Essay by Fran Cronin
I Feel Great About My Hair and Other Thoughts on Aging
When my hair started to gray at a somewhat respectable age, my dying mother—who finished all her sentences to me with “don’t ever tell anyone your age”—did not leave this earth until she said with her last breath, “And please dye your hair.”
As a Jewish woman, it’s hard to ignore one’s mother, especially when she hits on a raw nerve: At the time of her death, I was a widow with children aged 9 and 6. I had not been the most compliant of daughters and didn’t marry until I was 42. For decades, my mother hovered in the background, anxiously wringing her hands as she waited for me to do what was expected of me.
Her final warnings got me thinking that between the steadily advancing strands of gray and the realities of having young children at an “advanced maternal age,” my kids might never again have a father.
Even dead, my mother had a way of making herself heard.
I immediately started to dye my fading red hair to a revisionist shade of what it had once been, and, during the ensuing seven years, developed an excellent rapport with my hairdresser. After every snip and color, I booked my next appointment.
Then, one afternoon this summer, I opened a new issue of the New Yorker and found a full-page, full-color Eileen Fisher ad featuring a gorgeous woman with gray hair cascading to her waist. Not only did she have a shimmering mane of silver hair, but her eyes were trained defiantly at the camera and her well-structured face topped a long, exposed neck that was not wrinkle free.
I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron’s brilliantly titled treatise on aging, has given me a robust appreciation for turtlenecks and neck-hugging scarves. Facelifts may work wonders, but take one look at a woman’s neck and hands, and the jig is up. I have taken stock of mine. The maze of hatch marks encircling my neck has led to many impulse purchases of artfully concealing clothing and a cabinet full of anti-wrinkle creams.
But the image of this attractive, bold, older woman with the long gray locks got my attention. I tore out the page and tacked it prominently on top of the layers of photos, notes, recipes, and bits of wisdom cluttering my kitchen corkboard. I couldn’t pass it without stopping to look at this woman who seemed to snub the marketing norms. She possessed a late-blooming radiance. For the first time in years, I remembered my youthful fantasy of having a long gray braid down my back.
I confess to not being a devotee of Eileen Fisher fashion (I’m a small-bodied woman who needs some definition), but Fisher was onto something when in 1984 she set out to make clothes that allowed women to “relax into themselves.”
In 2003, Ms. Magazine recognized Fisher as a Woman of the Year in its winter issue. In her profile of Fisher, Amy Bloom wrote: “How many clothing designers use real women, over 30, from black to palest white—high school principals, ob/gyns, attorneys, airline pilots, the company’s own employees and the boss’s own pals—in their ads, instead of models?”
Fisher was sailing on the trade winds of feminism: Not only did she usher in an era of clothes designed to provide flattering comfort to busy, baby boomer women, but Fisher was also beating men at their own game. She was a clever and ethical businesswoman. When you wore Fisher clothing, you knew it was okay to take off your bra and let your hair and whatever else hang, and you knew that whoever sewed your garment was making a decent wage.
Twenty-seven years since it was launched, the Fisher brand still knows how to speak to women, and when I saw that glorious gray-haired woman, I knew she was speaking to me.
My newly hatched confidence in my aging self was fortified when I saw a replay of Steven Colbert’s interview with Gloria Steinem this past August. Steinem was doing the media circuit as HBO released its documentary, Gloria: In Her Own Words.
After razzing Steinem for being Steinem, Colbert tells her, “I’ve heard you were uncomfortable being perceived as the pretty feminist.”
“It has to do with being identified by your outside,” Steinem says. “So if a woman is pretty, people just say she succeeded because she was pretty. Women who are ‘not pretty,’ whatever that means, are said to succeed because they couldn’t get a man. So we basically all had the same problem—being identified by our outside instead of our hearts and minds.”
Ms. Magazine and Fisher’s clothes forged a new reality for women. Women were no longer an ideal, like a piece of carved Elgin marble, but flesh and brains and a determined sense of self.
Two years ago, I saw Steinem speak at a Harvard 50th reunion lunch, where I was the guest of my mother-in-law. There was no mistaking Steinem as she ascended the stairs to the canopied stage. Tall and straight, she was her quintessential self in her long, lean jeans; belt snug around her hips; fitted top; not-quite-gray hair pulled back from the broad plains of her face; and large aviator glasses.
My mother-in-law, like the other women seated beside me at the round table, was 75, the same age as Steinem. But where Steinem’s attire was provocative, the women surrounding me all wore subdued clothing. When Steinem started yanking lessons from the past and hurling them into the future, these women quietly nodded and looked at me. They were once the brightest of the bright, admitted into the exclusive ranks of Radcliffe women, but very few got to shine. Their prime time was before Gloria, before Eileen, and before the word "foundation" no longer referenced a woman’s undergarments.
Now a “shocking 77,” as she described herself during this summer’s media rounds, Steinem’s voice is still strong, her mind sharp, and her message clear: Power lies in choice.
Eileen Fisher, who built her image and clothing line around bucking traditional fashion trends for older women, outdid herself with the svelte, hip grandma in the ad. Like all the imbibables and comestibles that I relish— a fine cabernet from France, artisan cheddars from Vermont, or well-brined and oil-laden olives from Spain—this lithe woman in the Eileen Fisher outfit had aged well. She gave me the courage to imagine that perhaps I too could do the same.
When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to let my hair go, she remarked, channeling my mother, “Did you forget you have a 13-year-old?”
I do have a 13-year-old son, but I also have a daughter who is 16. After many years of denouncing my wardrobe, that daughter now raids my closet. Waving goodbye, she bounces out the door…in my favorite stretch denim jeans. Or, after rummaging through the hall closet, she emerges wearing the brown Patagonia jacket she maligned when I brought it home last year.
You might think, in keeping with conventional wisdom, that I’m simultaneously raiding her closet in search of youthful outfits. But the truth is that I’m content now with the way I look. Like Fisher’s clothes, I’ve learned how to settle into myself.
My encounter with Fisher’s gray-haired beauty has nudged me into believing that looking older might not be such a bad thing. I’m saving some time and money by not fleeing to my hairdresser every three months. My daughter knows she and I aren't competing with each other (except for my brown jacket). And perhaps my available-for-all-to-see maturing self provides her with a safe, reassuring glimpse into what aging may hold for her.
Publishing Information
- I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman by Nora Ephron (Vintage Books, 2008).
- “Women of the Year 2003: Eileen Fisher,” by Amy Bloom, Ms. Magazine, Winter 2003.
- Steven Colbert Interview with Gloria Steinem, August 11, 2011.
Art Information
- “Fran’s Glorious Hair” © Dora Cronin; used by permission
- “Gloria Steinem, 2008″ © Mindy Kittay; Creative Commons license
- Eileen Fisher; courtesy of Eileen Fisher Company
Fran Cronin is the press contact and a contributing editor at Talking Writing. "Eileen Fisher's Got My Back" is the inaugural column of The World According to Fran.
"I confess to enjoying a little dose of the Kardashians or Brangelina when in the grocery checkout line. " — Errol Morris Takes on the Tabloids
