Stacy London, who co-hosted the show What Not To Wear for a decade, is back at the job of wanting to make you look and feel your best.
But this time, instead of with clothing, she’s doing it as CEO of the company she took over in 2019, State of Menopause. After transitioning through an extraordinarily difficult midlife period when she faced back surgery, the death of her father, and severe perimenopause symptoms, she wanted to use her platform to help midlife women not just survive, but thrive.
And if she couldn’t do it with a TV show (which she repeatedly hit brick walls trying to create), she would do it in business.
State of Menopause offers products to help us manage, understand, and even enjoy the menopause transition. The brand sells everything from a cooling spray to a CBD vaginal moisturizer, and recently launched a line of hair products, specifically targeting all the changes our locks experience during midlife.
Gen Xers like London (and myself) were taught to compete, but we’re learning that collaboration delivers better results than competition. With that in mind, London convened the first Menopause CEO Summit in New York City this week on World Menopause Day. Although some of the companies attending are in direct competition with one another, she believes there’s room for everyone, and hopes the event will strengthen education and community around menopause issues.
Read on for my interview with London. We discussed, among other things, being a Gen X leader, her difficult menopause journey, and the ridiculous idea that anyone should be evaluated by their reproductive status.
RELATED: ‘I’ve Been A Monster:’ Women Share The Unexpected Emotional Impacts Of Menopause
How Has Being A Gen X Woman Influenced Your Leadership Style?
“We were taught to compete. We were taught that there was only one place to get that job or only one guy to date, or there was just one first place. And it was kill or die to get there.
“I think we are a fascinating generation. Gen X is the last generation that will probably experience generational shame around aging and menopause, as well as generational confusion and ignorance around aging and menopause. And we’ll be the first to break that stigma in a real way.”
Yes And Hopefully We’re Changing The Way Our Culture Views Women In Midlife.
“So menopause has traditionally been seen as this kind of expiration date. Simply because once you are no longer able to give birth to biological children or be fertile that somehow means that you are no longer the focus.
“When we had wooly mammoths and sabertooth tigers, you were no longer the focus when you were not furthering the race anymore. And there are a bunch of people who have theories about why women live past menopause or past child-birthing years I’m not sure I understand or agree with entirely.
“But this idea that you can reduce us to our reproductive health or our hormonal chaos is ludicrous.
“If you look at the contributions of women over the age of 40 for a long, long time in our history, they have nothing to do with giving birth to children.”
What Is The Meaning Behind Your ‘AND’ Necklace?
“Things can be true at the same time. For me, the ‘AND’ means I had a career in magazines and in television and now I’m in business.
“I can feel like I am at my most authentic self, I can be incredibly self-aware, and yet still be bummed that I don’t get looked up and down on the street anymore. These things can all be true at the same time. And aside from that, it stands for ‘a new dawn’ and ‘a new day.’”
I Love That.
“Over time, we become less culturally relevant. We start to feel invisible. But one, I don’t think Gen X is really into that. I think we like being the center of attention. I think we believe there’s room for all of us.
“But also we can actually look at the trope of a midlife crisis and recognize that that is really part cultural invalidation and part hormonal chaos. And what that winds up creating is a crisis of confidence and confusion in terms of identity, both of which I think are truly solvable within the menopause experience and within the midlife experience. And we’re just starting to get to the tip of the iceberg.
“That was part of the reason for wanting to be involved in [the State of Menopause].”
How Do You Think Gen X Is Learning From Younger Generations?
“I believe in a lot of ways younger generations have given Gen X permission to be more transparent and more honest about their own experiences. I mean, I remember growing up being taught you never show weakness, you don’t cry. Be a duck, like perfectly floating on the surface and you are like paddling like hell underneath. Or if you were exercising and somebody said that you looked great, you never admitted to how hard it was to get there. There was always this illusion that we were supposed to have done everything without effort.”
Totally. The Cool Girl Fallacy.
“Right, cool girls are all of the things. They just know how to play chess, they didn’t have to learn.
“But I think millennials and Gen Z feel very much cheated by the idea that we didn’t talk openly about the struggles and tribulations that we had. And by not sharing those things, by not being more transparent and honest about those experiences, it’s made them very forceful in the way that they talk about things that are quite personal, that we would’ve considered off limits in terms of conversation, like race and gender and sexuality.”
What Was Your Menopause Experience Like?
“I medically did not have a profile that allowed me to go on hormones. And what is so astounding to me is that I thought at certain points, my moods, all of the different issues that I had going on at the same time, when I say hormonal chaos, I mean, I’ve been quoted saying it was a tsunami of batsh*t, crazy. I truly felt like I was going to throw myself off a bridge.
“Some days I was just like, I don’t know how I’m going to do this. And to think about all of the millions of people who have gone through this, who never said a word in total silence, who never said to their doctor, ‘please help,’ or never got the kind of counseling or care practitioner that they needed—it breaks my heart to think about it.
