Stacy London

You probably know famed stylist Stacy London as co-host of TLC’s hit makeover show “What Not to Wear.” which landed her squarely in the heart of TV stardom. What you might not know is that she is now taking the middle age market by storm with her new company, The State of Menopause. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Sam Edis and I'm Amy Nelson. Welcome to
What's Her Story? With Sam and Amy. This is a
show about the world's most remarkable women, their professional and
personal journeys. Together, we'll hear from gold medalists, best selling authors,
and leaders of the world's most iconic brands. Listen every

(00:22):
Thursday or join the conversation anytime on Instagram at What's
Her Story Podcast. You probably know fame stylist Stacy London
as co host of TLC's hit and makeover show What
Not to Wear, which landed her squarely in the heart
of TV stardom. What you might not know is that
she's now taking the middle age market by storm with

(00:45):
her new company, The State of Menopause. You have said
that what a person wears can be very symptomatic of
what is going on with them. So what are you
wearing right now? I'm wearing actually a cuel turtleneck and
it's not one of those r efron uh moments of like,

(01:05):
I hate my neck so I'm trying to hide it.
It's just it's the comfy as shirt that I have
and I love stripes, so I was like, I'm gonna
wear this today. It also kind of goes with my
white streak in my hair somehow strangely navy and white,
black and white. So yeah, that's what I'm wearing. Do
you feel pressure when you're out and about that you
always have to be wearing the perfect thing or that
everyone's I mean, you were critiquing what people wore for

(01:28):
so long on television. It kind of puts you in
this spot where you always have to be wearing the
perfect thing. Yeah, I mean, look, you know, first of all,
in terms of What Not to Wear or love Less
or Run or any of the makeovers that I've done
on any television show, you know, that's part of me.
That's a persona that's like that came from years of,
you know, being an assistant to some of the greatest

(01:49):
fashion editors in the world and then learning to work
with real people on commercials, you know, not six foot tall,
hundred pound models, but real people who were like in
bank commercials or kids or men, And that was also
part of my experience. So getting to What Not to
Wear really was a very interesting time for me, specifically
because one, I didn't know it was going to be

(02:10):
so popular and that people would start going like this
with like a you know, a super lens looking at
whatever I was wearing, to the point where I walked
out of my house wants to go to the gym,
and this woman sort of snapped her neck around and
was like, you're not allowed to wear sweats, and I
was like, I'm going to the gym, So it's pretty appropriate, right,
Like it does match the occasion, unlike a lot of

(02:32):
what you know people were wearing on the show, and
the only thing that I would say is like, you know,
look what not to wear. We did critique, but I
do like to think of it as constructive criticism, partly
because it was like we were never saying, wow, you
look awful and leave it there, right, We were like,
is this getting you where you want to be? Is
this most flattering for your body type? Let us show
you some alternatives. Right. Criticism is criticism if you're just saying, wow,

(02:56):
you look lousy, But constructive criticism is when you're offering
alternatives to you know, whatever the present situation is. So yes, okay,
to get back to your original question, I don't feel
that kind of pressure anymore. Right, I'm fifty two years old.
I've already done all of this clothing for me is
much more about self expression now than it has ever been.

(03:18):
Let's get back to your story, So tell us about
those early years pre What Not to Wear. You were
working in the cutthroat world of magazines. What was that
journey like for you? Well, you know, it was a
very interesting one, right I started my first job straight
out of college was as an assistant at Vogue UM
to both Philispolsnic and Andre Leon Tally who just passed away.

