Threads at fifty

Yet it remains almost impossible for our culture to speak about ageing without talking exclusively about how we defy the ageing process. It is time to think anew about how we age. In response to her mom saying, "Don't grow old, Diane," Keaton writes: "I didn't like those words then, and I don't like them now. The exhausting effort to control time by altering the effects of age doesn't bring happiness." Dr Janet McCabe and Dr Deborah Jermyn are leading a research symposium into celebrity and ageing at Birkbeck, University of London today

Fashions for older women Fashion is obsessed by youth, yet more of us are living longer than ever. Isn't it time designers started creating looks for the more mature person?........ Nowadays the older woman gets a pretty raw deal; clothes for her are shown on a bone-thin female with long white hair who looks as if she's spent years on a desert island, and ignore completely the need for covered upper arms and helpful high necks. Even Fanny Karst, whose "Old Ladies' Rebellion" styles are designed with her great aunt in mind, has skinny models like the rest. If we're really all living longer, it's about time for some new helpful fashions that actually do something for seniors.

When I was a child – in Glossop and district – no one supposed that women over 50 were invisible. On the contrary, they blacked out the sky. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder like penalty walls, solid inside corsets that encased them from neck to thigh, so there was no getting past them: if you'd rushed them and butted them with your head, you'd have careened off, sobbing. They stood in bus queues muttering dark threats against the driver. They stood in line in the butcher's shop, bloodied sawdust clogging their bootees, and amid the loops of sausages and the tripes they talked about My Operation – they boasted of their surgical crises, as Coriolanus boasted about the wounds he got for his mother country. Almost every one of these women was called Nellie, and the others were called Cissie. Why these names are synonymous with effeminate weakness I cannot imagine. They wore vast tweed coats or impermeable raincoats in glass-green, and their legs were wrapped round and round with elastic bandages, so they took up plenty of space in the world; to increase their area they stuck their elbows out. They had baskets and brown paper parcels. They said, "That child wants feeding/ slapping/its bonnet on," and younger women jumped to it. They'd been nowhere but they'd seen everything. They never laughed with you, they laughed at you. They did not use face powder but scouring powder. They could add up grocery prices at calculator speed, and they never took their eyes off the needle of the grocer's scale. Show them the ageing heroines of today, and they'd have snorted – they were frequent snorters. Helen Mirren, Joanna Lumley they'd have called picked wishbones. They'd have sneered "bleached blonde" at Madonna, while grimly rating those sinewy arms; she looks as if she could scrub a step or mangle a bucket of wet sheets.