Happy Sunday and International Women's Day, TED Talks Daily listeners.
I'm Elise Hugh.
As we often do on Sundays, today we're sharing a recent episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you.
My lens around style doesn't have anything to do with style anymore.
It's about physicality.
That is from stylist and fashion consultant Stacey London.
What do I want to be able to do?
How do I keep myself strong?
Stacey's message has resonated for many women around the world.
And so today we're sharing a special episode from TED Health, where she joins host Dr Shoshana Ungerleider for a conversation from TED 2025 about why women are so embarrassed to talk about aging.
For Stacey, aging became a chance to reassess her relationship with her body.
Her best advice on what you can do to feel good in your own skin?
Throw away the most painful pair of shoes you own.
Listen to TED Health wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.
This is TED Health, a podcast from TED, and I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter.
Today I'm excited to present a conversation with my friend stylist, fashion consultant, author and magazine editor Stacey London, of TLC's What Not to Wear.
In recent years, Stacey's become a powerful voice in a space that's long been overlooked.
Midlife and menopause.
Through her writing, public speaking and advocacy, she's reframing this transition not as a decline, but as a time of reinvention of power and deep self-knowing.
She's on a mission to bring honesty, humor and visibility to a time of life that has historically been shrouded in silence.
It's a topic close to my heart too.
As someone who entered surgical menopause in my early 40s, I know firsthand how isolating and confusing this phase can be when we don't talk about it openly.
That's why I am so grateful for voices like Stacey's that are helping to change this conversation.
She joined me this year at the 2025 TED conference in Vancouver, where we explored all of these big ideas on stage together.
I can't wait to share that with you now.
But before we dive in, a quick break to hear from our sponsors.
And now, my conversation with Stacey London at the 2025 TED Conference.
Stacey, I'm just so grateful that you're here today.
Thank you for having me.
Absolutely.
I first got to know you.
You didn't get to know me through my living room TV set watching What Not to Wear with my sister.
Such a formative show for so many of us.
And now you're back with something new, and I'm excited to get into that.
But before we do, I want to start with this idea that our culture loves a good comeback story.
And to me, midlife can feel a bit like that.
A return, a reimagining, a new chapter.
Where are we meeting you right now in your life?
I would say you're meeting me at the apex of it.
Not simply because it's the now and sort of.
You know, I'm not interested in really rehashing past experiences and I don't know what's coming.
But I think that the last decade for me really, which is almost synonymous with when What Not to Wear ended, became a real journey of self-expression of which I was not prepared.
I was not prepared to realize that I was so attached to the show.
I wasn't prepared to find out that my identity was so inclusive of the show.
And it wasn't like I didn't have jobs before that show.
I was a fashion editor for many years at magazines before I ever got to television.
But I didn't know who Stacey was without What Not to Wear.
And it was actually kind of embarrassing and I was ashamed of the fact that I didn't recognize that that was going to happen when I was the one who sort of facilitated the end of the show.
I quit.
And I think that the show itself had run its course, right?
Let's be honest.
And makeovers were kind of no longer the darling of reality television.
We were getting a lot more things like My 600-lb Life and Dr Pimple Popper, and it was no longer so much about teaching as it was about shocking.
That, to me, was nowhere that I was interested in going.
And I wasn't a real housewife.
I don't think I ever will be.
And I wasn't sure what to do or where to go.
And one of the biggest things that I remember writing about quite a bit after I left.
What Not to Wear was.
My inability to understand the leap from television to social media, right?
And being on Twitter from 2008, being on Instagram around, I don't know, 2013, something like that.
I was late to Instagram in that game.
Facebook was no longer about like checking in with your aunts.
All of a sudden, you know everything was commercialized and I didn't even know what it meant to be an influencer.
I wasn't making brand deals.
I didn't know at all how to move into that space.
I find it really silly to talk to my phone if I'm not talking to another person.
I don't know how to look at myself and tell you things about what I ate or what I'm wearing.
Why do you care?
I don't care what you're doing.
I really found it such a bizarre way to interact with people.
And obviously, what an idiot I was.
I probably lost out on a lot of money.
But at the same time I felt very disconnected from that kind of media and that kind of communication.
And one thing that reality television meant for me was about being an expert.
Truly being an expert, right?
10,000 hours at least of experience.
I knew what I was talking about.
I took that very seriously.
Actually, probably a little too seriously.
But what I learned about social media and the kind of forefront of that technology really taught me was that expertise no longer had the same kind of value.
It was really about shared experience and your own personal taste guides that experience.
I look at you and I see somebody who loves color, right?
And I'm pointing to somebody in the audience because we're on a podcast.
And she loves color.
If you love color, you're probably going to follow people who have a penchant for color when they talk about fashion.
So you don't need me the same way that you did when it was just television and we weren't talking to each other across the world.
And I have spent this decade figuring out who I am, both in the face of that kind of technological progress, that kind of digital sense of isolation and alienation, and who I want to be as a person.
So imagine my shock when you invited me here which, first of all, coming to TED, has been on my bucket list forever, as an audience member for the last 15 years.
