Opinion: Women over 40 have been sidelined for too long. Now we push back

THERE’S A PARTICULAR kind of pain that comes with invisibility. Not the dramatic, all-at-once kind but the slow, creeping kind.

The kind of discomfort that shows up in a dressing room mirror, or in the scroll of an Instagram feed, or the quiet moment when a woman looks at a wardrobe full of clothes and feels, inexplicably, like none of them belongs to her any more.

I know this pain because I watched it every single day.

Working as a personal shopper at Kildare Village, I began to notice a pattern in the women who sought me out. They were almost always over 35, and almost always, they’d lost something; not just their style, but their certainty. Their mojo. That easy, grounded confidence that says: “I know who I am, and I know how to show up in the world.”

Covid had scrambled everything. The lockdowns ended, the world reopened, and suddenly these women were standing in front of their wardrobes, wondering: Who am I now?

The leggings and sweatshirts that had carried them through years of working from home no longer felt right. Workwear had shifted. Bodies had changed; weight gained, weight lost. The go-to pieces that had once felt like armour were either outdated, ill-fitting or simply didn’t reflect the woman looking back in the mirror. Style was back on the agenda. But confidence? That was harder to retrieve.

What struck me wasn’t just the practical challenge of rebuilding a wardrobe. It was the emotional toll of it: the dispirited faces and the negative self-talk. These were bright, capable, accomplished women, and they were unravelling over a pair of trousers.

Finding your style

So what did they do? What would any of us do? They looked to the world around them for answers, for inspiration. They scrolled. They searched. They looked to advertising, to fashion campaigns, to popular culture, hoping to find someone who looked like them, lived like them, who might spark something.

And found almost nothing.

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Because the woman over 40, despite being one of the most powerful consumers on the planet, despite her brand loyalty, her disposable income and spending power, is virtually invisible in mainstream media.

The brands she supports, funds and champions? They cast models in their 20s to sell her a dress. They build campaigns that whisper, without a word: this isn’t really for you because… You are not enough. Your youth is gone, and with it, a value, an identity.

That message repeated, reinforced, everywhere she looks, doesn’t just affect how she feels about shopping. It affects how she feels about herself. She experiences an invisibility in the world, and what’s worse, an invisibility to herself.

Just when you’ve earned your stripes, when you’ve clocked up the flying hours, weathered life’s bigger storms and finally arrived at a place of knowing yourself, of being genuinely comfortable in your own skin, that’s the precise moment the fashion and beauty worlds decide they’re done talking to you. Oh, they’ll take your money gladly. But acknowledging that you’re the customer quietly keeping their lights on? That’s a conversation they’d rather not have. We are, it seems, their dirty little secret.

And here’s the part that stings the most: we’re letting them get away with it. We’re being nudged into the shadows, handed a script that says stay quiet, step back, make yourself smaller and too many of us are following it without question.

Standing our ground

But why would we? We are women who have lived. Those who carry wisdom earned the hard way, perspective that can’t be bought, and an understanding of what actually matters that only comes with time. That is not a liability. That is extraordinary.

And our invisibility doesn’t just cost us, it costs the women coming up behind us, too. The next generation needs to see us: thriving, visible, unapologetic.

Because if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. When we allow ourselves to be erased, we take something away from every woman who needs to know that the best years aren’t the ones behind her.

There is another story waiting to be told, one about ageing not as a retreat, but as a release. About the liberation that comes when you stop performing for the world and start living for yourself. About the deep, quiet joy of self-acceptance.

Women Unbranded

That is the story Women Unbranded exists to tell. That’s why I created a grassroots movement that is building a community, shining a light on the value of women over 40. Not just her value to the world, but the value she deserves to see in herself.

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At a time when women are facing growing pressure to inject, lift, fill and slice — in pursuit of the perfect weight or the frantic fight against ageing — Women Unbranded seeks to offer something quieter and more radical. Permission to be you. There’s no judgment if women want to pursue a change in image, but we also want to remind them that perfection is optional and that there’s nothing wrong with simply being yourself and ageing in the world just as you are.

We want to encourage women to view ageing as a release, rather than a retreat. So many of the women I had worked with over those years had felt that, really, from midlife, their lives were effectively coming to some sort of close, and unless they’d opted for the aggressive beauty and bodily adjustments, they’d have no real chance to rage against the dying light. This is the message they’d received from society and media. And it was wrong.

At Women Unbranded, we want to encourage women over 40 to stop performing for the world and start living for themselves. To help them see that there is a real, deep and genuine confidence that comes along with knowing who exactly they really are.

This isn’t a brand in a traditional sense; it’s more of a response to an issue. A collective pushback, really, and a grassroots movement based on the belief that women in middle age are not fading from relevance, but moving into an empowered phase of their lives. 

We bring these women together to help them share their experiences of being this age, along with their sense of feeling invisible, and then we help them challenge that. We question why the same large fashion and beauty brands that rely so heavily on their loyalty as customers are also the same ones excluding them. 

Because this isn’t just about being seen. It’s about being recognised by the world as women who are still evolving, still contributing and still very much here.

And perhaps now, for the first time, we’re doing it entirely on our own terms.

Cathy O’Connor is a designer, fashion writer and stylist. She is the founder of Women Unbranded. More at www.womenunbranded.com. 

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