Edel Coffey: Learning to love ourselves as we get older

Edel Coffey: getting older oughtn't be painful

It’s been a busy month for ex-supermodels. Take a look at this month’s Vogue magazine and you might think you have been transported back to 1996. Linda Evangelista is on the cover, and Kate Moss is inside promoting her new wellness brand, Cosmoss, which she launched this week.

Some have expressed amusement at the idea of Moss launching a wellness brand; Kate has always been the Keith Richards of supermodels and has referred to her own adrenal glands and nervous system as ‘f***ed’. But maybe that’s exactly what the wellness industry needs. Someone who has had her authentic struggles with bad living and now wants to share the joys of clean living, meditation and herbal tea (she has two types for sale on her Cosmoss website, FYI).

But a secondary motivation might be that Moss is savvy enough to know that, at 48, her modelling opportunities are curtailed in a world where beauty is still defined by youth, and it’s time to develop a side-side-hustle. (She already has a side hustle in the shape of her Kate Moss modelling agency.) Even though Kate is still supernaturally beautiful, she knows she has to diversify, to use the correct term, in the face of ageing.

Linda Evangelista was also back in the news recently after revealing she had been in hiding for six years following a fat-freezing beauty treatment that ‘brutally disfigured’ her.

She said she was so depressed by the side-effects of her beauty treatment that she hated herself and she still can’t bear to look in the mirror or to have anyone touch her body.

Even supermodels are vulnerable to insecurities it seems. Bear with me here. I realise sympathy for supermodels whose cosmetic treatments have gone wrong is not top of the empathy-ometer at the moment but it was still sad to hear Evangelista describe how she was so desperate to undo the effects of her treatment that she went on a ‘zero calorie’ diet, trying to live on a stick of celery or an apple a day or just water. 

Now, she told Vogue, ‘I am trying to love myself as I am’. It was sad to think that as a mature woman in her late fifties, Evangelista was still holding herself to such stringent and archaic beauty standards, refusing to accept any change in her appearance. At what age do we become exempt from these punishing standards I wondered?

Ironically, Evangelista’s traumatic experience has rejuvenated her modelling career and catapulted her back onto the cover of Vogue where she looks absolutely beautiful.

However, she wanted to make clear in the interview that a lot of trickery went into that shoot. Hidden tapes and elastics were used to help her deal with her insecurities about how she looks now. For a shoot proclaiming loving yourself as you are, creating pictures that presented a false impression of Evangelista struck a bum note. 

Wasn’t this very false ideal the thing that probably drove Evangelista to get the beauty treatment that disfigured her in the first place? It felt weird that she and Vogue would reinforce and perpetuate such ideals in this context, especially as Evangelista is trying to learn to love herself as she is. But she justified the trickery by saying it took care of her insecurities, and ‘for photos I always think we’re here to create fantasies.We’re creating dreams.’

I was struck by the differences between her interview and Kate Moss’s interview a few pages along. Kate is photographed topless in a pair of bubblebum-pink leather trouser-boots rolling around in the flowers in her Cotswolds garden.

She looks great and also looks every one of her 48 years. She says she’s never felt better. Evangelista on the other hand seems to be chasing the ghost of her youth. I understand that Evangelista’s relationship with her looks is going to be radically different to the average woman’s. 

If you’ve spent your life since the age of 14 as a legendary supermodel who doesn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day, it’s likely your identity and self-worth is defined by your beauty and the ageing and changing of that beauty is likely to be a painful experience. 

Even I as a mere mortal woman have found it depressing to watch my jawline become jowly and my waistline become stubbornly thicker as I get older, but I try to keep it in perspective. It’s not the sum of who I am, it’s not the sum of my life.

I suppose that’s why it’s good to have other things on the go, like your own wellness business or modelling agency, or even just simple things like good friends and hobbies. Moss seems to have always understood this. She’s always had a side-hustle even at the top of her modelling game when she collaborated with TopShop. 

I wondered if that is the difference between her apparent attitude and Evangelista’s, an acceptance that everything changes, everything grows old, everything dies. 

Beautiful queens must eventually relinquish their grip on the title of being fairest of them all. But in doing so, there are consolations. We can discover the many other beautiful aspects of ourselves as human beings, many strengths and talents we never even knew that we had. It needn’t always be painful. It can in fact be joyful.