So imagine what it's like to be up here.
But also, how I was going to continue to have a message of any kind or make a living.
What does it look like in the face of a complete media reinvention, where the kind of old media that you were an expert at no longer exists?
Remember, I started in print.
I saw print go the way of the dinosaur.
I saw TV go the way of the dinosaur.
And I missed the bus for the rest of it.
So I don't have a YouTube channel.
I don't even have a website.
And I thought, what do I do?
Do I go back to styling people?
I don't know if I have the energy for that.
I don't know if I have the patience for that.
I don't know.
And I've had to do a great deal of reassessing at a time in life when I would say reassessment is perhaps the key to a true renaissance.
Well, we're going to get there.
Everything you've said really hits home for me.
I'm in my 40s, and I've been thinking a lot about how this stage of life isn't just about change.
It's about stepping in to who we really are, I think.
And something that you've said that I really love is that aging isn't just about getting older.
It's about becoming more you.
So many of us have been conditioned to fear aging.
What was your biggest fear about getting older?
And what do you think about that fear now?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think the same fear of getting older that a lot of people have, right?
I mean, our societal and cultural pressures are really very difficult.
And I would say that this is for everybody.
You know, I used to say, oh, it's so much worse for women.
I don't know if that's true.
I think all people of all genders really struggle with aging.
We struggle with The fact that aging limits our ability to do certain things.
I think we have to face the fact that we don't look the way we used to look, and that is hard.
I think that look, the older we get, the closer we are to the end of our lives rather than the beginning.
And because we don't talk enough about death, which Shoshana and I love to talk about.
It means that we are in denial about how precious life is.
We can't value life if we don't understand and accept the end of it.
And so for me, I think it was all of those things.
And I walked into midlife around 45, 46 really feeling death, like I was fighting myself at every turn.
I didn't recognize myself.
I didn't feel like myself.
I didn't know what my place was in the world.
I had spent about a year auditioning as a sort of guest host for The View, and then I was not chosen as one of the permanent hosts.
And that was when they were doubling down on politics.
And at that point, I was really just known for style.
And I was like, what am I going to do?
Say that somebody looks trustworthy because they're wearing navy?
I didn't have much to offer in that arena.
And so it wasn't that I didn't understand their decision, but I was devastated.
I put everything into thinking that that was going to be sort of the next step for me.
And there is a lot to be said for reducing expectation and increasing curiosity.
For me, it was a huge learning curve to recognize that what I thought was going to happen to me was not.
And my phone stopped ringing.
And I wasn't sure where I was going.
I was extremely lost and extremely low.
When I started to feel physically very different, I really struggled.
I couldn't run as much anymore.
My body hurt.
I couldn't sleep.
All of a sudden, I had insomnia.
I had racing thoughts.
I mean, it was one thing after another.
Headaches, dry skin, dry hair.
I couldn't understand what was happening to me.
And I had doctors tell me, you're depressed.
Do you want to go on an SSRI?
You're anxious.
Do you want anti-anxiety medication?
But nobody was linking anything together for me.
Nobody was making it make sense.
It was just.
How do we get you to stop feeling this way?
Not what is the root cause of these feelings?
And I found that very frustrating.
So I started asking deeper questions and doing my own homework, because I did not find anybody in the medical profession who was actually advocating for me.
I felt like people were just trying to kind of shove me out the door.
And I got pissed.
My deep dive into what became what I call my menopause journey and experience to be the time that I also recognized that I had been a people pleaser my whole life.
My whole life.
And when people told me something, I took it at face value.
I said, yep, okay, especially in the medical profession.
You have this, you do this, okay.
And when a doctor finally said to me, I think you're going through menopause, you'll get over it.
I thought, gosh, I must be overreacting.
I mean, this person is telling me it's not a big deal.
Until I was like, I'm not overreacting.
I have not been taught to trust my gut or believe myself.
And I need to reassess how I'm going to manage this or I won't survive it.
Well, we're going to come back to a lot on menopause.
But I think so many of us carry around these invisible scripts about what aging is supposed to look like, how it's supposed to go down.
And hearing you talk about that reminds me that we do have the power to rewrite those stories.
You've talked about shedding old beliefs about what aging looks like.
And for so long, I think getting older, until now, has been something to hide.
But I think we're both in the business of flipping that narrative.
What's a belief about aging that you had to unlearn?
And what have you chosen to replace it with?
I mean, I think I had to unlearn sort of what we're talking about when we're actually saying aging, what we're talking about when we're saying old or elderly.
What does that actually mean?
And why are we embarrassed to talk about aging?
It's a little bit the way we're embarrassed to talk about being sick, right?
Which I also don't understand.
That it's sort of some sort of weakness on our part that we didn't do something right.
And I think the most interesting thing for me was that you know I used to be like I'm going to be that crazy old lady you know, wearing all the clothes I want to wear, and I'm going to be so cute when I'm 85.
But it really neglected to account for 40 to 80.
40 to 80, I just kind of, I just skipped over it.
I was like, you know, I didn't even think about what do mature women look like?
What does mature skin look like?
