we all aspire to a youthful aesthetic. It is cool for a grown woman to wear the clothes, second time round, that she was wearing when she was eighteen (and most of us would give that woman more brownie points than the one in the ‘age-appropriate' skirt suit and sensible heels). This is all good news: it means more fun for us, more freedom, more choice. But if you want to look GFYA you must first recognize that, just because you Can doesn't mean you Should. This is the most important rule of dressing your age – don't confuse a good body with a young one.
Here are some others:
Everyone has to adapt her style some day. Stevie Nicks is the only exception and no one else could get away with what she does.
If you fancy yourself wearing something, then that automatically takes seven years off your age. If you happen to actually look good in it, make that ten.
What you wear is just a part of how you come across. You could be working the groovy minidress and the five-inch heels, and look like Alexa Chung from the neck down, and then… whoops. That grim I-have-a-lot-on-my-plate expression will kill it dead as surely as if you'd hit the town in a tweed suit and orthopaedic lace-ups.
Now you need to beware of the following style traps, which can be more aging than knee socks on Sarah Jessica Parker. (We've all been victims of at least one of them.)
Too Body Conscious
If you happen to have a good figure, it is tempting to go down the ‘check out my bmi' path. We're talking low-cut Lycra tops, push-up bras, super-tight jeans or short jean skirts, stretch jersey dresses and high-heeled boots with everything. No one is left in any doubt as to this woman's impressively toned assets, but this look is aging because it only appeals to fortysomethings with expensive gym memberships. (And, obviously, too much flesh on display is never a good idea. Wear a strapless top, by all means, but not with a miniskirt.)
Avoid: Tight on top and bottom. Too much cleavage (a little goes a long way).*
Instead: Show off one aspect of your fabulous bod. It's okay, we can still see you're a size ten.
Too Youth
It's true that the whole concept of clothes for different generations has been blown away – kids wear pearls and women wear Ugg boots – but it's mostly one-way traffic, and you have got to feel for the younger generation. Every day they share changing rooms on the high street with women old enough to be their mothers (I have actually tussled over a jacket in Topshop with a fellow shopper who turned out to be a child in school uniform). But here's something to remember: not all of these clothes are meant for us. Great if you look good in the loons and the wedges and the military jacket but it is not – as some of us like to think – okay to duplicate everything your niece is wearing, right down to the shell ankle bracelet and the Stranglers' T-shirt. Apart from anything, it makes you look like you are having an identity crisis.
Avoid: The rule used to be don't go there if you were wearing it first time round. Now it's more like don't go there if you know your eighteen-year-old god-daughter would kill for it especially the season's throwaway must-have (like a skull scarf) and anything that you might wear to a festival or prom. Also steer clear of logos (what are you even doing in Abercrombie & Fitch?).
Instead: Check if the clothes you fancy could conceivably be prefixed with the word chic, so: jackets, sunglasses, boots, bags, a sheath dress, a military coat. But not: the smock dress, harem pants, playsuit, strapless sundress, flying suit, leggings, etc.
I think I can still do Scruffy Rock Chick
I am standing in Rough Trade, a record shop on Portobello Road, and there is a girl wearing a man's cardigan over a T-shirt, a denim miniskirt and biker boots. She is not wearing make-up, or a bra, she has long, ropey hair and bare legs and she looks exactly like a young Jane Birkin – which is, as far as I am concerned, about as good as it gets. This look is also deceptively easy: the skirt is not too short, there's not a lot of flesh on show. Then I notice two things. One, her legs, which are demerara golden and Barbie-doll smooth. Two, another woman, maybe ten years older, who is also doing a Birkin – unbrushed hair, boyfriend's shirt – and managing to look like she just got out of bed, possibly after a bout of flu. This look is actually harder to pull off than a pvc catsuit, because it relies on youthful skin and a certain kind of dreamy, unselfconscious attitude. A good figure and a tan are not enough to get you into the club. For this look you actually do have to be young.
Avoid: Bare legs and miniskirts, unless you have one in a million legs. Boyfriend's cast offs (now strictly for the bedroom).
Instead: Get some opaque tights. Better still, don't go there.
I'm doing Old-school Glamour
Well, you'd better be careful. The trouble with Glamour with a capital G – unreconstructed cocktail dresses, jewel colours, expensive jewellery and fur wraps, not to mention the ready-for-my-close-up panstick make-up – is you automatically look like a woman who predates the sixties fashion revolution. Think Nancy Dell'Olio. No one knows how old she is – fiftysomething? – but she's looked it for as long as anyone can remember.
