You can change your life in any decade.
Just ask Lyn Slater, 70.
A decade ago, the former professor of social work started chronicling her fashion choices on a blog called “Accidental Icon.” She soon amassed over a million followers from her blog and her Instagram account. She landed an agent and modeling deals with global brands, including Valentino.
But around 2019, Slater decided she didn’t want the life she had.
“What began as a way to express myself artistically devolved into one that was more about consumption than creativity,” she wrote last month on her blog. “A life I did not intend, and that made me unhappy.”
Slater’s new memoir, “How to be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly from the Accidental Icon,” which hits shelves this month, focuses on her journey from professor to model to writer. The book also touches on her style evolution, what it’s like to sit in the front row at a fashion show, and what it means to get older.
“There is one aspect of getting older that is under our control, how we choose to think about our age,” she writes in the book.
Slater talked to WNYC’s Tiffany Hanssen on a recent episode of “All Of It.” An edited version of their conversation is below.
Tiffany Hanssen: First, I want to start with a definition. How do you define “old”? We hear a lot of people say age is just a number. What does old equal?
Lyn Slater: I am a real fan of good old dictionary definitions. If you look up the word “old,” it says very neutrally, “having lived a long time.” For me, that is a privilege, and that’s how I like to think of the word old.
When did you cross that threshold?
I actually never thought of myself as being old until I became the Accidental Icon, and the media and society started telling me I was.
How did being labeled old make you feel about yourself?
I’m a real rebellious person, and so I did not accept that identity. A lot of people are focusing on the early part of the book, when I was the Accidental Icon. For me, the…
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