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I no longer do sponsored posts on Instagram, preferring short pieces of writing with an invitation to think and respond meaningfully and a longer essay on the blog. In the long hours no longer filled with content creation, sponsored Instagram posts and travel, I wrote and in doing so, found myself again. I gratefully call the pandemic “The Great Interrupter” because it interrupted a life trajectory that needed to be more critically examined and was making me unhappy. Like many others, the pandemic gave me an opportunity to slow down, reflect and take stock of how I was living my life. I was miserable and felt guilty about it because I had a life on social media, many people would envy. Rather than being known as a creative older woman who reinvented herself into a completely new career, I became known as a social media influencer, the kind that influences you to buy no longer the kind that inspires a cultural shift. Writing on my blog, which was why I started it in the first place, became sporadic and littered with sponsored posts. Traveling at 120 MPH through life and social media left me no time to reflect or think critically about what I was doing.

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Vogue Japan named me one of the four most inspiring women over 60 in the world.Īfter retiring officially from academia in 2019, when I started doing Accidental Icon full time, I somehow lost myself, and in doing so, got commodified and became a brand. My Instagram exploded to 757K followers of all ages, from all over the world. I worked with independent magazines, emerging designers, was featured in music videos, travelled the world, had a feature in every major fashion magazine and international campaigns. The following year Joan Didion and I appeared (wrinkles and all) in fashion magazines wearing sunglasses (hers were Celine, mine Valentino) and somehow being old suddenly became cool.

My rejection of age as a variable to be considered in how one dresses, lives and represents oneself seemed to hit a chord.

I explored the use of fashion as a window into society and a vehicle to make personal and social change. Much to my surprise, the images we created caused me to become, for a time, an influencer of popular culture. My life partner Calvin, a street photographer/scientist, agreed to take my photos. I wrote about fashion although I was a professor of social welfare. In 2014, after increasing feelings of dissatisfaction with the corporate turn of academia and the constraints placed on how one may write, I started a blog named Accidental Icon.

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