Avoid: All those clothes marked ‘evening wear' that hang in the no-go areas of department stores. High-impact block colours, like turquoise and scarlet and candyfloss pink. Ginger with a sparkle make-up. Fur, and done, teased hair (see hair).
Instead: Wear a vamp dress without the jewels.
Note: Quantities of precious rings, trophy watches, more rings, charm bracelets, are as much of an age giveaway as a crêpey cleavage. Everyone knows that women who feel their sexual power slipping away are unwisely attracted to plunging necklines and serious jewellery, especially hand booty. You don't want to be one of them. Red nail varnish is another giveaway.
I'm a Chic Lady
As in neat and formal in a navy-blue shift dress and a princess coat with a snappy little bag to match. This look wasn't aging when Jackie O was laying down the formula, but please, the woman was unique and it was more than forty years ago. Can we get over it? Carla Bruni – who has a head start over most mortals – has started to look every inch her age since she married her pocket-sized president and ditched the jeans and ponchos for cable-knit cashmere, loafers, chinos and grey dress-and-coat ensembles. (Yes, yes, we're meant to think she's the epitome of European elegance, but who cares if she's added on a decade?) A pristine coordinated outfit is more aging than a blue rinse.
Avoid: Covering up (you need some flesh on show, whether it's your arms or your neckline). Uninterrupted grey and navy and beige. Pashminas (you can still wear them, just not proudly, in a slip knot, out to dinner). Jackets with gold buttons. Flat pumps with below-the-knee hemlines. Sunglasses on the head: it's the wooshy, to-the-manor-born thing it does to your hair; suddenly you are Princess Anne at the Burghley Horse Trials.
Instead: Break up the tailoring, go for quirky shoes and Françoise Hardy hair (Bruni's pre-Sarkozy fashion muse).
Floaty and Feminine
You think it's a sexy, bias-cut, floral tea dress that will look just like it did a decade ago. But floaty and feminine flips over into mumsy and blowsy, quite suddenly, at about the same time your lower legs start to look stiltony at the start of summer. And beware slinging a cardigan on top unless it is tiny and in a fashion colour such as watermelon.
Avoid: If you are going to wear a pretty dress, then everything else has to be the opposite of pretty. Steer clear of cashmere wraps, straw baskets, subtle gold jewellery, nude stockings and kitten-heeled sandals.
Instead: A denim biker jacket, clashing wedges and a flash of brilliant orange bra strap is more like it.
Kitten Girl
Who knows what you're thinking? I suit bows? I am adorable? The cut off for good girl cutesiness is twenty-five.
Avoid: Bows. Broderie anglaise. Cloying pastels. Gingham. Puffed sleeves. Note: Even if the sleeves look perfectly okay when you are standing in front of the changing-room mirror, you will be out in these puffed sleeves, reach for your martini glass and – whoosh! Suddenly you will feel like a maid of honour at Ivana Trump's wedding. Or worse (and I know this feeling), Grayson Perry.
Instead: Just get over it. And put away that flowergirl handbag with the appliquéd roses.
Some more things that are surprisingly aging (and they're not what you think they are)
Make-up. As with hair (which we are coming to), what is aging is overdoing it. Bizarrely, the only people who suit lashings of make-up are the very young and fresh faced. When you start to really need the cover is when you have to step back from the dark eyeshadows and strong lipsticks and resist that bronzer. Orangey foundation automatically adds years. It's like wearing your Spanx on your face.
Chiffon. The little chiffon dress will take you everywhere until one day, not that long after your fortieth birthday, you will put it on, look in the mirror and looking back will be the sort of woman who wears half slips and carries a pack of Wet Ones in her handbag. It is amazing how this dress can go from being your Holly Golightly facilitator to a total whistleblower.
Teeth. Everyone assumes that whiter teeth are the key, and it's true yellow teeth do no one any favours. But please. That wall of glaring white porcelain just screams, ‘I was born before 1966.’
Black. You can still wear black, of course. It's just that it has to be the deep, quality, light-reflecting sort – Oscar Night black, not a black T-shirt you have had in your drawer for a couple of years, or, God forbid, a cotton polo neck.
Leather. You can still wear leather – just not the hardcore Girl On A Motorcycle sort. Or the shiny, tailored Alaia sort. Or trousers (unless you're Honor Blackman). It has to be soft, and it can't be bulky or feature any hardware. I have a faded black men's Gap leather jacket and so far, so good. But that could change any day. Leather is borderline.
Cheap when it needs to be Real – as in the vinyl, high street version of the leather jacket. Poor quality will age you before it makes you look hip.
