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Diane Gilman became HSN’s top fashion personality after age 60 – when she designed sexy jeans for baby boomers like her who were tired of being ignored when they hit 50 and their bodies changed.
The home-shopping “sell-ebrity” has sold 19 million pairs of her DG2 jeans on TV and built a sisterhood of 700,000 women who feel confident, cool and connected – in their 50s and beyond.
In her new book, Gilman, 77, reveals her ”rulebook for women who don’t like rules” – her 25 secrets for becoming the star of your Act 3, your “Age of Illumination,” when everything that’s happened in the first and second acts of your life comes into crystal focus.
“Too Young to Be Old: How to Stay Vibrant, Visible and Forever in Blue Jeans” tells Gilman’s own story – from her early days, dressing rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s, to creating her biggest success as HSN’s No. 1 fashion personality.
With raw candor and humor, Gilman reveals:
How she survived an abusive childhood by focusing on the one thing she could trust, her talent. That talent drew her to UCLA, where she was classmates with Jim Morrison. She opened her first boutique when she was a student. A top customer: Cher, who loved the A-line dresses Gilman sewed and sold for $13.
How her quest to stay young almost killed her. Hormone treatments Gilman took for decades helped fuel her breast cancer. When she got her Stage 3 diagnosis in 2018, she was forced to face the truth, drop her vanity – and accept the love and support of friends for the first time in her life.
How her “DG2 sisters” have sparked her new mission: to show the world how cool aging can be.
She’s among stars such as Maria Shriver and Jamie Lee Curtis who are reimagining what it means to be a senior today. “I never say ‘I’m too old,’” says Gilman, whose role model is her friend Iris Apfel, a 101-year-old fashion icon who is regularly spotted in Palm Beach.
“We are beautiful today in ways we could not be when we were 20, 30 or 40 – because we share the beauty of wisdom,” she writes. “We know ourselves. We see with a clarity only real-life experience can reveal. So, repeat after me: Today is the youngest we will ever be. Let’s embrace our radiant Act 3.”
Here are three of Gilman’s tips:
- Declare your visibility. “We all have a visibility meter, a comfort compass that we use to decide how much attention we want to attract. Mine is off the charts — no surprise there! — and yours might be low on the shock scale. You set the dial on your own visibility meter, and you decide if your dial-setting changes as you get older. My need for self-expression and visibility led me to create DG2 jeans. I had to declare my visibility and do something about it. I won’t fade away by choice, and I won’t fade away if somebody else decides my opinion isn’t valuable at 77.”
- Growing older is a privilege, not a punishment. “I am not anti-aging — I am pro-living. I agree with actress Emma Thompson: ‘The trick is to age honestly and gracefully and make it look great, so that everyone looks forward to it.’”
- Don’t be a spectator in your own life. After a certain age, everyone around you has an opinion of how you should live your life — your children, your doctors, your financial team. It’s like the older we get, the less we know. Wrong! All that blah blah blah is background noise. If you don’t own your own power, somebody else will.”
“Too Young to Be Old: How to Stay Vibrant, Visible and Forever in Blue Jeans,” by Diane Gilman with Jan Tuckwood, will be released Nov. 29 by Amplify Publishing, and is available for order now ($27, 337 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other book sites. Tuckwood was the longtime associate editor of The Palm Beach Post, and she lives in Lake Worth.
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