Suddenly it’s chic to be 70
There’s a revolution in attitudes to ageing. And women who blossomed in the 1960s are leading the charge
THE scene was the achingly cool Palm Springs Film Festival. The star, dazzling in blue cobalt silk and bright scarlet lipstick, sported a sharp new hairdo.
It was a perfectly ice-blonde bob that looked slick but not sculpted, cutely chopped at the nape of the neck and elegantly parted to one side.
Not bad for a 70-year-old woman dressed in a maxi skirt and a cardigan. But then, Helen Mirren could give a masterclass in reinventing any look with the daring and flair of a much younger woman.
In fact, her appearance at the film awards ceremony this week was the perfect summation of her signature mature-chic style.
And she’s not the only one doing it. Look around and the charismatic, confident, seventysomething woman is everywhere, stealing the limelight from
her much younger fashion rivals. And, as a 75-year-old woman myself, how wonderful it is to celebrate my fellow septuagenarians!
Take, for example, Priscilla Presley. Seventy last year and looking luminous beneath even the gloomy winter skies of Milton Keynes, where she starred in the pantomime Aladdin this Christmas.
Never anything but perfectly groomed, Priscilla still has that glossy mane of hair and those bewitching cat’s eyes that Elvis fell in love with more than 50 years ago.
Meanwhile, Raquel Welch turns heads as easily today at 75 as she did in her prime — and all, as she recently revealed, without ever stripping off for a role.
Not that you have to search as far as Hollywood to find stunning examples of mature female beauty.
Take home-grown Anna Ford, 72, who never stopped being beautiful and whose freshness still captivates. Pictured at a Labour party rally in the summer, she cut an elegant figure — her neatly arched eyebrows framing those widely spaced eyes with a jawline as sharp as her intellect.
And Angela Rippon, too. She was recently featured in this newspaper rocking tight leather trousers and knee-high suede boots at the age of 71.
‘Is there an age limit?’ she mused. ‘I didn’t notice a label in the trousers saying, “Only to be worn by twentysomethings”. For heaven’s sake, a woman of 70 should wear whatever she feels like wearing.’ Well, amen to that.
Indeed, this is very much the era of the septuagenarian; the era in which women in their eighth decade step out from the shadows and redefine what it means to grow old.
Not for them the gradual slide into little old womanhood, all blue rinses and cosy slippers. These are the women who prove that 70 is the new 50, a time of life not for pottering about and babysitting the grandchildren, but for travelling and working and refusing to shrink into the background.
NO LONGER invisible, the seventysomething women shown here are every bit the elegant, red-carpet stars that their 30-year-old selves once were. Tellingly, the advertising industry has at last woken up to the older woman and her colossal spending power.
It was clear things had changed when Mirren became the oldest recipient of a cosmetics contract as the face of L’Oreal’s Age Perfect moisturising cream — and quickly wrong-footed critics who doubted that anyone of that age could look as good as she did in the advertisements.
Surely her skin had been airbrushed, the wrinkles smoothed away by computer software, they said.
But no, an inquiry by the Advertising Standards Authority backed Mirren’s claims of absolute authenticity. Her cheeks really were that dewy; her lines that fine.
‘It was about time that someone of my age, not necessarily me, did it,’ she said in September, confirming she’d insisted on truthful, non-airbrushed photographs when she signed the contract.
So what’s happening here? Is it a coincidence all these women were born in the Forties, either during the war or immediately afterwards? And that the period of their freshest youth therefore occurred in the Sixties?
I don’t think so. I am 75 and, as a leading fashion model in the Sixties, I witnessed first-hand the amazing creativity of that decade.
It was a time of new freedoms for women — or at least the start of them — and always unlikely that many of those who came to prominence would consent to shuffle off quietly into the sunset when they got older.
Why would women who blaze as brightly as Helen Mirren or goldie Hawn, with her endless smile and wonderful giggle, grow into old, grey-haired Nora Battys?
goldie, by the way, has five grandchildren, and credits her youthfulness to daily meditation and the practice of ‘mindfulness’. Another who turned 70 last year, she refuses to comment on speculation that she’s had cosmetic surgery — but even if she has, should it really be a source of shame?
One of the great benefits of this age is that you’re too old to care what other people think of the way you behave, at least most of the time. Besides, today’s face-lifts are much subtler than they once were — more filling and smoothing rather than tautening and stretching.
I remember a stay in Beverly Hills just 15 years ago, and the look of permanent, frozen surprise on the faces of many seventysomething women I met, their skin weirdly plastic and over-done.
Nowadays, the techniques give a much more natural result.
Look at 75-year-old Linda gray, best known as the conniving Sue Ellen Ewing from Dallas, who appeared on a British TV chat show looking so naturally beautiful people actually gasped.
She admits to ‘having work done’, in that coy phrase, but it’s been performed with a skilful lightness of touch; fine lines stary, but deep wrinkles go. ‘I need to live for a long time to fulfil all the things I want to do," she says. ‘I want to be walking around at 90.'
Meanwhile, Jane Fonda, at 78, has a fake hip, knee, thumb; more metal in me than a bionic woman’. But she also has a defiantly
ballsy attitude to ageing, embracing it and living life to the full.
‘Looking at age from the outside is so scary. But when you’re inside age — and I’m very much inside age — it isn’t scary at all,’ she told an interviewer at the Cannes Film Festival, where she wore a sculpted Versace gown and huge diamond earrings. ‘You need maturity to learn this, but it’s important to figure out what you need to do every day to decompress. I meditate. And I always get eight hours’ sleep.’
Of course, it’s not all a bed of roses. Your eyes and your teeth aren’t what they were, there’s no disguising the veins on your hands and you long to shift fat bits of your body to parts that suddenly seem oddly scraggy.
Leather trousers might still work, but I know I shall never wear a sweet little puffsleeve blouse again. And yet it’s good to be this age. Just weeks ago I completed my sixth novel, and now I find people asking me to talk at book festivals and on cruise ships all over the world. I travel in style, without screaming babies or easily bored children.
As Helen Mirren says, being 70 is a pleasure — and this year, paradoxical though it sounds, it’s also the epitome of cool.