Hats. I have a fortysomething friend who looks dazzling in a woolly beanie, à la Ali MacGraw in Love Story. Even so, on the whole, the hats you used to wear – fedoras, trilbys, wide-brimmed felt hats, berets – make you look considerably older than you would bare headed. It is a sad fact that once you reach the stage of life when you can afford the giant coyote trapper's hat, that is the moment when you start to resemble the Russian oligarch's dowdy first wife (the one who's been banished to the dacha in the Crimea).
Back fat. I mean that spare bulge above the horizontal strap of your bra just before it snakes round under your armpit. This can be solved by buying a nice new bra.
Underwear. If your bra strap is liable to show, and it's last year's white, or this year's flesh, then that's telling everyone that your underparts are being protected in a functional, joyless manner, and that feeling sexy doesn't rank high on your list of priorities. It's so easy to get a bra in shocking sherbet pink or canary yellow, and then whey hey!
Practicality. Never give in to the temptations of practicality: the easy fleece, the sloppy cardi, the really useful blazer (and then you complain that you're becoming invisible?).
The one-piece swimsuit. If you've always worn them, fine. If you're a natural bikini girl, then a one piece will make you feel like you've been branded ‘It's All Over’. Stick with it. Joan Collins does.
The knee-to-shoe zone. Strange though it may sound, the knee to toe area is the number one danger zone. Your hem to heel ratio is crucial. A below-the-knee hem with flatish heels adds years (and pounds). Midcalf-length is miserable and, however chic the outfit, automatically makes you look dowdy. Maxi is a devil to pull off, but, if you're going for it, make sure you are wearing dangerously high wedges. And, if you happen to have the legs for short, resist wearing ultra high heels – that's a young girls' game.
All stockings are aging if the weather is good enough to go bare, but sheer and coloured or, God forbid, patterned are worst of all.
Shoes must have flair and on no account should be practical or safe. (That said, there is nothing more aging than the Theresa May ‘Do You Think I'm Racey?’ leopard-print shoe stuck on the bottom of a boring old suit. Jazzy shoes are the equivalent of jolly spotted wellies, and you don't want to go there.)
Veiny feet. Unfortunately there comes a time when heels make the veins in your feet bulge. The solution is to wear them for less time, or to drop an inch. But watch this one: the engorged foot is as aging as dentures.
Know How to ShopRemember, the sales assistant is not your friend
She doesn't know you, or the people you hang out with, or the places you go. She is not equipped to say, ‘Hang on, but where exactly are you planning to wear this full-length kaftan, madam? I assume you've been asked to the Missonis' holiday villa, because, otherwise, what could you possibly be thinking?’ The assistant is not aware that you already have three pairs of white jeans in your wardrobe, two of them unworn, because every time you try them on you feel like the third wife of a hedge-fund manager. She can't tell that you are allergic to wool (how could she guess – you keep trying on wool?). She doesn't know that silk makes you break out in a muck sweat, or that, flattering though the four-inch heels may look when you're standing in front of the changing-room mirror, you can't walk in anything over three. And all of this is no problem whatsoever, so long as you don't expect the sales assistant to tell you what you should be wearing.
The problem is, you lean on sales assistants more now than you ever did. There was a time when you might ask the girl serving you if she thought you could do with the smaller size. Now you say things like, ‘You don't think it's a bit too pale for me?’ or, ‘This doesn't remind you of Miss Piggy, does it?’ There are some wonderful sales assistants out there, but, on the whole, this makes no more sense than asking your boyfriend if you look okay in what you're wearing when you're already two hours late for the party. Not only that, but you are inviting the sales girl to bamboozle you with her stylist's know how: ‘…not if you dress it up with heels and maybe a sparkly shrug… not if you belt it and add a rabbit's foot on the lapel… not if you wear it with a special low-backed bra and a slip’. The assistant doesn't know that you can't belt anything, and that you are more likely to leave the dress hanging at the back of the wardrobe than get round to buying the novelty bra (why is it so depressing to shop for those things?). She assumes that you know what suits you and what doesn't, what works with your life and what doesn't, what is within your budget and what isn't, what is already in your wardrobe and what you actually need. She is pushing you a) because she is on commission and b) because it has never occurred to her that a grown woman might abdicate all responsibility for her appearance to a stranger. I repeat, she doesn't know you.
My favourite person to take shopping is Mentor Friend (of whom you will be hearing more). She once said, ‘I know what you think you look like – Jane Fonda in Klute – and you don't. Trust me.’ You just can't argue with that.
What you look good in is not the same as what you want to look good in
you look hot