Fashion may remain hooked on a skinny ideal, but Alexandra Shulman’s selfie shows she is moving on

lexandra Shulman has, everyone says, been terribly brave. Daring, even. Some might say heroic, given the circumstances, which are that the outgoing editor of Vogue magazine is all of 59, and was therefore presumably expected to live out her remaining days hidden beneath dust sheets.

Yet instead this week she posted a bikini selfie online, looking – well, like a 59-year-old on holiday generally does, relaxed, cheery and definitely not 25 any more. The response on Instagram to what many saw as a blow against unrealistic, airbrushed images of women was overwhelmingly positive. “Why was this not our September cover?!” gushed a former magazine colleague. Why indeed?It’s just a guess, but one answer might be that the magazine’s publishers would never have let that happen. They would surely have worried that young women wouldn’t buy it, would recoil from this beaming Ghost of Summer Future. They would have feared designers responding to a real, older body in their clothes with the same disgust as the late critic AA Gill, who, reviewing Professor Mary Beard’s TV appearances a few years back, suggested that, at 57, she “really should be kept away from cameras”.

There is a grudging place reserved for older women in the public eye who somehow contrive to look freakishly youthful, but those who have aged in recognisably human fashion are still expected to do the decent thing and disappear. No wonder so many women hesitate over the holiday packing, wondering what they can still get away with; a YouGov poll this week found two thirds of over-50s wouldn’t feel confident being seen in public in a bikini, and, more depressingly, nor would half of 18- to 24-year-olds.

And that’s what makes Shulman’s picture if not exactly brave, then subversive. She is refusing to go quietly despite being 59 in an industry where 30 might as well be dead, and where to have actual thighs instead of a puzzling gap where human thighs are generally located is deemed shocking.

And frankly, she looks liberated. After quarter of a century of being asked in practically every interview why she doesn’t look as people expect the editors of glossy magazines to look – namely skeletal and terrifyingly groomed – how glorious it must feel just to pull on a Boden bikini (a label surely too mumsy for Vogue) and not gittp://www.queeniebridesmaid.co.uk/purple-bridesmaid-dresses-onlineve a stuff. She said, when she left the magazine after 25 years, that she longed to do something different. One wonders now just how big a break with the past she had in mind.

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