I didn't think about what the actual process of getting old was going to look like.
And for me, I thought menopause happened in your 70s and 80s, because when I was five years old I thought Edith Bunker was in her 70s.
I didn't know that Edith, when she yelled at Archie and apparently was going through, the change was 47.
Jean Stapleton was 47.
I mean, thank God for modern day haircuts.
Because we would all look like the Golden Girls believe me, you know, J-Lo included if we didn't have better hair.
So there's definitely that.
Better hair.
I love that.
Stacey, what's something that you love about getting older that you didn't expect?
Oh, I love everything about getting older.
You know I hate the idea that it's so cliche to say it, but I have never truly believed until this age in my life that no is a complete sentence.
No, I swear.
No, no, period is a complete sentence.
And I don't need to tell you why.
And I don't have to make excuses for not wanting to go out.
And I don't have to be a social butterfly to have friends.
And I can stick to my version of happy instead of making you happy first.
That took a lot for me to learn.
It took a lot for me to learn.
And I'll tell you that part of that really was because reality television did a little bit of a wonky number on me.
I think really just in terms of my mentality.
What Not to Wear was absolutely, truly me and Clinton.
We did not have a script.
We had a format.
But we knew what we were going to say.
It came out of our mouths.
We didn't have an IFB.
We didn't have a producer being like, say this now, which a lot of reality shows do.
I hate to break it to you if you're under that illusion.
But we were the real deal.
But it was also that I was hired because I could be snarky and because I could be funny or because I could think on my feet.
But...
There was a reason that I could be snarky.
There was a reason I could be bordering on mean sometimes.
And I would say that's because I was so good at being internally critical.
I was so good with self-loathing that it was real easy to be mean.
And the great thing about What Not to Wear, which really changed my life significantly, is that it taught me compassion.
And not just compassion, it taught me self-compassion.
Because every contributor that came on What Not to Wear had insecurities that were writ large.
And when they would talk about them, I would look at these beautiful people and I would say how is it possible that you could think this about yourself?
How is it possible that you can't see what I see?
And if that's true, then I didn't have any excuses for saying all those awful things to myself.
What I say is, if you have negative Nelly talking to you nonstop 24-7, negative Nelly has to meet positive Polly and let them fight it out in the ring right.
Give positive Polly a fighting chance here.
And it taught me that if I could see such good and such beauty in other people, then I had to have the grace to give it to myself as well.
It made me good at my job, and then it made my job a lot harder.
People said I got less snarky over time.
That's true.
I got a lot less snarky over time because I couldn't do it anymore.
I didn't feel it anymore.
And because I didn't feel it for myself.
It was very hard to just come up with it in service of some kind of entertainment.
Didn't feel funny anymore.
Didn't feel like the way in which to communicate that I believed in somebody's ability to change their own lives and to be able to help guide them.
So over time, I think Clinton and I became a lot softer, really, as people, because we saw what the power of care and kindness can do and even though the show was meant to be entertaining we all knew that it was going to be entertaining and some of us even knew that it was meant to be educational a lot of the rules that we taught people people still shop with to this day and they love to tell me when they meet me you know oh i do right i define my waist i wear pointy toe shoes i know how to elongate my leg line blah blah blah love it i love it we taught you geometry essentially um You know, it's practical geometry.
I feel good about that.
It was sort of like a master's class.
But that's not the same thing as loving who you are, being who you are, evolving into who you are.
And it took all of my belief systems around external validation and fame and success to recognize what's actually valuable.
That's just an incredible reflection on that experience and all the people that you helped you know, as well as yourself, throughout the journey.
You know, one of the things I've struggled with and I'm curious if you relate is how aging can bring a kind of invisibility, and yet there's also freedom in not caring so much right, what other people think?
Have you experienced that push-pull?
I mean, I know people say, you know, we become invisible.
I think that's less and less so.
I've got to be honest.
I think it's also really Gen X in particular.
And you're in your 40s.
I consider that to be like you're a baby.
I am about to be 56.
And I, you know, I consider myself to be like a true middle-aged woman and a woman of experience.
And I do not feel invisible anymore.
Maybe that's just because I'm loud and I don't let people ignore me.
But it doesn't feel that way.
It feels like Gen X has finally said the buck stops here.
We don't feel old.
We don't look old.
Maybe that's also to do with better health regimens and cosmetic dermatology, better haircuts, all the things that I said.
But, you know, we're like, we can still sneak a cigarette.
We can drink a martini.
We're cool.
We're down with Gen X.
So there's this sense of relevancy that Gen X insists upon.
That I don't know, that we've seen in generations before us.
And I also think that Gen X's legacy is going to be the relevance of this age, of this stage of life, how important it is.
And that we keep talking about how we are expanding our lifespans, that longevity is the new conversation in health.
I think relevancy is also part of that.
And relevancy means that we are part of pop culture.
We are part of this conversation.
We are part of these conferences.
We're not going anywhere.
And honestly, it's probably because we don't want to give up the spotlight.
We're not ready to cede to younger generations, but I like to think of it as just that the spotlight gets bigger and we all get to share it.
