The professor who became an accidental fashion icon
Lyn Slater, 63, walked past a New York catwalk show and became a star
The models in glossy campaign images are, overwhelmingly, very young. When H&M cast the 60-year-old stylist Gillean McLeod to model its swimwear last summer, unsurprisingly, she became a global news story.
Perhaps it isn’t so strange, then, that the Spanish retailer Mango is releasing a campaign starring a diverse cast of women ranging in age from 19 to 63. While Mango’s decision to depart from the adolescent norm may go against the grain, the numbers suggest that it makes perfect economic sense. In the U.K., for example, the over-50s hold 68.3 per cent of household wealth, while over-65s spend billions per year on clothes.
The campaign’s oldest star is 63-year-old New Yorker Lyn Slater, a university professor and a successful fashion blogger.
The really clever part is that this isn’t just about appealing to an older demographic. Characters such as Slater — who has almost 100,000 followers on Instagram, and promotes clothes by young designers — are millennial catnip too.
She had been thinking of starting a blog, but it wasn’t until she unwittingly walked past a fashion show venue and was accosted by photographers at New York Fashion Week in September 2014 that she took the plunge.
“I went to meet a friend for lunch and I was wearing a Yohji Yamamoto suit and carrying a Chanel bag. All of a sudden all these photographers starting taking pictures of me because they thought I was some kind of fashion person.
“When my friend arrived, there was a huge crowd around me. We were laughing and I said ‘I’m an accidental icon!’ Then she said ‘That’s the name of your blog and you need to start it tomorrow.’ So that’s what I did.”
On the subject of age, Slater is dismissive, although she acknowledges the power of style confidence. “Age is not a variable I consider when getting dressed ...”