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It’s about style not age

— by Alyson Walsh

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Lucinda Chambers photo: New York Times

If you’ve spent this week employing a much-needed digital detox you might just have missed a rather uplifting online sensation. When the New York Times published a feature entitled ‘Don’t Dress Your Age’, urging women to ignore ‘mutton-shaming’ style advice about what you can and can’t wear over-40, hundreds of women took to social media in solidarity. Posting pictures of themselves on Instagram wearing what they damn well like (with the hashtag #nytstylenotage). Hoorah.

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Gillian McLeod Instagram photo via Telegraph

‘It’s not about age, it’s about style’ is what it says in the sidebar over there; a mantra I’ve been chanting for quite some time. Obviously I was delighted by the online response to the New York Times feature written by Julia Baird; favourite quote, ‘We are told to monitor our appearance in a way men are very rarely told to. Find me a man leafing through a magazine that tells him to upturn his collar to hide his neck wrinkles, and I will upturn it for him.’

The Daily Telegraph asked for my thoughts on the situation.

One of my key points was that the internet has changed everything. Social networking (specifically blogging and Instagram) has provided a show-and-tell platform for women of all ages that is democratising fashion. It allows women of any age to say this is what we look like, this is what we wear, get over it.

And we are a big demographic. We don’t want fast fashion or fickle trends. Nor to be told ‘this is what you wear when you’re 40, 50, 60, whatever’; the boundaries between the generations are blurred, it’s all about ageless style now.

You can read my Telegraph article: ‘Don’t dress your age  – modern women know it’s about style not following fashion rules for over-40s’ HERE.

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