The stylist and TV personality has gone through a mid-life personal and professional transformation.
STACY LONDON
Is the
reinvention
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by ERIKA JANES | photographs by GEORGE CHINSEE
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Creative Direction
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Sheila Patel
Photographs
George Chinsee
Styling
Stacy London
These days, London is making the change of life her life’s mission. She started (and last year gracefully shuttered) her State of Menopause beauty brand, created the Menopause CEO Summit, and has taken that thanks-but-no-thanks TV show idea to Pinterest TV, hosting Midlife Magic with Stacy London.
What happened to Stacy London?
Helping women transform has been a throughline of London’s career, from her time as a fashion editor at Mademoiselle, where it was aspirational and a step removed, to WNTW, where it was in-your-face fabulous. So it makes sense that her next chapter is all about helping women thrive throughout one of life’s most, well, transformative times. “I don’t think people understand the radical freedom that this stage of life gives to you,” she says at the Flow photoshoot for this feature. London styled herself for the shoot (naturally) and along with the now trademark silver streak in her hair, chose a stylish blazer paired with sequined pants. It’s a business on top, party on the bottom look, and the duality is frankly a good metaphor for London’s life — indeed, many women’s lives — at this stage.
But achieving that sense of freedom wasn’t easy. Perimenopause was terrible for her. Over a Zoom call, she explains how she didn’t even realize she was in it until she was almost through it, with symptoms that scarily mimicked the issues her father, ill with heart disease, was experiencing. “I thought I was going to throw myself off a bridge,” she says. “I'm not kidding. My mood was a roller coaster. My physical health was a disaster. I did not know what was happening to me. I didn't find out until almost the end of perimenopause that I was in perimenopause. And I finally called my doctor at four o'clock in the morning and I was like, ‘I have to get help.’” Being put on hormone replacement therapy (HRT), she says, “changed my life.”
The severity of her experience was exacerbated by the fact that London ultimately lost her father during this time. “You know, a doctor said to me that perhaps some of the most difficult life stressors happen when we are least physically prepared to deal with them, and menopause is one of those times,” she says. “My father passed away while I was in perimenopause, and I have not, in these past five years, been able to stop thinking about that.”
Ask Stacy London to describe herself right now, and you won’t get a simple answer — certainly not the multi-hyphenate stylist-author-entrepreneur version of her work. “It'd be really easy to say, I'm in the middle of a transformation, I'm in the middle of an evolution, I'm in the middle of change — and I'm championing all of those things,” she says. “But for the first time in my life, [I’m] really trying to champion the difference between a cultural, internalized perception of ourselves, and a true lens through which to look at ourselves.”
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It'd be really easy to say, I'm in the middle of a transformation, I'm in the middle of an evolution, I'm in the middle of change — and I'm championing all of those things. But for the first time in my life, [I’m] really trying to champion the difference between a cultural, internalized perception of ourselves, and a true lens through which to look at ourselves.
STACY LONDON
The Change
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Reshma Gopaldas
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Erika Janes
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In the midst of her own big life changes, London grew frustrated at how neglected menopause is in our society — “how embarrassed and ashamed and afraid anybody with a uterus is of this conversation” — and how cultural standards that prize youth (or at least the appearance of it) have set us up to fail.
“We've been held to this cultural standard of always looking young, always being on top of our game, having perfect children or the perfect relationship, being in the best job…this whole kind of ideology that I think in midlife is the thing we start to question,” she says. “We've done all of the things right the first half of our life to figure out who we are and what we want, and achieve those goals. And menopause is Mother Nature's biological failsafe for you to look at yourself and those values and realize that you don't have an expiration date just because you can't have biological children [anymore].”
London is making it her mission to change the narrative. “If anybody asked me what I'm doing or who I feel like I am becoming, it is a person who is trying to change the idea that there cannot be this positive culture around this stage of life,” she says. “This is not just about how long we're going to live; it's how we're going to live well.”
