‘I’m not 20. I don’t want to be 20, but I’m really cool’

THEY ARE THE ‘INSTAGRANS’, WOMEN OVER 60 WHO ARE USING THE PLATFORM TO BUST THE NOTION OF ‘OLD IS BORING’

Lyn Slater projects a kind of swagger rare among her peers. A professor at the Graduate School of Social Service at Fordham University, she is known to a wider public as an Instagram idol.

She is 64. On Accidental Icon, her influential account, she is followed by hundreds of thousands.

‘I flaunt it,’ she said. ‘I’m not 20. I don’t want to be 20, but I’m really cool. That’s what I think about when I’m posting a photo.’

She is not alone. There is a whole chorus of women in their 70s and 80s, who are taking on aging with an audacity - and riveting style.

‘These women are ambassadors of age,’ said Ari Seth Cohen, the creator of Advanced Style, a popular street-style blog.

‘The idea of what these older women look like has changed,’ Cohen said. ‘If they were stylish in their youth, they will still be stylish now. They continue to be who they were.’

Posting on Instagram reinforces a sense of solidarity that may have been missing elsewhere in their lives. Slater was quick to monetise her Instagram account, Accidental Icon. The Spanish retailer Mango hired her for a 2017 campaign, ‘A Story of Uniqueness.’

She recently appeared in a commercial for a pharmacy, which uses unretouched models of varying ages. She is featured in a music video with Charlotte Gainsbourg and has been approached by several literary agents to turn her posts into a book.

But Slater does not want to be ‘colonised’ exclusively with women her age. ‘Every woman should be able to open a magazine and see herself there as part of a mix,’ she said.