How I became an accidental fashion icon at 64 | Lyn Slater | TEDxMidAtlantic

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Transcriber: Silvia Monti Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs Hello! So, most people think my sunglasses are a fashion statement, but I have to tell you, I wear them because I'm a little bit shy. So I'm going to take a big risk ... (Cheers) (Applause) and give it to you. All right, so I'm really excited to talk to you tonight about this extraordinary journey that I have been on the last three years, since I've started writing my blog "Accidental Icon." So I wrote this blog because I was feeling very stifled in the way that I could write about things that I really cared about in academia. And so I decided that I wanted to write more creatively. I wanted to do some visual storytelling, and I wanted to use something that could engage a lot more people into conversations about important things. And so I actually chose fashion as the lens through which I was going to do it. And I have to say, if anyone had told me - because it really was a passion project, I had no endgame, no outcomes in mind - that what has happened to me would happen to me, I would have said that they were stark raving crazy. And so what has happened to me is - you can see on the slide - I got to walk the runway at New York Fashion Week, my image is on a bus in London, and I'm in Shanghai, China, telling people how you can start thinking about developing personal style. So the interesting thing about my story is that I'm not the one who's been telling it. And so that's really what my talk is going to be about; the difference between how the press has decided to tell my story and what the real story is. So this is a post that went up five months ago, and it went absolutely viral. Within 24 hours, I had 100,000 new followers. And in social media, you know, my first response was, "Hey, let me unpack this," because getting that many followers in 24 hours is amazing, and it took me three years of very hard work to get that amount of followers by doing a lot of engaging and thinking about the kinds of content. So as I started to look at this, I realized they're telling a fairy tale. And so how many of you - I'm probably dating myself here, which is fine because that's what I embrace - heard of the cartoons, or remember it, "Rocky and Bullwinkle?" Okay. They had this segment called "Fractured Fairy Tales." And as a kid, I used to think this was absolutely hysterical. And basically, quickly, the Fractured Fairy Tale is, you know, you take a classic tale, you add modern characters, you add modern elements and you make us a moral that's much more relevant and engageable for today. And so I realized this is a Fractured Fairy Tale. And as I started to read on, I start getting a little bit annoyed about how they're characterizing me as an "ordinary" professor. (Laughter) So the Cinderella story, after I dug in, it's a Cinderella fairy tale, and in this case, Cinderella is 63 years old, she has grey hair, she has wrinkles. She's a social work professor, which in the mind of the public is probably the most antithetical thing to a fashion icon you could ever think. And through some random event at New York Fashion Week three years ago, she becomes famous, she becomes known. She upends all these traditional ways we think about beauty and who's allowed to come to the big ball or, in my case, into the fashion industry. And so I think what's interesting for me is that it's actually the ordinary parts of me that I have embraced which have caused me, I believe, to enjoy the level of success that I had been able to have in this venue. And so those two things are, I have embraced the process of aging. The other thing is, I have really embraced trying to be a good teacher, and I have learned so much from my students and in class. So I'm rewriting this Fractured Fairy Tale a little bit, and I'm going to flesh out Cinderella's character, and just quickly tell you a few key, ordinary things that I learned from being an ordinary professor that has actually made me very successful, I think, in this world. So the first is being process-driven. Because I really didn't know the fashion industry, I was pretty clueless. So I really didn't have outcomes or endgames because I didn't know what I would find. And I learned this in a classroom. Because I would have these wonderful lesson plans and academic outcomes that I wanted to see, and of course a student's going to come in and ask a question or tell a story that is going to completely derail your well-planned lesson. But you stop a moment and you say, "I'm going to go with this because I think it could be interesting." And inevitably, at the end of a class like that, you and the students are leaving and you're saying, "That was the best class we ever had." And so that's the approach I've taken towards this project. The second thing is to be inclusive. And as a professor, I can't speak to one person in a classroom. I have to speak to students who might have a disability. I have to speak to people who are coming back to school after a career in doing something else or haven't been to college in a long time. So I've had to challenge myself to think about ways that can include and engage and speak to a huge, wide audience. And when I thought Accidental could start becoming something, all of these folks said to me, "Oh, well, now you have to have a target market. Who are you talking to? You have to segment. You have to identify." And I really resisted that because I wanted to just talk to people who wanted to talk about fashion and who thought maybe we could use it to make some interesting change in the world. And so I have followers - my youngest is 13, my oldest is 90. They're from almost every country in the world, every possible culture. And I think that was a very helpful thing to do. I think another thing that was really important is to experiment and to make the most out of mistakes and happy accidents. And I often tell my students, "You know what? The best learning is going to come from messing up." And they don't believe it because they see me as a successful professional. But here's a little story from Accidental Icon. I had been asked - how many people have heard of Refinery29? Okay. It's a pretty big millennial web platform. And they asked me to come in. They wanted to do a photoshoot and have me be part of their holiday calendar. And so I get there, and there's this kind of short, young-looking woman, and she's bopping around. She's giving people water. She's coming to me and saying, "What kind of music would you like when you have your photoshoot?" And then she came up to me and said, "Can I take a photo for your Instagram?" So she took a photo of me. I thought it was a really good photo, and I thought she was an intern. And so I said, "Do you have a card?" You know, I thought she was starting out. And I said, "Sometimes I could use another photographer, so it would be great, you know, if I had your card." So I go home and, bad professor, I did not do my research before I went to the job. I did it after. And come to find out this little woman is one of the founders and creative directors of Refinery29. (Laughter) So after I was able to overcome my horror and my dismay and my embarrassment, I decided to write a blog post about it poking fun at myself. And I ended it by saying, "Wow, I hope maybe she'll let me be her intern." And she actually read it, and she thought it was hysterical. And I've had many lovely projects with Refinery29 after that. And what's interesting is, I tell people in the fashion business about this terrible mistake I made. And they're horrified, like you could never recover from something like that. So this sort of just-me-being-me kind of approach has really been able to take me very far. And so I think the message that, you know, the fairy tale says, "Oh, everybody wants fame, and everybody wants to be very special." But the real secret to my becoming known has been that I just really am okay with being me. (Cheers) (Applause) And so that is really the message that I hope to leave all of you with. And finally, have fun. I am having a blast. I am going everywhere. I'm doing things I never would have dreamed could happen to me. And I really think if I had a business plan or an endgame or I was really outcome-focused, I would miss all of these wonderful and lovely opportunities that have been coming my way. So my superpower is ... just be your old, ordinary self. Thank you so much. (Applause)
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Channel: TEDx Talks
Views: 104,443
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Aging, Culture, Fashion, Identity
Id: n-taouqUe4c
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)
Published: Fri Oct 05 2018
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