And there is something so important about multi-generational mentorship that I've learned as much from younger people as I'm able to teach them.
It's such a gift.
It's such a joy to me.
And that does keep me feeling very relevant.
I mean, you know, I'm a big Chapel Rowan fan.
I'm a big Billie Eilish fan.
I'm thrilled what younger generations are doing around conversations of race and gender and sexuality, how we are moving towards something that is about talking things into existence, speaking things into the light, rather than shame and fear, which I do feel have really constricted our societal values for a very long time.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So I want to shift a little bit and talk about something that you brought up earlier.
And so, as you've gone through this process of entering midlife, you've shifted a lot of attention toward speaking differently about menopause.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Menopause has historically been framed sort of as a loss when it was talked about at all.
That's really shifting.
But you've been outspoken about it as an evolution.
Yes.
And I would argue it's an emotional, relational, and sometimes spiritual evolution.
And physical, sure.
Yes, yes.
What's the most unexpected gift that this transition has given you?
I don't think I've ever been as calm in my life as I am now.
I know that doesn't sound like very much, but for a neurotic like me, calm is a big leap.
I like to say that menopause starts as a reckoning and ends as a renaissance.
It's the way that I experienced it.
The minute that I was going through menopause is when I stopped getting jobs.
It's when I started to look different.
I had gained a lot of weight.
I didn't know what I could do to make myself feel better.
I lost some hair.
I started...
I started getting chin hairs that I would name because I just had to make a game out of it.
There was a new one every day.
And there were things that I just didn't understand, as I said, that were related to menopause.
My father was dying.
I had been through spine surgery.
And I thought that had created depression and anxiety, because your body apparently, I was told that when you have brain injury or heart injury or spine injury or any kind of surgery, your body doesn't know that it isn't dying, and that it can wind up being a very emotional experience.
For me, after spine surgery, I went through a deep, deep, deep depression.
It took about 18 months for full physical rehabilitation.
And I swore I would take such good care of my body after that because it was traumatic.
It was a seven-hour surgery.
It was a lot.
And as I started to come out of that, my father got very, very sick.
And I was with him pretty much from March until November of 2018 when he passed away.
And I was with him when he died.
And that in and of itself was hard.
But during that time, I had these weird symptoms that were mimicking my father's symptoms.
I had heart palpitations and he had heart disease.
He was having trouble keeping food down, and all of a sudden, I had all these food allergies.
All of a sudden, I couldn't eat salmon without being sick, or I couldn't eat CBD.
Weird things that I'd been taking or eating or whatever, I all of a sudden couldn't do.
I was struggling to keep my mood up.
My dad kept saying he felt like there was a black cloud that was following him and I felt like I was underneath it with him.
And losing him.
I thought that what I was experiencing was anticipatory grief, that I was so unable to reconcile what was happening, that my body was sort of taking the hit for me.
All of which was probably true, except I didn't know that any of those symptoms were perimenopausal.
Nobody ever once sat me down and said listen, there are almost 100 symptoms that you can experience during perimenopause.
They may not seem related, but they are.
Nobody said that, nobody told me.
I never was pregnant, so it was not like I had any experience with postpartum or anything like that.
And so for me, I really had to put all of these pieces together.
And once I started to, I thought I cannot be the only person experiencing this.
I can't be the only person to experience this kind of isolation, this kind of rapid sense of pulling away from the world.
I felt like I was no longer a part of it.
I was just watching from the outside.
And once I started to do a little bit of digging, just a little bit of asking my friends how they were feeling,
And I started to notice I wasn't the only one.
Well, I didn't know that you'd be, you know excuse the expression able to swing a dead cat and find somebody in menopause, because now, in 2025, there are a billion of us going through it.
So about seven years ago, I got serious about talking about it.
I acquired a brand that had been started by a company called State of Menopause.
And I thought I am going to be this kind of first line of defense against menopausal symptoms, because women were talking about dry hair, dry skin, dry vaginas.
I mean, the only thing truly that you want dry in menopause is a good martini, right?
So I thought, this is what I'm going to do.
I'm going to do oils.
I'm going to do creams.
I'm going to do all of this, until I actually got in the business.
And not only did I see millions of hits to the website people reading the articles that I had doctors vetted to discuss what actually perimenopause is, what menopause is, what postmenopause is.
And no conversion.
Nobody was buying anything.
And all of a sudden it occurred to me when I was at my worst, when I felt my lowest.
I couldn't walk across the Brooklyn Bridge without the idea of I'm going to throw myself off.
Nobody needs a face oil if you want to throw yourself off a bridge.
And so I closed the company immediately.
I closed it.
It was, i would say, the worst financial decision of my life to acquire and close this company but it was the smartest decision that i ever made for myself because i could not lie.
There was nothing in these products that i thought was revolutionary enough that truly spoke to changing hormones in any scientific way.
That wasn't a load of that i was going to sell to somebody as vulnerable as me.
I could not bring myself to say This is going to change your life.
This is going to make menopause easier for you.
That any other cream couldn't do, that any other oil couldn't do.
And the minute that I realized.