(03:42):
And it was a really interesting journey for me because
you know, I was twenty one years old. I was
kind of didn't know what I was getting myself into.
I kind of got thrown. It's like sink or swim
with a bunch of sharks. But I always talked about
it as military training, like it was boot camp for life.
The words impossible did not exist. So whatever had to

(04:06):
happen to make a shoot happen, to make a proper
to you know, to find a proper to fly a
model from anywhere in the world to get her to
a shoot on time, nothing mattered. Nothing was impossible, And
for me that was a great life lesson going forward
is like, you know, when people sort of give you
this attitude of like nat can't be done. That's the
first thing you should not accept as an answer. Right

(04:29):
the minute somebody like poop poos you is the minute
you've got to dig in your heels and get done.
I agree, and Amy agrees to. But now, Stacy, that
you're a CEO, you realize that very very few people
you work with have that mentality. Yeah, and you know what,
I actually try to surround myself with the people who
do have that mentality. And not only that, I mean
being a CEO is very different from being talent in

(04:50):
the sense that I am always trying to find people
who are smarter than you. I do not want to
be the smartest person in the room. I didn't mind
if I was the smartest person in the room while
giving a talk on fashion, but not not as the
CEO of a company. Uh, everybody who surrounds me has
to be way smarter than I am. Like, that's how
things get done. Do you thinks in today's work environment
in the way you know, just the dynamics that we

(05:13):
have today, Like could the Vogue work out exist today?
Doesn't exist today? No, it can't. And in fact, there
are so many things about you know, print magazines. I mean,
there's so few of them, right, they all need digital platforms.
Um In a lot of ways, I think that print
felt that it was so far superior. You know, when
I left magazines to go into television, I can't tell

(05:34):
you how many editors said, oh, I'm so I'm so
sorry you couldn't make it in magazines. And then I
was like, oh God, I know I'm really doing something
wrong here. You know, I don't know, maybe TV is
the really the wrong move. Only to find five years
later that people were like desperate to get jobs like
the one I had. Right, all these editors suddenly realized
like television was the place to be. And I will

(05:56):
tell you that I completely miscalculated when I started to
get much more success as I kept doing What Not
to Wear? You know, then I started to do Oprah
and The Today Show in Access Hollywood, and then I
got you know, I was a spokesperson for Pantine and
will Light and Dr Schulz and um Lee Jeans. I mean,
you know, it was it was pretty insane, that meteoric rise,

(06:17):
you know, to get to do all of these things.
I wasn't paying attention in the rear view mirror to
the fact that my agents were now starting to sign
bloggers and what did bloggers become influencers? Right? I had
no idea of what the digital revolution and the social
media revolution was going to do, not just to my career,
but the way that I was no longer viewed for

(06:39):
having taken a chance on a new version of it
of the fashion industry to go from print to television.
I really did not calculate how massive the jump from
television to digital and social media platforms was going to be.
I feel behind. I'm always behind when it comes to
that stuff. Now I feel I feel like I'm old.

(07:00):
How did it impact you so post What not to wear? You?
You know, walk out the door and what awaited you? Well?
I spent a year developing a syndicated talk show that
got bought but never made, that was called The Find,
and that was about It was like um, sort of
based on the idea of the view, right, five different women,

(07:22):
all of different ages, colors, sizes, all with different areas
of specialty. Right, So mine was fashioned. We had somebody
who was interiors, we had a finance person, but the
idea was that it was a shopping show and so
everything that you saw on the show and everything we
talked about was for sale and that you could buy
it all on a second screen app. We developed that

(07:44):
technology to do it. We were probably about fifteen to
twenty years too early. But now you see things like
Talk Shop Live that are they're trying to recreate this
television show. And that was actually one of the most
disappointing things for me, was that show I think had
such part in and disappointed that everybody thought it was
too complicated at that time. And then I went on

(08:05):
to do Love Luster Run, which was very much about
what we were just talking about, the disconnect between the
way we see ourselves, our perception of ourselves, and the
way that we are perceived by others, And is that
message is there a disconnect in that message? And how
do we sort of write that connection in order for
you to get what you want? So the example that
I always uses of the suit. Right, if you are

(08:28):
going to interview for a very serious corporate banking job
at an old heritage, you know, banking firm, chances are
you should wear the pinstripe suit. It's like, are you
are you projecting the image that you want in order
to get what you want out of other people and
your life, and I think that we we tend to

