Elle of a sweet spot: Why 60 isn’t the new 40, and that’s fab

Elle Macpherson is the first of a flood of celebs — think Liz Hurley, Sandra Bullock, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sonia Kruger — hitting 60. Here’s why it’s a new age of womanhood.

Supermodel Elle Macpherson returns to the runway for PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival Royal Exhibition Building. Picture: Jason Edwards

What do Liz Hurley, Sandra Bullock, Elle Macpherson, Brooke Shields, Courteney Cox, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rebecca Gibney, Calista Flockhart, Diane Lane, Sonia Kruger, Viola Davis and Kristin Davis all have in common?

It’s hard to believe when you see Hurley modelling her own bikinis and Macpherson helming a wellness empire and Gibney, Flockhart, Kruger and Parker turning out some of their best work, but they are all turning 60 within the next 18 months.

In fact Elle Macpherson is hitting the milestone within days and when I was invited to a lunch with her recently I have to confess that I was curious to see what she looked like (there’s not a guest there who wouldn’t have been doing the same).

I’d interviewed the model and businesswoman late last year but it was via Zoom and while I’m too inept to manage it myself, I know you can give yourself a face lift with filters or some well positioned lighting.

Anyway, Elle does look sensational but what was more notable was that she looked happy.

Brooke Shields is set to join the 60 club. Picture: Getty Images

Sex and the 60: Sarah Jessica Parker. Picture: Getty Images

Ecstatically so. She was promoting her wellness brand and had brought along her new bloke and was describing what she’d felt like ten years earlier which was basically sluggish and exhausted.

“I guess I was going through menopause but no one ever said that to me,” she said.

And that’s when I realised that 60 is not the new 40, as is constantly being claimed, but the sweet spot of womanhood.

It’s the moment, typically, when most of the challenges within marriage, mothering, menopause and mastering your career have likely resolved and if you are fortunate enough to have reasonable health and wealth and live in a country free from conflict, you are truly in your prime.

Compared to subsequent generations, today’s 60-year-olds are also less challenged by mental health issues, not just because of greater resilience, but because it wasn’t in their lexicon.

I’d once feared 60 but as I see it on the distant horizon it looks fantastic. And enticing.

Sandra Bullock is no senior citizen. Picture: Getty Images

As the first of Gen X hit 60 next year they are ushering in a new age of womanhood. Unshackled from the kitchen, funded by their own jobs, streamlined by technology, buoyed by greater fitness, leisure and travel and free to pursue whatever relationships they like, they are entering a golden age. Except golden sounds like the sun going down which is not what it is. Neither is 60 the age of serenity because from what I can see, there’s a lot of frivolity going on.

No, 60 should be rebranded the age of fulfilment.

How different it looks to my grandmother’s life. Fingers stained orange from smoking and wrinkled by lack of sun protection, she’d spent her days under the house washing clothes through an old hand wringer.

She didn’t drive, functioned thanks to Valium, never travelled overseas and was married to a man whose alcoholism meant he was lovely one minute and a monster the next.

She died aged 68, remembered for her excellent brandy snaps but not as a woman who’d loved her life.

As I inch towards the decade that would be her last, I wish she could see what womanhood looks like now.

My body is strong and well because I have time and the knowledge to make it so.

My career is more interesting than it’s ever been because I’ve worked hard and created opportunities and believed I was worthy of it.

Long-term Friend Courteney Cox. Picture: Getty Images

My children are adults and while they suffered their parents’ marriage ending, they see us still getting on. They know that hard times are survivable. I have a home, superannuation and income protection insurance because, unlike my grandmother, I glimpsed what agency might feel like and sought the means to pursue it. I have friends I share my whole world with, a partner who is my equal and I can see more education, new hobbies and purpose ahead.

The women I see turning 60 have a playfulness I never saw in my grandmother.

Their bodies are glorious even if, like Hurley, they sleep in a bra to keep their breasts pert or sip on green elixirs like Macpherson.

They’ve had children every which way.

By surrogate like Parker, via egg donation like Kruger, via adoption like Flockhart, Bullock, and Kristin and Viola Davis, or through IVF like Cox. Equally, they may happily not have them.

Thanks to social media, you have some insight into their days.

Parker is an avid reader and constantly recommends books to her followers, Flockhart and Lane are enjoying great roles, notably in Feud: Capote Vs The Swans, Gibney is a whirlwind of work, gratitude and recent empty nesting, Kruger has her own dance-based fitness program and Shields heads up a global community for post-40 women called Beginning is Now.

Recently she posted a quote on Instagram from writer Madeleine L’Engle: “The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”

And that’s the true secret of 60 I suspect. You’re in the sweet spot between a life lived and the one still ahead.

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Originally published as Elle of a sweet spot: Why 60 isn’t the new 40, and that’s fab