“I just feel very fortunate that we are at that stage where Gen X is like, it’s bullsh*t that we’re being rated on the performance of our reproductive health. I mean, it’s ludicrous. You cannot reduce any of us or our worth to those systems.
“Instead we really just need to be looking at the science. We only started insisting that women be in health trials in 1993. We don’t know enough about female physiology to feel safe in our bodies. That’s insane to me.”
You Tried To Create A Show For Midlife Women, Can You Talk About What Happened?
“When I was around 47, I started to feel like I didn’t know what my next move was. I wanted to do this show about middle-age transformation, particularly for women, and do it about fashion, but also about finance, empty nest syndrome, elder care, all the things that we want to really be thinking about at this stage of life. And I pitched to every streamer and every channel to crickets.”
Wow.
“Everybody said nobody wants to watch middle-aged women on television. And I was like, okay, I don’t know who you think the Real Housewives are, but you’re basically telling me you don’t want to see anything that really tries to elucidate and illuminate what aging means and what midlife means.
“I took that very personally because I was like, I’m a middle-aged woman. This is what I wanna talk about. This is the woman I want to reach because I had an identity crisis. I didn’t look like myself. I didn’t feel like myself and I didn’t know what to do about it.
“I knew it couldn’t be just me who feels this way, and little did I know that a lot of things I was attributing to my midlife crisis, like having pretty significant spine surgery and my father dying—I thought physical or emotional grief was kind of taking over my body, having no idea what perimenopausal symptoms were, having no idea that that is what I was experiencing. And perhaps those two events really amplified that experience, but I felt like I was fading.”
‘I Didn’t Know How To Dress Myself Anymore’
“I was like, I don’t know where the Stacy London from What Not To Wear or the Stacy London who is a successful person is anymore. I was having trouble getting off the couch every day. So I recognized that something was happening to me, and I thought it was something worth exploring in the medium that I understand best, which is television.
“And being able to talk about these things in a visual way, that there was always like an ‘aha’ moment that you had watching What Not To Wear in understanding that it was never about the clothes. It was about what the clothes could do. How could we make people see themselves differently, be compassionate with themselves?
“How could they treat their bodies with respect? How could they walk into a room and feel wonderful? And feel like I had lost that. At 47, my body has changed. I didn’t know how to dress myself anymore. I knew I could not be the only one feeling this way. And after being turned down by all of these television channels, COVID happened.
“I had this come to Jesus moment with what is my kernel of truth? What is it that I want to do? I am in a fortunate enough position to be able to choose a new path instead of banging down a door that leads to a room with a crowd of people that don’t really want me there anymore.”
‘I Want To Be A Self-Esteemist.’
“I really wanted to be influential in the way people feel about themselves. And so I’ve always considered myself a stylist, but I think that even more, I want to be a ‘self-esteemist,’ that’s the only word that I’ve been able to come up with.
“And that was partly why I wanted to take over [the] State Of Menopause. I want the company to have products the same way on What Not To Wear I wanted you to wear clothing—because they’re instruments. They’re weapons in your arsenal of making sure that you feel and look the way you wanna feel.”
It’s Exciting That The Younger Generation Is Noticing Midlife Women Since We’ve For So Long Lacked Attention And Resources. Suggest’s CEO Is In Her 30s, And There’s A Community Called Revel Whose Founders Are Also In Their Thirties.
“That goes back to the generations coming together and I mean, not for nothing, a lot of this has to do with commercial viability, right? We may be a smaller population than boomers or millennials, and there was a smaller financial price tag attached to getting our attention. And now that we are reaching middle age and certainly after COVID, rethinking the way we want to live our lives and how we want to pivot, getting our attention is very profitable.
“And I think younger generations are actually recognizing that the lifetime value of any consumer can start very young and actually go the lifetime of that consumer. And that we’re going to stop segmenting everything by decade or even just by age and more by circumstance and the other issues that connect us.”
And How Did The Menopause CEO Summit Come About?
“I am very lucky to be able to do what I do. But the women and all of my colleagues who have been working in this field for a lot longer than me don’t have the same kind of following and don’t have the same kind of soapbox.
“And what is the point if I am the only one screaming from the rooftops? That’s a drop of rain in the ocean. What matters is being able to use that soapbox and convert it into a platform to raise everybody’s voices.
“That to me is not just part of my company, but of this stage of my life—wanting to share the spotlight, wanting other people’s success to help impact my own. And that is something that I’ve never done in my lifetime. I’ve never had the opportunity to do it this way.
“Menopause as a topic and a community that in 2025 is going to be 1 billion people—that’s 12% of the Earth’s population. That’s the population of China. There are only 13 or 14 companies right now. I want to get us all together. I want that to grow bigger so there is a group of people out there who aren’t just fighting for you to have information, or for you to have agency over your own wellbeing, but we’re like cheerleaders rooting for you.”