That is when I realized that my advocacy around midlife and menopause could not be attached to a paycheck.
If it was, then I wasn't actually doing anything to help.
It was extractive capital and not additive.
And I didn't know I cared so much, but I do.
And I do think it's really important the way we talk about it, when we talk about aging or the elderly, or health care, or longevity.
What is behind it?
And watch where your information comes from.
And now, again, in the age of social media, right, this is what we all need to do.
Where is your information coming from and who profits from it?
Yeah.
Oh, my goodness.
So, on a personal note, two and a half years ago I learned that I carry a BRCA2 mutation and decided to undergo a risk-reducing mastectomy and then removal of my ovaries and fallopian tubes, which launched me into what they call surgical menopause at 42, so 10 years before I would have probably physiologically had that happen.
So, like you, I had quite a journey, finding good medical care, addressing my concerns, especially given my high-risk genetic situation.
What do you think needs to change most urgently in how our healthcare system approaches menopause?
And what role do we play as women in midlife in demanding better care?
Well, demanding is the right word.
Self-advocacy, I think, is really underrated.
And this idea that we have to push for ourselves is what I said before.
This idea of trusting your gut is something that I did not understand.
My friend Latham Thomas is somebody that I quote quite a bit.
She is a birth doula. and really just unbelievable when it comes to maternal health.
But she said that women have never felt safe.
We've never been taught to feel safe in our bodies.
We've been taught that getting your period is like oh you know.
We may say, oh yeah, you're a woman, but then we're also like don't get pregnant.
And blood is gross.
And make sure you know how to use period care, because God forbid you should bleed through your clothes or you leave a stain on somebody's couch.
How embarrassing for you instead of the natural cycle that it is.
We talk about pregnancy in terms of performance.
We talk about fertility in terms of failure.
I mean, these words have meaning and they can be internalized so easily.
And then we talk about perimenopause as an ending.
We talk about it as the end of fertility.
But we forget to say that endings are natural.
And that doesn't mean that you then sort of expire in terms of use value as a human.
And this idea that women are just baby makers and that's sociobiologically, what we are or what we've evolved into.
Certainly that's not where we are culturally or societally.
So I think when it comes to health care, one, it is about saying, what does not feel right to me?
What don't I feel good about?
What is going on in my body that I can't quite name or I can't quite describe?
How do I get somebody to listen to me?
It's by being sure of what you're saying.
And then I think it's seeking out the doctors that really are starting to talk about menopause.
Now, I will say that menopause has come a long way since I started talking about it.
And there is a lot more in the news about it.
There are summits now.
I did a menopause retreat.
There are all sorts of things that are happening in the world.
But something else that happened, which I also predicted, was that you were going to get a lot of experts who then started disagreeing.
So again, this idea of where you're getting your information matters, because now it's information wars over who's right and who isn't.
When it's not about who's right, it's what's right for you.
So one.
I think it is about trusting your own body, listening to your own body, being still enough to actually feel your own body.
I spent years completely cut off from my physical self.
When I was doing What Not to Wear, I would wear five, six inch heels.
Clinton is 6'4".
To get us in the same frame, I had to wear high heels.
And I never took them off.
I would run in them.
I mean, there's a reason I had spine surgery.
But I also walked around for three weeks with my hip out of its socket.
And I didn't even know because I had no time for that.
So I completely shut off my ability to feel my own physical pain.
I had to relearn how to feel.
Because when you're on somebody else's clock, you don't have time for that.
So listening to yourself, learning how to really actually hear what you're feeling, I think is extraordinarily difficult.
And then, once you're able to do that, it's being able to explain what those feelings are and to find somebody receptive to what you're saying in a way that feels helpful to you.
Because I will tell you, people will dismiss you.
People will tell you, you don't need what you think you need.
Oh, we don't need to talk about that.
I did your blood test.
You're not in menopause.
All of these things that doctors will tell you, that we also remember we can fire our doctors.
We can walk out and find somebody else.
The onus is not on that doctor to make you feel good.
If you don't feel good about them, walk away, truly.
Even if they're giving you sound advice, if something is off, it is like any other relationship in the world.
If you are paying for it, then you need to get the service that you need out of it, not the other way around.
Yes.
I often tell people, and I am a doctor, right?
If you don't have a good experience, go get a second opinion.
Go get a third opinion, a fourth opinion.
I think I had to go to eight different doctors who were specialists in obstetrics and gynecology to find out about hormone replacement therapy.
And everybody gave me a different answer.
Of course.
Just as a side note, the Menopause Society has a fantastic website where you can find certified menopause providers.
And that's a great place to go if that's something that you're looking for.
So shifting gears a little bit.
You've been open about your struggles with body image, with self-worth.
How do you think about beauty and fashion now?
And how is wear whatever the F you want different from your previous work?
It comes out April 29th.
I want to give Clinton Kelly the credit here.
This was really his idea.
It was his baby, his brainchild.
And he came to me with it and said, I think you are the only person I could do this show with.
And after 10 years of a highly publicized, really made up feud, we were like we're going to surprise everybody and do this again.
We got remarried.
