by Clare Taylor (Thu Sep 10, 2009)
I'm feeling bereft.
Or is it invisible? Because apparently women of over 40 don't need
representation in the glossy magazines market. At least, not any representation that I'm quite ready to admit to needing,
anyway. So after fruitlessly perusing
the newsagents' shelves, overwhelmed by the number of titles out there and
finding none that I want, I'm thinking of placing an ad. It would run:
'Wanted: Short-term thick and glossy magazine for fun,
frolics and opportunistic monthly spending of hard-won moolah.
Must contain a minimum
of 100 pages of head-turning fashion,
food and interesting articles suitable for women who have proper appetites,
intelligent thoughts, and are no longer interested in looking at images of 19-year-old size 0 girls showing how to wear the
latest hot looks.'
What I really want to see is women of my age or thereabouts
- good looking, yes, and reasonably fit, yes, but still closer to my age than
Gisele and her ilk - wearing clothes that I could imagine having in my
wardrobe.
Because it turns out that I am a ‘bear of very little brain'
when it comes to fashion. After the last
few years of having priorities other than the latest trends in ‘hats, bags and
shoes' (as Patsy so memorably put in Ab Fab), I have somewhat lost my way sartorially. I need
more than a little help in the wardrobe department, and right now there's
nowhere to get it.
There must be ways
of turning my fashion-mojo back on, but frankly without guidance from the world
of glossy magazines - who don't acknowledge my existence - I'm not sure where
to look for it. Oh, for my very own Trinny and Susannah to
take me in hand, tell me to throw my shoulders back and stick my tits out, and
frogmarch me to some funky boutique and show me how to do clever things with
shoes and beads.
Yes, I can flick through the pages of Elle, Marie Claire,
Vogue and Red perfectly happily, but any interest or admiration of their
content is more touristic than anything else; I don't actually feel that I live
in the land they're showing me. When it comes to transferring those ‘statement
looks' into sensible purchases for my own wardrobe, ones that can be ‘mixed and
matched' or used to form the basis for a stylish ‘capsule wardrobe' I am
incapable of doing it. Instead I have a collection of mismatched clothes that
sometimes work together, and more often don't, and which mostly hang in the
wardrobe waiting for that blue moon when I will have lost half a stone and
regained my pre-pregnancy figure of nearly 10 years ago.
So, getting back to my ad, if you don't mind Mr/Ms Publisher,
please, pretty please, I would be very grateful if you would pull together a
magazine that is not patronising, not condescending, and which recognises that
as a woman of over 40 I am not invisible (or at least, don't enjoy being so)
and that whilst I could perhaps do with a little help in the style stakes, I am
not yet ready for the stultifying good taste & muted colours of Good
Housekeeping's ‘A Look for a Lifestyle.'
I mean, Good Housekeeping?
My mother reads that. And yes, I admit to sneaking a peek at the back
copies she keeps hanging around whenever we visit, but that's beside the point.
I love my mother, but I'm not quite ready to admit to reading the same magazine
as her...
