Stacy London's second rodeo
“We’re not dying at 60; we’re dying in our 90s. We’re in our prime, so can we stop saying at 50, 'I’m done?'” — Stacy London
When we originally published this interview in January 2024, Stacy London declared she would never reboot her hit show, What Not To Wear.
But she never said she wouldn’t reboot herself on TV. “Some of [WNTW ] is a little cringeworthy looking back — but it was of its time,” London says. “To do another show like that, I would want to be less instructive and more supportive. So, if you come to me and ask me to help you figure out what flatters your figure, that’s one thing. But if you come to me and say, ‘I’m a free spirit, and I want to dress only in vintage and I wear sparkles and only purple,’ I say great. Wear whatever you want.”
We hoped for a TV comeback and we got exactly what we wanted with her new show with Clinton Kelly, Wear Whatever the F You Want, which launched in April 2025.
From What Not to Wear to Wear Whatever the F You Want
A reboot of our interview with Stacy London, the stylist-turned–TV personality-turned-women’s health entrepreneur-turned-TV-comeback queen
Stacy London was an early-aughts household name with her TLC show What Not to Wear. In case you’re not makeover-obsessed, the show involved London and her co-host Clinton Kelly pouncing on unsuspecting makeover candidates who were nominated by their family and friends, reviewing their closets (usually in horror), then scurrying them off to NYC for a crash course in shopping and personal style.
Since the show wrapped in 2013, London has undergone a series of evolutions. She hosted another makeover show called Love, Lust or Run, lent her style pedigree to The Today Show and The View, grappled with the death of her father, underwent spinal-fusion surgery, and began her first serious relationship with a woman, comedian Cat Yezbak.
She also entered menopause, and was so disoriented by her lack of preparedness for that journey that she launched State Of Menopause, a health and wellness company that made products to address menopausal symptoms. In 2023, London sunset the company, because, although she retains a deep interest in the field, she wanted to move away from a product focus. As she put it on Instagram, “my interest lies in connecting us, in collaborating, in amplifying all the voices in this space. …Product has not held the same interest for me personally. I love being brand-agnostic!”
In short, London has earned her throne as the Maven of Midlife. She continues to be in the trenches working as a reigning leader of menopause advocacy and is an advisor to women’s health- and peri/menopause-focused companies Wile, Evernow, and Flow Health. She notes that the wind-down of State Of Menopause is in the service of a “much bigger idea that I’m really excited about launching...this is not an ending. Well, it is an ending … It’s like menopause. It’s an evolution…a transformation. And it is the next thing that’s coming for me.”
In 2023, London headed up a retreat at a well-known spa with a team of menopause authorities (Dr. Jen Gunter, author of the The Menopause Manifesto); also doctors Somi Javaid, Julie Sarton, and Joy’El Ballard — who spoke on topics from physical, mental and sexual health to medical advocacy. To ensure that participants felt uber cared for, London sourced products from dozens of brands to appoint their rooms with everything a peri- or post-menopausal woman could want (i.e., journals, books, vibrators, cooling pajamas, luxury face wash, vaginal care and more). During event-prep, once London started getting an influx of questions about how to dress their changing bodies, she recognized a need to merge her style expertise into the wellness event. She ended up bringing in 15 designers for on-site trunk shows and conducted daily style clinics for the participants.
We Zoomed with London in January 2024 to talk about menopause as reinvention, being childfree, and how to own your personal style evolution with age.
The Midst: In the last few years, in addition to celebrities speaking openly about menopause, we’ve seen the launch of companies and sites like Hey Perry and Evernow, and this under-recognized segment of healthcare is beginning to grow and be disrupted. Why do you think menopause is becoming less taboo and more openly talked about?
Stacy London: Because Gen X is basically running these menopause companies — that’s not by accident. Gen X has always pushed buttons and broken ceilings. We’re the generation where we got to menopause and were like, “We're not taking this lying down.” Forbes published a great article about that. There was nothing to help us; our doctors weren’t educated and weren’t even taught about menopause in medical school, or if they did, it was like a three-hour course.
If somebody tells us ‘no,’ we're gonna go and figure it out. That’s going to be our legacy: Putting the spotlight on women's health in a very different way, because we got to this stage of development with no real counseling about it, no understanding of what was happening to us, and we simply didn't accept that as an answer.
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