But what was really interesting about it was that after 10 years of doing things separately, we really came to the same fashion philosophy conclusions, which made the show even easier to do, which is that style does not start on your body.
It starts in your brain.
And it starts by understanding that everybody comes to their vision of themself based on all of your childhood experiences and everything that you have been through throughout your life that make you think I can do this or I can't do that.
I can't wear green. because somebody told me it doesn't work for my skin tone.
I can't wear prints because I have big boobs.
I can't.
I can I look good in this or I don't look good in that?
All based on a belief system that has been created passively over time.
And the crazy thing is like, what are we saying?
We're saying that a belief is truth just because we're repeating it to ourselves over and over again.
That actually doesn't make it true.
So we started excavating belief systems with our clients.
And what we decided was, rather than say, you should wear this to look 10 pounds thinner or taller, or whatever was the thing of the day,
And that's why a lot of what we did and what not to wear would not fly today is because here are just two average white people telling you what to do.
I don't know, it doesn't just seem like it's okay.
Especially, we essentially kidnap people against their will.
There was a lot about it that I look back at, and there were a lot of shoulds and there were a lot of rules, rather than actually looking at the person and saying what would make you bloom.
What would make you feel like you can blossom?
What would make you feel like?
It's not our expertise that's going to make you look and feel better.
It's making you more of you that's gonna make you look and feel better.
We didn't have that opportunity.
That wasn't the format of the show.
We didn't write the format.
And so for us, it was really much more about, hey, we could redo this.
Clinton loves to talk about the fact that we had, you know, the slobs.
We had the moms that had forgotten themselves.
They'd forgotten who they were.
Yes, of course, we wanted to help them.
And it was easy to give that back to them because it wasn't like they didn't have that innate sense of self.
They just kind of lost it, right?
And then we had going to, you know, using quotes here, it's maybe not the most PC term, but the sluts.
And Clint and I use that word very affectionately because we both were in the 90s.
And that was about your appearance, is not about your value to the opposite sex or the same sex or to a romantic partner.
Being this viable sexual being is not your only use value on this planet.
And your worth should not be measured as such.
But then we had like the kooks.
We had the free spirits that both of us really kind of regretted stomping on the girl who wore the glitter wings.
I still stand by getting rid of the raccoon tail that that one girl pinned on her ass.
But you know, there were people who really had this kind of incredible innate artistry that they used their body in these amazing ways that we were just like no, it's not conventional anymore.
It doesn't make sense if you're going into the real world and you want a job or you want people to take you seriously.
Well, what is so great about being taken seriously?
I mean, seriously.
So a lot of the things that we held true, that we were trying to tell people about getting their first job, All those things are true, right.
I mean, context still matters.
And public opinion does still matter.
And we are still using reptilian software in this old brain of ours.
I am still going to make a judgment about you three seconds after I see you, because that's what fight or flight or freeze is.
Are you safe?
Are you one of my people?
Are you part of my tribe?
Are you dangerous?
Do I not understand you?
All of those things are what goes into the communications.
So these are the things when I see I'm like these are people I want to get to know, I'm interested in, I want to ask questions of.
Those things are real.
You get to control that narrative.
And if you say I don't give a toss what anybody thinks or what anybody says well, that's your right too.
And if you're happy, if you walk around in this bubble of happiness and I walk by you and I'm like train wreck who cares what I think?
I'm not living your life.
I don't even get to experience your joy.
How unlucky for me.
But I want to control my narrative.
I want you to know what I am or who I am based on what I'm wearing, where I am.
And I try to be aware of my context and my surroundings as a guide.
But that's not always going to be the case.
Sometimes you're just going to let loose and be whoever you want to be.
And the more we have of that, the more self-actualization.
The more self-realization that we have, The happier we are as a society, I am convinced and the happier we are as people.
Yeah.
It's amazing what shifts when we start letting go the things that no longer serve us, right?
You've really spent your career helping others feel seen and celebrated.
And I imagine that your own relationship to style has shifted too.
You've always been someone who helps others see themselves through their clothes, through their story.
I'm curious how you think about your own style now.
What's different for you now?
Now when you get dressed in the morning versus in your in your 20s and your 30s Yeah, I mean in my mid-20s I became a fashion editor and that was probably the most narcissistic, Materialistic time in my life.
I had to the the latest from every designer and I I would fly to Milan a day earlier, Paris a day early to shop, so I had the latest thing from the latest store, prodded this and Chanel that, and it was so important to me that to be the first one with that Prada, Mary Jane.
And all of those things felt so important because in those days you wanted every Japanese magazine to shoot you right.
You wanted to show up in some magazine as the outfit of the day or whatever it was.
And I loved fashion and I still love fashion.
But I can get dressed in the morning with my eyes closed sometimes, because I'm not thinking about who am I trying to impress today?
I'm thinking about how do I feel my best today?
Am I using fashion today as armor or am I using it to reflect or deflect, right?
Am I reflecting what a great mood I'm in, or am I deflecting the fact that I am like super down today?
And if I am not feeling great about myself, or just not feeling great because I turned the news on too early, I will say okay, I'm going to wear something sparkly or I'm going to wear a bright color.
