“If you love it, wear it”
This woman shows how middle-aged women ‘have to dress’
© InsideCreativeHouse / Adobe Stock
Luisa Dunn, 52, has made it her mission to create visibility for middle-aged women on social media.
“If you love it, wear it” – “If you love it, wear it”. With these simple words, 52-year-old model Luisa Dunn is wowing the social media world right now. In her photos and in her videos, which she presents both on Instagram and on TikTok, Luisa goes against the social idea that a woman over 50 has to dress “according to her age”.
Luisa fights against age discrimination
“By sharing our stories and taking our space, we can break through the stereotypes and make aging look so freakin’ empowering and fabulous that everyone looks forward to it,” she told BuzzFeed. On her website on Instagram, she describes herself as “anti-ageism”, i.e. against “ageism”, which means the negative evaluation of people based on their age. In her “Fashion Over 50” series, Luisa shows herself in dazzling outfits with strong colors, in satin fabrics, faux fur and body-hugging silhouettes – in short: she presents herself (self-)confidently and with a lot of style in all the fashion parts that society does not otherwise seen on a woman over 50.
The traditional images of middle-aged women in advertising and marketing campaigns don’t reflect what women would actually like to wear, Luisa said. Through her images and videos, she seeks to challenge and disrupt society’s notion of what a woman should and shouldn’t wear in midlife. And the message is apparently very well received: the model can look forward to 211,000 followers on TikTok and almost 500,000 followers on Instagram.
“Our body is much more than looks and age”
“I believe that the visibility and representation of all age groups are powerful tools to create a more age-appropriate social landscape,” Luisa continues. One possibility here is to change the image “that we have all our lives of aging and of women from a certain age”. The representation of age is a “powerful social tool” to defend against age discrimination and against the fact that “women over 50 and 60 are traditionally dismissed as useless,” says Luisa.
By authentically sharing the good as well as the bad, women would see that they are not alone in their midlife struggles – “and that our body is so much more than its looks or its age”.
Sources used: instagram.com, tiktok.com, discrimination-berlin.de, buzzfeed.com