How to be old: Lessons from a 70-year-old former NYC influencer

You can change your life in any decade.

Just ask Lyn Slater, 70.

A decade ago, the former professor of social work started chronicling her fashion choices on a blog called “Accidental Icon.” She soon amassed over a million followers from her blog and her Instagram account. She landed an agent and modeling deals with global brands, including Valentino.

But around 2019, Slater decided she didn’t want the life she had.

“What began as a way to express myself artistically devolved into one that was more about consumption than creativity,” she wrote last month on her blog. “A life I did not intend, and that made me unhappy.”

Slater's new memoir, “How to be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly from the Accidental Icon,” which hits shelves this month, focuses on her journey from professor to model to writer. The book also touches on her style evolution, what it's like to sit in the front row at a fashion show, and what it means to get older.

"There is one aspect of getting older that is under our control, how we choose to think about our age," she writes in the book.

Slater talked to WNYC’s Tiffany Hanssen on a recent episode of “All Of It.” An edited version of their conversation is below.

Tiffany Hanssen: First, I want to start with a definition. How do you define "old"? We hear a lot of people say age is just a number. What does old equal?

Lyn Slater: I am a real fan of good old dictionary definitions. If you look up the word “old,” it says very neutrally, “having lived a long time.” For me, that is a privilege, and that's how I like to think of the word old.

When did you cross that threshold?

I actually never thought of myself as being old until I became the Accidental Icon, and the media and society started telling me I was.

How did being labeled old make you feel about yourself?

I'm a real rebellious person, and so I did not accept that identity. A lot of people are focusing on the early part of the book, when I was the Accidental Icon. For me, the real story is when I decided to stop being her.

A big part of that was how I was being described in the media in a way that felt like a stereotype and was very ageist. That led me to say, “I'm stepping off and I am going to write my own book about what it means to be old and reclaim my narrative about what that actually means.”

You mentioned the stereotypes that fly around — not just on the internet, but pretty much everywhere — about what it means to be old. Talk to us a little bit about those.

When I first started in the early 2010s, I think my being shown as an older woman in the world of fashion was transgressive. I think, over time, like anything else, society doubles back and says, "OK, we're going to put you back in the box that you belong in."

A few years ago, there started to be a lot of news stories about what they called Instagrammers, “senior influencers,” and putting anyone who was older with gray hair, who was expressing themselves on social media, into those categories.

I think that in the early days, we had to be very, very positive about what it meant to be old, because there were so many negative stories. I think we've gone too far, and like many other things in our culture right now, we have these two representations of age that are very polarizing.

What are the main misconceptions that you take issue with?

I think on one hand you have the “decline narrative,” where we're going to be disabled and depressed and have dementia and be a burden on our family and very dependent and ruining everything for the generations behind us.

Now you have this other person who's being represented — who is ageless, highly resourced, very fit, very hot, running marathons at 90, totally independent.

I think the vast majority of older people are in the middle. We are what I call, and a friend of mine, Elizabeth White, calls, the hidden middle.

I'm wondering if you see a difference between the way older men and women are treated, not only on social media but in society at large. For example, George Clooney has had salt-and-pepper hair for quite a long time now. Nobody really says anything about it. He looks distinguished. And yet we had entire conversations on social media when Andie MacDowell decided to let her hair go gray. There was a major difference in the way those two celebrities were treated. I'm curious about your thoughts on that.

Aging in many aspects is a bit harder for women. That's not to minimize the experience of men, but I think, for a man, it does get romanticized. As you said, he's so distinguished. For women it's, “she's no longer young, she's not up to the standards of youth and beauty.” And there's a lot of focus on our appearance as opposed to our achievements and accomplishments.

Is it harder because it truly is harder, or because society makes it harder?

I think it truly is harder because all of the things that affect younger women — like the wage gap, caregiving issues — also impact older women. For example, I saw this recent post where it shows how motherhood impacts the wages in a very declining way for younger women.

There's also evidence that because grandmothers are assuming a lot of care for their grandchildren, some of them are losing wages because they are staying home to support their children and their caregiving. Women have this accrued challenge that continues to impact them in their older life.

We often hear older women say, "I feel invisible now."

I have a chapter about that in my book. At two different times during the decade that I wrote, I asked the question of my followers, "What would you like me to write about?"

In the early days, it was pretty unanimous: How do you not become invisible? In the later part of the decade, a lot of women were talking about some of the pleasures of invisibility and not being the object of the male gaze and being more in control of when they were being seen and by whom. They were asking the question, "who do I really want to be visible to and why?"

I think when you're focusing on appearance and youth and beauty, it becomes a very anxiety-producing question. I think if you ask yourself the question, "who really do I want to be visible to and why?" you begin to think about the places and the people — as the caller just revealed — where you are seen and where you are visible in a way that is life-giving and not creating anxiety about how you have to look a certain way.

Lyn, part of your journey as the Accidental Icon was about fashion, so I don't want to leave this conversation without talking to you a little bit about style and fashion. First, how do you view style versus fashion?

I always try to make it clear that I was never about fashion, I was really about using clothes and garments to express your identity and experiment with identity.

For me, style is an intensely personal thing that comes from inside of us. I think when you try to get your style from outside of you that you're always comparing and falling short. For me, it's like, "how can I use clothing to express who I am today or who I might want to play around with being today?"

It's much more like a creative material that we have access to. When you use clothing that way, it becomes part of you. One of my sayings is: "The best outfit is the one that you don't even realize you're wearing."

Let’s talk about somebody like Iris Apfel, who we just lost, who was over 100. She certainly didn't dress like my grandmother. She embraced her own personal style and was loved for it. What was unique about her?

She was in a creative business and she was a creative person. She was very much of the same sensibility as I am, that style is a very personal thing and it represents you and should come from within you. She surrounded herself in her work with beautiful textiles and traveled the world, and you can see that reflected in the way she chose to dress.

Part of what you talk about in your book is learning from your mistakes. What have you learned about learning from your mistakes?

I think if you look at life and the things that come before you in an experimental way, you're always going to be making mistakes. It's part of the process. If you're comfortable with them, it really is a message to you that you might have to pivot or this road is not working.

I was actually listening to a great podcast the other day on the London Review of Books, and an author had written a book called "Giving Up." It's along the line of being fine with making mistakes, because he was saying we have such a meaning attached to the words “giving up" or “I'm giving up.”

He said something very profound: that the giving up, very often, is going to result in the success that you really wanted to have. I see mistakes in that same kind of vein.