Fashion Influencer Lyn Slater, 70, Knows ‘How to Be Old’

Lyn Slater, 70, didn’t intend to become a style icon. The former social worker and Fordham University professor decided in her 60s to go to school for fashion and began writing an increasingly popular fashion blog. She soon became an Instagram star — an “accidental icon,” as she called herself — featured in Vogue magazine and seated in the front row at New York Fashion Week in 2018.

Part of Slater’s appeal is the fact that she’s an anomaly in an industry that skews younger, with her undyed gray hair and naturally aging skin. But her goal was never to make some sort of grand statement about aging, she tells AARP: “I was expressing a creative impulse, which has no age.” 

Courtesy: Plume

Now she encourages others to embrace reinvention and live authentically in How To Be Old: Lessons In Living Boldly From The Accidental Icon. Her book colorfully documents the decade or so when she reconnected with her creativity and found fame, as well as more recent years, when she pulled back from the world of fashion celebrity for a lower-key existence.

“My life,” Slater writes, “is now centered on my partner, my home, my wild and overgrown garden, my daughter and grandchildren, writing, becoming involved in my community, and being purposeful and diligent about the things I need to do so I can continue to be old in a healthy and satisfied way.”

These are some of the author’s tips for living authentically, regardless of age.   

1. Make mistakes

If you live 70 years without making a mistake, she suggests, what kind of life is that? 

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Slater recalls moments from her burgeoning career in fashion during which she experienced a fair share of foot-in-mouth moments as a newbie on the scene. Once, she sat front row at fashion week next to designer Thom Browne and didn’t recognize him despite being a fan of his work. Another time at a photoshoot, she mistook a major news outlet’s creative director for an intern. 

Slipups are often signs of or opportunities for growth, Slater poses, not reasons to retreat in shame. “As I look back on my life, I have found regret an unproductive emotion and one I try to avoid,” she writes. “Although I might suffer discomfort while going on fresh adventures, satisfying my curiosity, feeling the rapture when seeing the product of my ever-increasing creative impulse, or expanding my world, this all makes that scale tip in favor of the pleasures of terror.”