That led London to launch her beauty brand, State of Menopause, in 2021. She was an early adopter in a white space that now boasts other A-list players, including Naomi Watts’ Stripes and Judy Greer’s Wile. “Maybe a little too early, to be honest,” she admits. “It was like trying to move a mountain to get people to talk about menopause. More than one person said that I was committing professional suicide by going from style to menopause because it was so unsexy. And I was like, well, that's it right there. You are the problem.”
Still, London made the decision to fold the company after two years as CEO, explaining, “I don't think menopause is essentially a beauty problem, and as much as I wanted us to be sort of firstline, acute symptomatic relief — we had cooling spray, we had CBD oil for pain — the fact is, that's one very small aspect of menopause. And I didn't realize that until I was already running the company.”
That ability to pivot and power forward is a skill London honed early on; she wrote in Fast Company how getting fired from her job at Mademoiselle — and the subsequent realization that she had stayed in that role too long — helped her get comfortable with knowing when and why it’s time to move on. “If I hadn't gotten fired from Mademoiselle, I never would have gotten What Not to Wear,” she elaborates. “And if I hadn't done State of Menopause, I would never be in a position to be an advocate for women the way I am now.”
After WNTW ended, a series of events transpired in London’s life that “brought me to my knees a little bit,” she says. She spent a year developing a shopping show and corresponding app that got bought but never made. She had hamstring surgery. She moved out of her apartment for a renovation that was supposed to take 6 weeks but lasted a year. Her cat got lung cancer. She had spinal surgery. And then, just as she started to get better, her dad got sick. London and her family spent most of 2018 with him before his passing in November.
The one bright spot was in 2019, when she fell in love with musician Cat Yezbak and spent the year traveling. But then the pandemic happened. “I feel like 10 years slipped through my fingers,” she says. But it all contributed to the realization that making menopause and midlife better for women who were going through the same radical life changes she was, was her calling. Because Stacy London has been through it. And yes, she embraces the good parts of aging we hear about — the no-longer-caring-about-other-people’s-opinions part — but also understands the bad parts midlife women can face, including a plateauing of earning power, job loss, and ageism, to name just a few.
Here, London leans forward into the camera. “It’s why I wear this necklace,” she says, holding up a gold chain with the word AND on it. “To me, this is the most hopeful word in the English language,” she explains. “And it is about the fact that two things can be true at the same time. You can feel like you are out of fucks to give, or that you know what to ask for in bed or that you don't care about sex anymore, whatever it is, and also feel like your world is falling apart at the same time.”
The Pivot
That juxtaposition is also why London had her heart set on doing her show about midlife women — to go beyond the platitudes and talk about what a midlife pivot can actually look like, and “how do we take a crisis and turn it into a renaissance?”
So yes, women need more than a cooling spray to navigate menopause, and London, with her own experience as a catalyst, wants to be the one helping them get through it with grace. She’s a connector, a wise friend who’s been there, done that, and can help you do it too. A proud Gen Xer, she wants her generation’s legacy to be defining our attitudes around aging and menopause, and making midlife something to aspire to.
“I don't believe there's anything to re-create or re-design; we are not dealing with values that have to be somehow transformed,” she says. “We have to create new ones. And I really believe that that's the work. For me, it started with style. But it's always been about, how are we looking at the darkest parts of ourselves, culturally and personally, universally and individually, and saying, How do I make this better? How do I make this easier for whoever comes after me?”
This is an actual question that people ask Google — so frequently that it appears, unprompted, when you type her name into the search engine. The implication, of course, is that she’s gone away; is somehow no longer relevant and has been relegated to the “where are they now?” category of former television stars. It’s true that London hasn’t regularly graced the small screen in years — What Not to Wear, the hit reality TV show she co-hosted for a decade, ended in 2013, and her stint as a contributor on The View ended in 2016. And it’s also true that London herself has, at times, felt no longer relevant. She said as much in a blisteringly honest essay for Oprah Daily last year, when she described the crickets response to a show she pitched in 2019 about midlife women. “I’d woefully, and quite quickly, become out of date and out of style,” she wrote.
But don’t for a moment think that London has gone anywhere. What happened to Stacy London is nothing short of an evolution — a personal and professional transformation brought on by midlife and menopause, grief and growth, and the “no fucks to give” privilege that comes with her 54 years of age.