Insta-gran idols aging with audacity
A subversive group of women is challenging the notions of what ‘old’ means and looks like
Photographed with a hip thrust forward to show off her Margiela apron dress and modishly frayed jeans, Lyn Slater projects a kind of swagger rare among her peers. A professor at the Graduate School of Social Service at Fordham University, with hyper-chic side gigs as a model and blogger, she is known to a wider public as an Instagram idol.
Sure, she is 64, a time when some women her age are feeling pressed to close up shop. But if you are Slater, that is not going to happen.
On Accidental Icon, her influential Instagram account, she tends to vamp in an eye-catching mash-up of Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and consignment-store finds. Her following, hundreds of thousands strong, skews young, she said, and is responsive to her sass.
“I flaunt it,” she said. “I’m not 20. I don’t want to be 20, but I’m really freaking cool. That’s what I think about when I’m posting a photo.”
Her brash voice is one in a chorus of like-minded contemporaries and women in their 70s and 80s, who are taking on matters of aging with an audacity — and riveting style — their mothers might have envied.
Married or single, working or not, and most often grandmothers, they are asserting their presence on Instagram, intent, in the process, on subverting shopworn notions of what “old” looks and feels like.
That observation is echoed in the Elastic Generation, a 2018 J. Walter Thomson survey of 55- to 72-year-old women in England. “Our collective understanding of what later life looks like remains woefully outdated,” Marie Stafford, the European director of the JWT Innovation Group, wrote in her introduction. “Age no longer dictates the way we live. Physical capacity, financial circum- stances and mindset arguably have far greater influence.”
Some of these women are still subscribing to the counterculture values and maverick stance they adopted in the 1960s and ’70s.
In their wardrobes, unfettered self-expression is the rule. Dorrie Jacobson, an 83-year-old former Playboy bunny, piqued interest last year when she began modelling lacy black lingerie on her Senior Style Bible Instagram account. In an interview, as on her feed, she urges followers to ditch cobwebby notions of how a woman her age should dress. “Wear what you like,” she said. “Ageappropriate has nothing to do with it.”
That brand of feistiness likely owes a debt to a few playfully cantankerous online role models, women who call themselves “Insta-grans,” who have made brazenness a virtue. Making waves, and a little cash on the side, are pop sensations like Baddie Winkle (89-year-old Helen Ruth Elam Van Winkle), whose posts are conceived to flip convention on its head.
Snapped in shrilly colourful knits, skimpy swimwear and, in one instance, a pink message T-shirt that reads, “Be a slut, do whatever you want.” Van Winkle has transcended cult status. She has millions of followers and is paid to tout brands such as Got2B hair products and Smirnoff on her account.
Chalk up their influence to a palpable shift in the wind. Their advent coincides with the stepped-up visibility, and clout, of political outliers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose weathered features loom large these days on theatre screens, to say nothing of a voluble coterie of older women in Congress.
Also overlooked is their social media savvy. Eschewing stereotypes, 73 per cent of the Elastic Generation participants “hate the way their generation is patronized when it comes to technology,” the report says. Six out of 10 say they find tech “fascinating,” according to the report, and many of those may actually be more competent using tech than their younger counterparts.