I am going to actively do something to turn this around for myself.
I have that control.
How remarkable, how amazing that we all have that available to us.
So that's the way I think about it now.
I also used to think about clothing really as like, how sexy can I look?
How much skin can I show?
How tight can this be?
Whereas that is absolutely not at all where I feel my power comes from now, right?
I don't even wear dresses really much anymore.
I don't wear skirts.
I feel my power in suits.
I love wearing weird trousers.
I don't know if any of you can see my shoes, but they're like really heavy platform.
They look orthopedic.
And I'm very proud of that, thank you.
If 2003 Stacey met 2025 Stacey, she would be like, what happens to us?
Where did we go wrong, you know?
I had pointy-toe stilettos my whole life, and now I'm wearing orthopedics.
Let me tell you, they're bouncy and they're comfortable.
And here's the thing.
When I wore high heels and this is true when you wear high heels you will notice your posture does change.
Your shoulders go back.
Boobs go out.
Your stomach lifts up.
It's good for your core.
There's lots of great things about wearing heels until you wind up with arthritis.
And then you're like, oh, no, I don't want to wear a heel.
And all those women used to complain to me that I can't wear heels all the time because I have arthritis.
I'd be like, suck it up.
Now that I have arthritis, I understand.
So some things that I really thought were like, yeah, push it, push through it, push through it.
Now I realize you don't push through.
You have to accept and adapt.
So yeah, look, if you see these shoes, I still got height, right?
I mean, these are good four or five inches, but they don't hurt.
And I don't believe in any kind of physical pain for beauty anymore because that's not beauty.
Anything that hurts can't be beautiful.
Like I'm convinced of that.
And if it looks like you're in pain or if you're messing with your clothes because they don't fit right, all of those things give off an impression of you that you're probably not meaning to send right.
You don't want to look uncomfortable.
You don't want to look like you don't belong.
You belong in your body, and your clothes need to reflect how much you belong there and what a sacred space that is.
I really relate to that how what we wear can be a mirror for what we're feeling inside and how that shifts over time.
A mirror or a mask.
Yeah.
And really, I think both work to our advantage.
That brings me to something that I think about a lot, and I know you do too.
I spend a lot of my career talking about and thinking about how we live and how we die.
Yes.
I see sort of midlife as this liminal space, and I think it forces us to confront our mortality in a new way.
How has your... Oh, yes.
Yeah, perspective on time, on legacy, mortality shifted in this phase of your life.
Yeah, I mean I think it started with the death of my father because I was like well, who's next right?
It's me.
And watching somebody die, I think, also had a really profound, profound impact on me.
And it's not even like I would try to describe that.
It's just that being in the presence of it is very different than this abstract idea of death.
And if you are born with female physiology at birth, you will be postmenopausal until you die.
The things that happen in post-menopause are the things.
That really is when I had the biggest lens shift, and it's why it's such an honor to be at TED Health.
My new lens was all health-related, right?
All of a sudden, all of these things started to make sense.
Now I have to worry about cognitive health, cardiac health, bone health in ways that I had never even thought thought about before Alzheimer's.
Who's worrying about Alzheimer's in their 40s?
Well, there's lots of evidence that says that we should be thinking about Alzheimer's in our 40s, that we need to be thinking about osteoporosis, that we need to be thinking about the things that are going to keep us healthy, not at 45, but at 85.
It changed my entire feelings about body image.
For somebody who's to starve herself within an inch of her life to look a certain way, because I grew up with Kate Moss as the ideal.
Can you imagine standing next to Kate Moss at a party?
Literally, I was standing at the Calvin Klein, the CK show.
I used to work for a stylist named Joe McKenna, one of the greatest stylists of all time.
And he did all of Calvin Klein's styling in the 90s.
I did the CK campaign with him, the first CK campaign.
Stephen Mizell.
It's fashion history, what I'm talking about.
These were insane moments.
And I stood backstage between Carolyn Bessette and Kate Moss.
Now, first of all, just imagine what that feels like.
Bad.
It feels bad.
I mean, you're in awe, but it feels bad.
And they were talking about the fact that Carolyn was saying oh, John took me skiing this weekend and he's such a better skier than I am.
And Kate's going, oh, Johnny took me skiing last weekend, and I'm such a better skier than he is.
And I'm like, I can't ski.
You just realize being around people that beautiful does have an impact on the way that you see yourself.
So yes, I used to starve myself.
And now I would not think about that.
Because when I go to the gym, it's not because I ate a cupcake.
I go to the gym because I want to walk when I'm 85.
I don't think about my weight because I want to be strong as fuck.
I want muscles on top of muscles.
And a week before I got here, guys, I got norovirus.
And I will tell you, not only did I not know what it was, I was like, I could die from this.
I lost eight pounds in three days.
And I have never wanted eight pounds back more in my life than i did then.
I felt weak, i felt sick, i felt helpless, and that is not what i want my life to be like as i age.
In fact, i know that it won't be.
There is enough research and technology now that we can use to our advantage to age healthfully.
