Read more
Informationen zum Autor Lyn Slater is a cultural influencer, model, writer, content creator, and former professor. She started Accidental Icon in September of 2014 and has since garnered a loyal fan base of almost a million followers across platforms. Klappentext One of Elle 's Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2024 A personal memoir in which Lyn Slater, known on Instagram as “Accidental Icon,” brings her characteristic style, optimism, forward-thinking, and rules-are-meant-to-be-broken attitude to the question of how to live boldly at any age. When Lyn Slater started her fashion blog, Accidental Icon, at age sixty-one, she discovered that followers were flocking to her account for more than just her A-list style. As Lyn flaunted gray hair, wrinkles, and a megadose of self-acceptance, they found in her an alternative model of older life: someone who defied the stereotypes, refused to become invisible, and showed that all women have the opportunity to be relevant and take major risks at any stage of their life. Youth is not the only time we can be experimental. How to Be Old tells the ten-year story of Lyn’s sixties, the sometimes-glamorous, sometimes-turbulent decade of Accidental Icon. This memoir is about the hopeful and future-oriented process of reinvention. It shows readers that while you can’t control everything, what you can control is the way you think about your age and the creative ways you respond to the changes in your mind and body as they happen. Rather than trying to meet standards of youth and beauty as a measure of successful aging, Lyn promotes a more inclusive and empowering standard to judge our older selves by. In this paradigm-shifting memoir, Lyn exemplifies that even with its unique challenges, being old is just like any new beginning in your life and can be the best and most invigorating of all of life’s phases, full of rebellion and reinvention, connection and creativity. Leseprobe Today is the first day of the fall 2013 semester. Anxiety taps me on the shoulder, waking me up, and excitement propels me out of bed as I slip into my role of teacher. As a professor of social work and law, I know that every class I teach brings new students and new perspectives. The students and I will leave as different people than the ones who entered the room. It's that potential that excites me. Still, I know I'll have to wait through the first few classes to understand who is in the room and where we might go together. I've learned to be patient, comfortable with not knowing, because that's part of the class's process of becoming. I am dressed in black from head to toe. I wear a suit designed by the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. I found it in a consignment store in Brooklyn. So today, while first-day-of-school anxiety beats its wings in my stomach, my black-and-white oxfords fly toward the subway that will take me downtown. My layered white hair blows in the wind. My statement earrings chime with each step, announcing I am on the way. Before the first day of classes, I search the internet for an activity that will introduce the students and me to each other in a way that is not boring and repetitive. What I decide to wear is how I will make myself known. In the professional school where I teach, the dress code is formal: suits, tailored trousers, skirts, and blouses. Social work has always preoccupied itself with status. Like other care-oriented careers, fields historically considered to be women’s work, social work emerged as a way for middle-class women to get out of the house and into the world. It has never achieved the status or the pay reserved for male-dominated careers. Our professional garb self-consciously mimics that of professors in the school of law and the business school. I may not wear jeans, not even on Friday, when we sit in meandering committee meetings I am mandate...
