Thank you to local news maven (and author!) Janine Annett for covering our book signing with Lyn Slater, the Accidental Icon last Friday. The article appeared in Janine’s new substack Rivertowns Current and was also picked up by The Hudson Independent.
Author with Roots in Dobbs Ferry Puts New Spin on "How to Be Old"
"Accidental Icon" Lyn Slater, 70, takes a positive approach to aging
MAY 12, 2024
by Janine Annett
Dobbs Ferry — In a world where many women hesitate to reveal their age, Lyn Slater is a breath of fresh air. At 70, she’s upending preconceived notions of what it means to be a septuagenarian woman in her new book, How to Be Old: Lessons in Living Boldy from the Accidental Icon.
A cultural influencer, model, writer, content creator, and former professor, Slater became an “accidental icon” at age 61, when she started a fashion blog by that name. Soon after, Slater took social media by storm, acquiring more than half a million followers on Instagram and nearly a million followers across all platforms.
Slater turned to fashion blogging after she couldn’t find any websites or magazines that spoke to her, offering an “urban, modern, intellectual aesthetic” aimed at women who live “interesting but ordinary lives” and are “smart, creative, fashion forward, fit, thoughtful, engaged, related, and, most importantly, clear and comfortable with who they are," she states on her website.
“The year I turned 59, I couldn’t find anything to wear,” Slater writes in How to Be Old. “Everything that hung in my closet or on racks in stores no longer inspired.” In the book’s prologue, Slater shares that her own mother lived until 95.
The author goes on to discuss the ups and downs of reinventing herself, and challenges readers to live boldly at any age and think about aging and fashion and beauty standards in new ways.
In March, Slater celebrated the release of her book with an appearance at the New York Public Library, where she was in conversation with New York Times writer and author Chloé Cooper Jones.
At a recent appearance at Picture Book, the pop-up bookstore inside the co-working space HudCo in Dobbs Ferry, Slater chatted amiably with visitors and signed copies of How to Be Old for fans of all ages.
Not only did Slater grow up in Dobbs Ferry, she has strong connections to Hastings as well. “That’s where my mother lived as a child, and at the end of her life, she lived at Andrus [nursing home]. My brother-in-law also grew up in Hastings,” Slater told the Rivertowns Current. For high school, Slater attended Our Lady of Victory Academy, at 565 Broadway in Dobbs Ferry (now the site of Mercy University) which closed in 2011.
Slater currently lives in Peekskill and writes a column for the Peekskill Herald called “How to be Old in Peekskill.”
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