Are you aging right?

I have loved seeing the proliferation of midlife women in fashion imagery and runways over the past couple of years.

While major luxury brands like Celine, Dolce and Gabbana and Saint Laurent made massive waves in 2015 by casting iconic older women in their 70s and 80s like Joan Didion, Joni Mitchell and Sophia Loren, midlife women have been noticeably absent.

It felt like the industry just didn’t know what to do with us. 

It was cool to be young, it was cool to be old, but the in between ages of midlife seemed to vanish into the abyss. Until now.

It's no secret that the fashion and beauty industry is obsessed with youth. It has been selling us its equation of youth equals beauty for decades. This trick worked like a dream to drive profits. Until it didn’t. 

In 2024, luxury fashion lost tens of millions of young customers who could no longer afford to buy into the dream. When the smoke cleared, they saw that it was the older, recession-resistant customers who remained. They weren’t just staying, they were spending more than ever. 

The fashion industry had been relying solely on the idea that older women would continue to aspire to their youth-centric vision, despite the fact that their needs, lifestyle and bodies are very different to the young models representing the brands. 

But the landscape was changing.

Midlife women were increasingly showing up on social media disrupting the deeply rooted idea that fashion and beauty were only for the young. They were letting their hair go grey, actively resisting the cultural narrative of invisibility by expressing style on their own terms, they were talking about peri/menopause and stepping into midlife with a sense of power not fading.

This was a cultural awakening.

The beauty and fashion industry couldn’t ignore the cultural and economic reality. Midlife women were no longer buying their youth-centric ideal. If they wanted their money, which they did, they would have to change tack. 

Suddenly midlife women were on the runways.

I have loved seeing it. I love seeing beautifully dressed, edgy midlife women rocking grey hair and looking powerful. But lately something has been feeling off. I have been feeling the same familiar feeling I felt when I was younger - these women are aging so much better than me.

I look at Gillian Anderson, Halle Berry and Naomi Watts and I think, is that how I'm supposed to look? Is this the version of aging that is acceptable? Soft lines, subtle grey, slender frame, flat stomach and thin, toned arms. 

Fashion hasn’t changed, it’s just moved the goalposts. Subtle, delicate, quiet aging is the new beauty standard.

One of the most powerful things about midlife is that you start to see things clearly. You develop an exceptional bullshit filter. I can now see how much of my life was infiltrated by beauty standards. I know I’m not alone. It's horrifying to look back and realise how young and beautiful we all were, and how terrible we were made to feel about ourselves. 

The fashion and beauty industry is packaging up the midlife ideal and selling it to us. But we don’t have to buy what they are selling. We can exit the system.

This week’s Embodied Style Practice

This week I want you to notice any old familiar feelings of comparison creeping in. Thoughts like does she look better/younger/slimmer than me? Is she aging better than me? Do I look older than I am? Is my body ok? These thoughts belong to The Approval System – a system that is not designed to serve you.

Don’t judge yourself for having these thoughts, its a lifetime of conditioning at play, not a personal failing. Just notice them gently. Take a couple of slow, deep breaths, let your body relax as you exhale, let the pressure go. Remind yourself that these are old thought patterns, not facts.

Midlife women started expressing themselves on their own terms because they are looking for something different. Because they are different. 

The fashion and beauty industry is using its age-old tricks to lure us back into its system of approval. You don’t have to age perfectly, quietly, softly or any other way. 

Do it loudly, messily, crazily, boldly if you want to. Do it your way.

Enjoy your body, your beauty and yourself now, exactly as you are, so you can look back and say, God I was fabulous, and I’m so grateful I knew it.

Julie x