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Apparently This is What Winning at 59 Looks Like Now
People don’t seem to be too happy about it
Nicole Kidman is 59 and on the September cover of British Vogue. I saw the post online and thought: wow. Good for her. Good for all us “over 50s.”
It’s a significant moment.
Yet I didn’t entirely feel like celebrating. Which surprised me. Because watching someone break barriers is normally something I cheer on. Especially when the barrier breaker is a woman my own age.
Nicole, like every woman, has a right to be exactly who she wants to be. To care about beauty — or not. To work constantly — or disappear for a year. To fall in love again, stay single, wear the dress, refuse the dress, chase the next role, or decide she’s done enough. That, surely, is the point of exercising those rights.
What interested me wasn’t Nicole’s choice. It was ours.
Because invariably, one woman becomes evidence of something larger. Look, we say. This is what 59 looks like now.
And that’s where I get uneasy.
Not because Nicole Kidman shouldn’t look as she does. That’s her call, and the decision of the magazine editor, to be frank.
