How to Be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly from the Accidental Icon - Hardcover

Slater, Lyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593471792 ISBN 13: 9780593471791

Verlag: Plume, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

One of Elle's Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2024

A personal memoir in which Lyn Slater, known on Instagram as “Accidental Icon,” brings her characteristic style, optimism, forward-thinking, and rules-are-meant-to-be-broken attitude to the question of how to live boldly at any age.

When Lyn Slater started her fashion blog, Accidental Icon, at age sixty-one, she discovered that followers were flocking to her account for more than just her A-list style. As Lyn flaunted gray hair, wrinkles, and a megadose of self-acceptance, they found in her an alternative model of older life: someone who defied the stereotypes, refused to become invisible, and showed that all women have the opportunity to be relevant and take major risks at any stage of their life. Youth is not the only time we can be experimental.

How to Be Old tells the ten-year story of Lyn’s sixties, the sometimes-glamorous, sometimes-turbulent decade of Accidental Icon. This memoir is about the hopeful and future-oriented process of reinvention. It shows readers that while you can’t control everything, what you can control is the way you think about your age and the creative ways you respond to the changes in your mind and body as they happen. Rather than trying to meet standards of youth and beauty as a measure of successful aging, Lyn promotes a more inclusive and empowering standard to judge our older selves by.

In this paradigm-shifting memoir, Lyn exemplifies that even with its unique challenges, being old is just like any new beginning in your life and can be the best and most invigorating of all of life’s phases, full of rebellion and reinvention, connection and creativity.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lyn Slater is a cultural influencer, model, writer, content creator, and former professor. She started Accidental Icon in September of 2014 and has since garnered a loyal fan base of almost a million followers across platforms.

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Today is the first day of the fall 2013 semester. Anxiety taps me on the shoulder, waking me up, and excitement propels me out of bed as I slip into my role of teacher. As a professor of social work and law, I know that every class I teach brings new students and new perspectives. The students and I will leave as different people than the ones who entered the room. It's that potential that excites me. Still, I know I'll have to wait through the first few classes to understand who is in the room and where we might go together. I've learned to be patient, comfortable with not knowing, because that's part of the class's process of becoming. I am dressed in black from head to toe. I wear a suit designed by the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. I found it in a consignment store in Brooklyn. So today, while first-day-of-school anxiety beats its wings in my stomach, my black-and-white oxfords fly toward the subway that will take me downtown. My layered white hair blows in the wind. My statement earrings chime with each step, announcing I am on the way.


Before the first day of classes, I search the internet for an activity that will introduce the students and me to each other in a way that is not boring and repetitive. What I decide to wear is how I will make myself known. In the professional school where I teach, the dress code is formal: suits, tailored trousers, skirts, and blouses. Social work has always preoccupied itself with status. Like other care-oriented careers, fields historically considered to be women’s work, social work emerged as a way for middle-class women to get out of the house and into the world. It has never achieved the status or the pay reserved for male-dominated careers. Our professional garb self-consciously mimics that of professors in the school of law and the business school. I may not wear jeans, not even on Friday, when we sit in meandering committee meetings I am mandated to attend as part of my service requirement. I must devote a certain amount of my time to be used for the benefit of my school, independent of my own scholarship. These days, service feels more like penance than something I will be rewarded for. We argue over master syllabi I must use but rarely agree with because they teach students about what is, rather than engage them to think about what could be. This approach to learning makes me feel constrained, restless, and bored. My Catholic education compels me to confess that I close my classroom door, ignore the syllabus, and do what I want. While that’s a partial solution to the dilemma I face as an academic in an increasingly corporatized institution, it does not offer the challenge I feel I must have to grow.

It was during the late 1990s that I was introduced to the designs of Yohji Yamamoto. What first intrigued me was how he pushed the boundaries on suits. He works in black with touches of white, calling forth a somber seriousness. I fell in love with Yohji when I first read what he said about black: "Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy-but mysterious. But above all black says this: 'I don't bother you-don't bother me.'" His designs blur the distinction between womenswear and menswear, using theatrical drapes that create space between the body and the garment, erasing symmetry and proportion.

I think what Yamamoto knows about everyone is that as humans we are never perfect. In fact, we are quite flawed, and when we are aware of this, we feel vulnerable. When I put on Yamamoto's garments-irregular, with ripped and ragged fabrics and hems-perfection becomes mundane. I have permission to be messy, defiant, imperfect, and unfinished. At the same time I feel feminine, beautiful, and sensual in the space between my body and the drape of the clothes. The word trickster comes to mind when I think of Yohji.

The draping of the garments Yohji creates triggers memories of the nuns who taught me from kindergarten through college, and of the Jesuits who populate the university where I now teach. In these spaces, there are many rules about what a woman can or cannot do with her body and what rooms she can enter. Black is the color not only of religious attire but also of judges' robes and academic gowns. When I wear this color, it suggests to my students that what we do here in the classroom is of great importance, as are they. When I present at a conference, I make sure that my outfit demands that I receive attention, so that my words might receive attention too. While my clothes from Yohji Yamamoto make me look utterly singular in the academic room, no one can make the claim that I am dressed "inappropriately" for the occasion. Standing on this edge, sometimes in danger of falling off, fills me with glee. The right outfit can really make a statement.


Today is the first day of the fall 2013 semester. As the subway rumbles downtown and I head toward the first day of class, this time I am not a professor in a social work school. My photo ID shows that today I am a continuing education student in a fashion school. The class Building a Vintage Business begins at 6:20 p.m., and is in room SR7. It is twilight. I have taken classes at this fashion school before, most recently Jewelry Fabrication and Tailoring. Since entering this space, I have come into contact with fashion in a different way than what they show in glossy magazines under the control of editors. I become more and more excited by the potential of finding a way to do something involving fashion. I am anxious because I can’t imagine how I might be part of that world. On this day, there is something about the subway ride that makes me feel like it’s Cinderella’s coach and I am headed to a ball I have not received an invitation to.

New York City is one of the fashion capitals of the world, and when I moved there, the epicenter was Manhattan. Unobtrusively, Brooklyn was encroaching on the territory. My partner Calvin and I recently moved to Manhattan, something that we could check off the bucket list. We both work in Manhattan. There is a garment district there. We found a small but light-filled modern condo on the Upper East Side, right where it turns into East Harlem. Our new neighborhood was developing or, to be transparent, gentrifying. What it would be was as of yet undetermined. Best of all, this apartment provided easy access to the campus where I teach, just a block away from Lincoln Center, a stylish gateway between Broadway and the Upper West Side that until 2015 was the home of New York Fashion Week.

When wandering the streets of Manhattan, one can always find style inspiration. As Bill Cunningham, the well-known New York Times street photographer, asserted, "The best fashion show is on the street. Always has been, and always will be." Living here, I admit to being influenced by the overabundance of black clothes that Manhattan artists and other intellectuals seem to favor. Black flatters any figure, and looks lovely with my hair, which is turning white. But I am also inspired by the vision of young people in Brooklyn who are styling thrift and vintage clothing in interesting ways and dyeing their hair gray. It seems this is a playful experimentation with the notion of "old." These same young people stop me on the street to ask if I work in "fashion."

In fashion-school classes I had taken previously, I had innovative ideas but often fell short on execution. I realized that it would take time, money, and practice to become a skilled fashion or jewelry designer and craftsperson. I felt as if there was someone breathing down my neck to do something different, and to make it happen now. In hindsight, I don't think I was looking to start something completely new; rather, I wanted to make something new with what I already had. As I look back at this time, I think the hot breath I felt was coming from my age....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Plume
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593471792
• ISBN 13: 9780593471791
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland