The jeans fit perfectly, with just the right amount of flattering stretch. The patterned top keeps the ensemble from being too plain. The jacket tones it all down, and the three-quarter sleeves give it surprise and verve. They are all well-made basics that are neither boring nor screaming. The colors go together, but they don’t exactly match. The heels are flattering, but I could walk reasonably long distances in them. For the first time in my middle-aged life, I harmonize.
I suddenly realize that I’ve wasted hundreds of dollars and countless Saturday afternoons trying to discover something that any Parisian could have told me instantly: I’ll never look like Diane Keaton. I’m a small-boned, wide-hipped, high-waisted Ashkenazi woman who looks good in skinny jeans, blazers and a small heel. I will later add a ponytail and some bracelets.
I have another epiphany, too: I have nice ankles. Before I entered my forties, I never once considered my ankles to be an asset. Now they and my calves are the only parts of my body that still look good from every angle. Henceforth, I’ll plan whole outfits in order to give my ankles maximum play.
My new look isn’t especially unique. I soon notice that some of those stylish women I see around Paris are wearing versions of the same ensemble. They have my body type, so it works on them, too. And yet—because we’re different people, and choose different colors, fabrics, shoes and hairstyles—this uniform looks different on each of us. At most, we’re fashion cousins.
I’m not sure I’ve mastered my image, but at least I’ve found my style. And I’ve worn variations on it ever since. I stray from it at my peril. By not trying to look unique, I finally look like myself.
Rules for dressing in your forties . . .
If you buy three items at the same time, one of them will be a mistake.
That long pleated skirt that looks great on the hanger will never fall that way on your hips.
If you like the outfit on the mannequin, buy exactly what’s on the mannequin. Do not try to re-create the same look by yourself.
Whatever bothers you when you’re trying something on will always bother you. If the shoes hurt even a little bit in the store, they will be excruciating on the street.
The occasional splurge is worth it, if the item gives you a feeling of well-being and confidence every time you wear it.
Pare back on the rest. Buy fewer items of better quality. Men, invest in one pair of hand-stitched brogues that you wear with everything. Shoes and handbags needn’t be by high-end designers. Says Inès de la Fressange: “A pileup of luxury labels can be fatal after forty-five.”
13
how to age gracefully
I’VE FIGURED OUT how to dress like myself, but I have yet another problem: I don’t look quite like myself anymore. My frown line—those two vertical slashes between the eyebrows known as “the eleven”—no longer disappear after I wash my face in the morning. When I walk around Paris, I suddenly feel as if I’ve developed a skin condition. Strangers seem to be staring, not at me exactly, but at my age.
Apparently this feeling isn’t unusual. A Canadian sociologist writes that some older women feel a vast disconnect between how they look and who they truly are. She describes a seventy-one-year-old who imagines that when neighbors see her, they think, “That’s an old lady walking her dog.” Whereas, in fact, “I’m still me inside, the outside is sort of a shell.”
I don’t feel like a shell. I feel like myself with an eleven superimposed on my forehead. But I can feel the mind-body disconnect beginning. I suspect it starts in the forties, then widens. It explains why I’m so jolted when waiters call me “madame.” “Madame” means my looks are detaching from my essence.
No one wants to have an older essence. I know Americans in their sixties who still cringe at being called “middle-aged.” At a certain point, you’re practically obliged to say that you feel much younger than you are. To actually feel your age would be to admit that you’re tired, staid and unable to operate electronic devices.
It’s unnerving to feel this disconnect. It’s not a midlife crisis, but it’s a steady ache. I could handle looking older sometimes. But I look like a lady in her midforties all the time, everywhere I go. It’s not a disguise that I get to remove sometimes. When I pass women who seem to be about my age, I look at them in silent solidarity, and wonder how they cope.
After a few months of feeling this way every time I leave my house, I have an epiphany about why those strangers keep staring at me. It’s not because I look old. It’s because I look terrified.
* * *
—
Women are supposed to dread getting old. And this dread is supposed to begin when we’re young.
I remember feeling proud, in seventh grade, that I still looked like I was in sixth. I did arm exercises as a teenager so that I would never get “bat wings.” (I got them anyway.)
When I was in my twenties and thirties, the cultural message was clear: I was peaking and would never look this good again. Women are supposed to be nostalgic for this brief phase of youthful beauty while they’re still in it. In one published study, women twenty-five to thirty-five were more concerned about becoming less attractive with age than those in any other age group.
Finally entering our forties is like the scene in the horror film when the heroine realizes that the monster is inside the house. The loosening and thinning and wrinkling that we’ve been fearing for decades, and trying to keep at bay, has come for us anyway.
Women I know—and a few men—describe what’s happening to their bodies as if they’re narrating scenes from The Exorcist. The changes would seem to require special effects.
“My butt and my belly have changed places,” one woman tells me.
“My skin has become papery,” another says.
“I have not only a double but a TRIPLE chin!! Stop the insanity!!!” a forty-year-old friend writes, after I innocently send him a cheerful snapshot of the two of us. (Naturally, I’d only made sure that I looked good in the picture.)
To hear people older than us tell it, the movie is about to get even scarier.
“Forty to fifty is great, enjoy it,” a woman in her fifties tells me. “But at fifty, your face falls.” (I picture the face-melting scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
Women seem to cope with aging in two ways. The first way is to watch it happen. (People in this camp probably have no trouble watching scary movies.) When I mention the topic of aging to a friend who’s forty-four, she instantly catalogs all the recent changes to her face: incipient jowl, eye bags, neck wrinkles (“and I always despised people with that creepy neck thing,” she adds) and a “frown” between her eyebrows. She blames herself for her eleven, saying, “I must have started doing it in my teens because I thought it would make me look intelligent.”
I deal with getting older the same way I deal with horror films: I avert my eyes. I can’t help but notice my eleven because it shows up in every recent picture of me. (Smartphones are the enemies of aging.) But I try to only look in mirrors without my glasses on—one benefit of waning eyesight is that you effectively Photoshop yourself. I’d always scoffed at actresses who made a surprised “oh” expression in pictures so their features would look taut. But I now instinctively assume this expression whenever I look at myself. My daughter calls it my “mirror face.”
Not everyone seems to mind looking older. In psychological research, lesbians and African American women are less concerned about becoming less attractive with age than heterosexuals and whites are, respectively. When I run into a German woman I haven’t seen in years, I see that she has morphed into an aging earth mother, at ease with her rays of laugh lines and her long blond hair that has gone at least halfway gray. A lawyer I know has eagerly switched into I’ve-become-my-father mode: he announces, age forty-one, that he will henceforth no longer wear T-shirts.
But most people I know are dis
tressed, and for the beautiful ones it’s even worse. A handsome gay man tells me that he used to know instantly which men were homosexual because they routinely flirted with him. Getting older has thrown off his gaydar.
A very pretty woman in her midforties says she used to get bumped up to business class on flights, just by flirting with the fellow behind the check-in counter. She didn’t even have to plan vacations; men would invite her to travel on their yachts. In recent years, however, the upgrades and invitations have ceased. She still flirts with the check-in guy, but without results. I sense she walks around feeling like she’s missing a limb.
* * *
—
What’s a fortysomething to do? One approach is to sow confusion about your age. A Texan tells me his grandmother’s tactic: tell people you’re seven years older than you are.
Me: So if I say I’m in my fifties . . . ?
Him: People will say you look fantastic.
Me: And if I say I’m thirty?
Him: No one will believe you.
There is also, of course, the strategy that I grew up with: fight all signs of aging with early and frequent medical interventions. In Miami and some other places, middle-class women are practically obliged to get a face-lift, followed by regular injections of Botox and fillers, or they risk looking freakishly natural. I know a gorgeous Miamian in her fifties who’s considered an eccentric simply because she’s never had work done.
Elsewhere, even some of the most salt-of-the-earth feminists I know admit that they’ve had at least a few injections. Done with moderation, these look pretty good.
I tell Simon that I’m thinking of getting a touch of Botox, too, to make my eleven less prominent.
“Don’t do it,” he says. I had no idea that he had views on female skincare. But he says that he’s been observing older women, and thinks that the trick is to stay slim and age naturally but with elegance.
I think this must be what another friend of mine means when she says she’s following a philosophy called “Aging Gracefully.” She explains that this involves “accepting the body’s natural changes.” When I prod her for more details about this philosophy, she confesses that she isn’t sure what else it involves; she just feels inspired by the name. Then she tells me about her liposuction.
I want to age gracefully, too. And I suspect that this doesn’t mean squinting past mirrors, charting the spread of my eye bags or believing the “madame” isn’t the real me.
And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life pining to look thirty again. It’s antifeminist and futile. It might even be bad for my health. One American study found that young people who held “negative age stereotypes” were more likely to have heart troubles over the subsequent four decades. I suspect that feeling your body is just a shell makes it harder to get out and exercise, and to avoid binge-eating cookies.
But what’s the alternative? Is there a different, healthier, saner way to think about my eleven?
Perhaps. If there’s a secret, it’s in the mind, and it’s related to the secret to dressing well. You have to bridge the gap between the shell and the self. In other words, you must own your age and even be proud of it.
I’m probably idealizing the French a bit. But I’ve noticed that women here take a slightly different tack than I do, as an American. Like Hélène, the sexy sexagenarian, many tell me that they aim to be bien dans son âge—roughly, to wear their age well and be comfortable in it.
I realize that the women I meet who seem to actually be aging gracefully do look their chronological ages. They don’t appear magically younger. (“Trying to look young is the quickest way to look old,” Inès de la Fressange says.)
But these women share certain qualities. They all seem to be immersed in their lives and at ease in their bodies. They don’t look terrified or detached, or like they’re starring in their own personal horror film. Sure, they wouldn’t mind having their twenty-five-year-old bellies back. They’re not thrilled about their elevens, either. But they’re not in permanent mourning for a previous version of themselves. They’re fully inhabiting, and enjoying, their current bodies and ages (and spending a lot of energy maintaining them). To be bien dans son âge is to live out the best version of whatever age you’re in. I know not-at-all-beautiful women who do this, and they look radiant.
Just as dressing well in your forties entails making choices that reflect who you are, and not just wearing generic basics, looking good as you get older requires accentuating and enjoying what’s specific to you rather than striving for cookie-cutter perfection.
Part of the appeal of smooth-skinned young women is that there’s no obvious story written on them yet. In theory, you can project anything you want. As women get older, they look like they have a story. The French adjustment is to treat that story not as unwelcome baggage, but as part of a woman’s specificity and allure. It would be odd to reach the forties, or older, without having this.
Some French women do get face-lifts, and they have all kinds of injections and procedures. But the objectives tend to be modest. “I’m trying to take off five years,” one Parisian woman observed. Whereas Americans “are trying to take off twenty.”
“The beauty is to see the humanity of someone,” explains Elsa Weiser, founder of the eponymous Elsa Weiser Beauty Institute in Paris’s tony Sixth Arrondissement. She warns that smoothing out your features too much eliminates your uniqueness, too. Especially after a certain age, “We don’t want to look like we come out of a box. We’re not frozen, we’re alive.”
I have a breakthrough about my own specificity when, at a dinner, I’m introduced to an American woman who looks just like me, except that she’s taller and—I soon learn—she grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She’s basically my Mormon doppelgänger. We stare at each other for a moment, acknowledging the likeness.
She’s not gorgeous, or flawless, or especially skinny. But her combination of qualities is appealing. I can imagine someone caring about her more than anyone else in the world, despite the existence of millions of other objectively more attractive women.
I’m struck by this. For the first time, I can see why someone could want me simply because I am, specifically, myself.
“Oh my God, I understand why someone would want to sleep with me!” I tell her.
Even in France, being “comfortable in your age” doesn’t happen automatically. It’s a deliberate, adult act. It requires believing that your particular shape, mind and assortment of qualities—including your age—have a valid place in the world. It means making a choice about how you’re going to age. And it means believing that the person in the mirror is you.
You know you’re a fortysomething woman when . . .
Friends who refuse to dye their hair or shave their armpits for political reasons no longer look charmingly rebellious; they look scraggly.
People on the street only notice you when you’re fully coiffed. But they have started to appraise your daughter.
You’ve attended a “pool party” in which almost none of the women wore swimsuits, and the few who did wouldn’t stand up.
You see the hidden costs of things. You realize that behind every glamorous, itinerant childhood, there’s a mother who handled the school enrollments and the packing.
You’re losing patience with “imposter syndrome.”
14
how to learn the rules
EVER SINCE I WAS A KID, I’ve been collecting rules of life. These are compact truths about how the world works. I heard my first rule when I was nine or ten and riding home from school in the backseat of a neighbor’s car. I’d just told the neighbor—Mrs. Gross—that it was okay to turn into our street, since she had the right-of-way.
Mrs. Gross didn’t budge. Instead, she looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “You can have the right-of-way and be dead.”<
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She said this with such seriousness and conviction, I knew I’d be foolish not to take heed. And it struck me that every adult probably has a few such truths inside them, distilled from their life experience. I was desperate to understand the world and how to navigate it. If I could gather key lessons from lots of people, surely I’d be prepared for almost any situation. These rules wouldn’t make me wise, but they would nudge me in the general direction of wisdom. At least I’d do some things right.
I soon noticed that people rarely say profound things when they’re supposed to. Each Saturday, the rabbi stood before our congregation and whispered a secret into the ear of the child getting bar mitzvahed that week. I assumed he was imparting advice that would guide them into adulthood. I longed to know what it was. But when my own turn came, he whispered something like “This is an important day,” then the organ played.
In fact, rules tended to emerge when I didn’t expect them. Often someone would just blurt one out. When I got older, my ears perked up when someone mentioned that “a man will tell you what he wants on the first date” or that “any woman who’s very thin spends a lot of time working at this.” These felt like facts that any grown-up should have in her arsenal.
I was suspicious of clichés. I liked truths that seemed self-evident, but that were so slender and specific hardly anyone noticed them. “Keeping your tush clean is the key to good health,” a boyfriend told me once, when emerging from the toilet. “Don’t get divorced,” a colleague said, after an acrimonious exchange with her ex-husband.
There Are No Grown-ups Page 11
