Opinion: Women over 40 have been sidelined for too long. Now we push back |
THERE’S A PARTICULAR kind of pain that comes with invisibility. Not the dramatic, all-at-once kind but the slow, creeping kind.
The kind of discomfort that shows up in a dressing room mirror, or in the scroll of an Instagram feed, or the quiet moment when a woman looks at a wardrobe full of clothes and feels, inexplicably, like none of them belongs to her any more.
I know this pain because I watched it every single day.
Working as a personal shopper at Kildare Village, I began to notice a pattern in the women who sought me out. They were almost always over 35, and almost always, they’d lost something; not just their style, but their certainty. Their mojo. That easy, grounded confidence that says: “I know who I am, and I know how to show up in the world.”
Covid had scrambled everything. The lockdowns ended, the world reopened, and suddenly these women were standing in front of their wardrobes, wondering: Who am I now?
The leggings and sweatshirts that had carried them through years of working from home no longer felt right. Workwear had shifted. Bodies had changed; weight gained, weight lost. The go-to pieces that had once felt like armour were either outdated, ill-fitting or simply didn’t reflect the woman looking back in the mirror. Style was back on the agenda. But confidence? That was harder to retrieve.
What struck me wasn’t just the practical challenge of rebuilding a wardrobe. It was the emotional toll of it: the dispirited faces and the negative self-talk. These were bright, capable, accomplished women, and they were unravelling over a pair of trousers.
So what did they do? What would any of us do? They looked to the world around them for answers, for........