Conversations with women (over 40): Anna Murphy

Meet a woman as gobby as I am about ageing however you bloody well want!

Welcome to Conversations With Women (over 40), a new occasional series, where I share transcripts of some of the incredible chats I’ve had with women in midlife and beyond for The Shift podcast. These transcripts are exclusive to paying subscribers, but if you’re a free subscriber, or this has been forwarded to you, you can get access to this and my previous conversations by signing up for a 7-day free trial at the link below.

This conversation is from one of the most popular podcast episodes so far this year. Anna Murphy is now Fashion Director of The Times, but we first met when we were both regular stalwarts of the second row at the Milan fashion shows. She was then editor of the Telegraph magazine Stella and I was editor of Red, both magazines deemed not quite fashion enough by the fashion industry. I certainly dressed not to be seen, I think it would be fair to say the same of her. Oh, how things change.

Somewhere between 41 and 51 Anna went from anonymously chic editor to colourful fashion industry doyenne with cascading grey curls and a wardrobe that manages to be both outré (there’s a fashion word for you) AND wearable. You go quietly into middle age if you want to, but she’s not having any of it, as you’ll discover! (This is a transcript of our chat, slightly edited to remove you knows and actuallys!)

Sam: What I really want to talk about is how you got from sitting in the second row with me - what was it, about ten years ago? Twelve years ago maybe? Very chic and stylish, but probably dressing not to be noticed. Would that be fair?
Anna: Not dressing to be as noticed maybe! But yes. In tandem with ageing, I suppose, well, becoming aware of ageing. And in tandem with that sense of invisibility that people talk about, I thought, ‘Well what can I do to to remain or trying to become more visible?’ And one of the tools in my kit, as a fashion journalist, has been through what I wear. Although it is only one of the tools in my kit. Where this whole thinking about ageing thing started for me really was when I went fairly obviously grey. I was warned by so many people not to do it. Again I heard that word invisible. 'Just don’t do it, you’ll be invisible.’ And, actually, it’s proved to be one of the most visible things I've done. So I suppose that got me thinking about these kind of contradictions, these things we’re told that maybe don’t add up to being how things actually are. 

I’m trying to remember, was it about a decade ago you started going grey?
It probably was. I’m 51 now, so I was probably in my early forties and I’d sort of accidentally slid into dying it. I think that's what happens with a lot of these things, you might not necessarily make conscious choices. I’d started to have a little bit of a lowlight, as they call it, and then suddenly I was ending up with a full-head of dark hair. And by the end it was a pretty mammoth job of maintenance, it was every two or three weeks, and I just felt I was losing myself really. I got a bit cross about the fact that I was having to spend all this money and spend all this time dying my hair. So I went for it! And that was the beginning of me thinking, well, maybe some of these preconceptions around what we're supposed to do and not supposed to do and how we’re supposed to be and not supposed to be as we get older are complete bunkum!