And that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be problems and it doesn't mean we won't get sick.
But just in general, i feel like my lens around style doesn't have anything to do with just style anymore, right?
It's about physicality.
What do I want to be able to do?
How do I keep myself strongest?
And then everything else kind of falls into place.
I think of my younger years, maybe I would say the first 45 years of my life as the hero's journey, right.
I was acquisitive.
A-C-Q-U, acquisitive.
I wanted the house.
I wanted the clothes.
I wanted you to think I was cool.
I wanted all of that external validation.
And I think of this half of my life as the artist's way.
I think about this so much as my inquisitive phase.
I have never had the yearning to learn like I do now.
I spent my whole life being the know-it-all in the room and now I want to be the dumbest person in the room.
I want to be the one who knows nothing.
I want to be the one who asks all the questions.
I want to be the one who learns things that I was afraid to learn.
I was so afraid to fail when I was younger that I wouldn't play if I couldn't win.
And I mean play, just play if I couldn't be the best.
And look at what that does.
That just stops you from any kind of opportunity or experience for joy or pleasure or curiosity, or to fall on your face and laugh.
I took myself so seriously.
And now I'm the person who's like, let's do the dumb thing.
Let's do the thing.
And I want to be around smart people.
I want to be around people who are so much smarter than me.
And if you stop for a second you realize pretty much anybody who isn't me has something to teach me.
I so love hearing how your thinking about all this has evolved.
It's just incredible.
Well, that's the one thing I know, because I know that when I get to my deathbed, I want to know.
I asked all the questions.
I asked all the questions that I could.
I tried to figure out all the things that I could.
There is no way I'll be able to lie on my deathbed and say, well, I'm glad I figured that all out.
You know, I won't get there.
I don't think any of us are going to get there.
But I want to know that I tried, that there wasn't anything I didn't reach for.
And that takes, oh, I'm going to get emotional.
Sorry.
It takes real humility.
And I've been really humbled by life in order to become a student of it, instead of thinking that I was the teacher.
I spent a long time thinking that I was the teacher.
And it took me an even longer time to realize that we teach what we need to learn.
Beautiful.
For me, the older that we get, the more I realize who really matters in our lives and who helps me stay grounded when everything's shifting.
We talk a lot about the importance of community during times of transition.
Who's in your corner now and what makes someone a good ally in midlife?
Friendship is something that I don't worry about anymore because, now that I know who I am, I don't have time for people who don't meet my criteria.
I don't even meet them, really.
Because, to be honest, I don't travel in circles where I'm not curious and the people around me aren't curious.
The ones who have been in my life for a long time, and Vika is here, and Amanda is here somewhere.
I don't know where you are, Amanda, but anyway.
I've known them for over a decade each.
One lives in Portugal, one lives in England.
I haven't seen them in years in life.
That means nothing.
It is literally like all of my friends are camp friends, right?
The minute you go back to summer camp, you start exactly where you left off.
That's the way I am with all of my people.
If somebody says, you need to meet this person, I already know I need to meet them.
That's how vetted it becomes.
And I think that that is something that happened naturally for me.
It wasn't like I sought to do that.
It's just what happened.
And now my people, I went through something very, very difficult a few months ago.
And it is the first time in my life that without reservation, I knew I could not go it alone.
I knew without question that I would not be able to go it alone.
And I had terrible trouble asking for help.
I have terrible trouble.
What if somebody lets me down?
What if somebody can't help me?
What if somebody says no?
I rang that bell so loud that it like reverberated and not one person didn't answer my call.
Not one person did not show up for me.
The gratitude that I feel around that just proved to me how much I've done right in the last decade.
When I will tell you that I felt like I was doing everything wrong.
That nothing was leading to the success of What Not to Wear.
That nothing was leading to the Stacey of 35 years old.
Nothing was leading back to her because nothing ever will.
And the minute that I was able to let go of her, the minute I was able to thank her and grieve her and say goodbye to her, my life has been exponentially better.
Incredible.
Okay, I have one final question.
What's one thing that anyone can do, no matter their age, to feel good in their skin?
Throw away the most painful pair of shoes you own.
That's going to make you feel good.
Even if you love them, even if they're dreased, even if they're something fabulous, sell them for a lot of money.
I've been saying it a lot lately.
It keeps coming up that life is hard, right?
But all of that hardship is only because we have some sort of expectation of perfection.
If we didn't lead with expectation, if we led with curiosity, think about how different the world would be.
So every time you think or expect something, that something is going to work out a certain way, stop yourself and say I'm open to all possibilities instead of just one.
All right.
You're amazing.
You're amazing.
Thank you.
You guys are amazing.
So much for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you, Shoshana.
Thank you.
I just want to say, you invited me.
You asked me to do this.
And I really couldn't be more grateful.
So thank you.
Of course.
That was my conversation with Stacey London at the TED conference in 2025.
Stacey's new show, Wear Whatever the F You Want, is streaming now on Prime Video.
Thanks so much for listening.
TED Health is a podcast from TED.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode.
Send me a message on Instagram at ShoshanaMD. and Roxanne High Lash.
