Why are we so surprised when ‘old people’ do ‘young’ things?

On ageing, and the fashion icon Iris Apfel, who has died at 102

An ‘older woman’ dancing. Photo by Vladimir Soares on Unsplash

The fashion and interiors designer Iris Apfel died on Friday, aged 102. Known for her clashing style, cropped white hair and huge glasses, she was an influencer with 3 million Instagram followers who got noticed almost overnight after New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition of her accessories collection.

It’s very unusual for someone to become famous in their 80s, as Apfel did after that art show, and it’s even more unusual for someone to continue working and attracting public attention until they’re beyond 100.

Being a working centenarian is part of what brought notice to Apfel, along with her talent, sharp wit and extraordinary style. She was a ‘style icon,’ according to the website Business of Fashion and someone who ‘knocked the socks off the fashion world’ per the New York Times.

But I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that with an ageing population, an increasing retirement age (in the UK at least) and a world that is rife with ageism (according to the World Health Organization, half the global population is ageist against older people), we will increasingly see older people doing ‘young’ or ‘surprising’ things - and we will need to stop being so surprised when they do.

At the moment, we’re amused, amazed or in awe when old people do things like dance, let alone reach the giddy heights of Apfel.

“Pensioner, 81, has time of his life dancing with care home worker” screamed Metro; “AMAZING!” was the title of a video of some older people dancing to Rock Around The Clock, seen more than 60 million times according to the Mail Online.

My response is: that looks fun - why wouldn’t ‘older’ people enjoy dancing? Sure, there might be health reasons, but the interesting bit here is that if people stick to the stereotypes, such as old=frail, it can actually lead to a person becoming so, according to research from Georgia State University. In other words, when someone is seen as doddery, they perform “below their abilities,” the study found.

The research also showed that what you believe about getting older has an impact on how well you actually age. “Your own attitude about aging is highly predictive of your aging outcomes,” according to Sarah Barber, the psychologist behind the Georgia study.

My mother, aged 78, works as much as she can, goes to a weekly Pilates class and cleans her teeth standing on one leg (she read that tip in the book Sod 70: The Guide to Living Well, by Muir Gray).

She also regularly walks 5-8 miles a day via a walking group or on walking holidays and rails against the stereotypes and language that’s used to describe older people, such as ‘he’s had a fall’ instead of ‘he’s fallen over’. I hope this attitude will be useful to her - and me - in the coming years.

I’ve long been interested in age and our perception of it. In my mid-30s, I was a lifestyle editor at an online magazine named High50, which was aimed at people in mid-life and founded by an ad man who turned 50 in the same year as Madonna.

The idea was to appeal to an age-group he felt was ignored by the media and brands, and who had a particular set of challenges – looking after kids as well as elderly parents, raising teenagers, going through the menopause.

We often had discussions about whether the website’s tagline ‘Age has its benefits’ was a good one. For me it wasn’t: I thought it had a sense of resignation about it, being based on the assumption that being of a ‘certain age’ would not be beneficial, or be negative in some way.

Two places that get the tone right are the website Glorious Broads that talks about women as ‘sages, not saints,’ and Ageist, a website and community that’s aimed at challenging expectations of getting older, and celebrated Apfel for changing the world with her ‘radical vision of what age could be’ on its Instagram account.

And, part of the reason Apfel lived so brilliantly for so long might be to do with her attitude towards age. She seemed to want to distance her age from her identity, saying people liked her for her ‘glamour, fantasy, humour’ rather than how old she was. “I think people like me because I’m different. I don’t think like everybody else,” she told the Guardian in 2015.*

And that last bit, about not thinking like everybody else, is the key thing, I think, in how we view our ageing selves and life in general.

Indeed, the Georgia research showed that: “Those who have positive attitudes about aging live longer, have better memory function and recover more easily from illnesses,” according to Barber in a post on the university’s website.

Maybe this has something to do with why Apfel lived for so long. May she gloriously rest in peace.

*In the same interview, Apfel also talked about not having children because she and her husband travelled so much for work, that she didn’t believe in kids having a nanny and because “having children is like protocol. You’re expected to. And I don’t like to be pigeonholed.”

Part of me screams ‘pigeonhole me please, I want to be like everybody else, I want to fit in!’ and the other part goes ‘fuck off’.