(08:49):
minimize how much that first visual impact has on the
way that people perceive us. And now a quick break,
take us to two thousand and sixteen. What happened in
your life. I know that you hit a financial speed bump.
Oh I hit so many speed bumps in seen it's

(09:11):
kind of I don't even know where to start, right. Um.
One of the things and I've gotten a lot of
criticism for this, was that, you know, I wrote this
article where I had wanted to talk about this kind
of the sense of falling from grace, right having been
in the public eye and really having had quite a
quick ascent in terms of being sort of a known

(09:32):
personality in a way that I wasn't ready for, but
sort of you know, I always had this idea in
the back of my head my career in my life
was going to be linear, right, so I would get
to this. I got to this stage in my career
and I thought I'll just stay there. I didn't know that,
you know, audiences are fickle, that television executives are fickle,
that people might stop thinking, Wow, Stacy is the person

(09:55):
we want to look at this new cool girl that
we want, right. It never occurred to me that I
hadn't set myself up in a way that was allowing
me to kind of have continued success, even if that
success looked like something different, even if that success wasn't
in television, even if that success was then to write
a series of books, right, or I've written a couple

(10:15):
but that I had could have made that my full
time occupation, or I could have done a podcast, or
any of the things that I sort of was like, no, no,
I'm a television person, and I kept waiting for something
to happen to me. I kept waiting for somebody to
come to me to fix what I felt was sort
of the loss of this career or that it was

(10:36):
starting to fade, and nobody did right. And so at
the end of I started to realize, like, wow, I
have been spending money the way that I was making
money right in in enough money to never really think, oh,
I should be worrying about my finances. Now. That's not
to say that I didn't save money, of course I did.

(10:58):
I was very smart when I was a young I
a good financial advisor. I've always invested, and I believe
very much in having financial independence. But I just didn't
realize that everything sort of career wise was going to
get soaked, buzzy and blurry and complicated for me in
a way that I couldn't see what the next step
forward should be. So I wrote this article about the

(11:19):
fact that, you know, I went to see my accountant
who said to me, Wow, if you don't really sort
of course correct here, you are going to be broke eventually,
like you can't live like this forever. And it really
struck me. Now what I said in the next sentence
of that article was I don't mean broke broke, right,
But everybody really took issue with the fact that I

(11:39):
had said that. My accountant said that I was going
to go broke, But basically what he meant was you
cannot live the lifestyle that you have been living for
the last fifteen years. And so for me, it was
again another lesson that I needed to learn that sure,
of course, in hindsight, I wish I had learned earlier,
but this idea that you can be very successful in
your career and then there is you know, you hit

(12:01):
a certain age where there is the real potential for
decrease in your earning potential that you're not going to
be able to sustain the same kind of income that
you have for you know, maybe your thirties and forties.
There are a lot of women who become much more
successful and become you know, they've been on the same
track to get the corner office and you know, retire

(12:21):
or sit on boards or all of the things that
we think that way, you know, way modern women of
a certain age start to kind of become so respected
or create passive wealth for themselves. And I've never really
thought about that because all of the things that I've
ever done I was hired to do, right. I was,
you know, work for higher I didn't own anything, I

(12:42):
wasn't making passive income from anything. I hadn't really thought
that that was ever going to be necessary for me.
So that was really the first thing that I had
to take stock up one how am I spending money?
To how am I making money if I'm not the
flavor of the month or the year or the decade anymore? Right, Like,
what does that looked like for me? And that was
also you know, that was a big death of ego moment.

(13:05):
I spent a lot of time I wouldn't say that.
I've always been the most confident person in the world,
but definitely when it came to my career, I felt
like I was very good at what I did, and
to kind of see that being taken away from me
without having a say made me very angry. It made
me feel like, you know, but I'm so good at this,
I'm so talented. Everybody knows me for this, right, um,

(13:27):
So you got to kind of let your ego die
in order to get past that. So then in sixteen
you dealt with a massive spine surgery. What led to that?
I mean it could be argued my body fell apart
because I'd just been going and going and going and going.
I never stopped working. I was always in my head.
I was never never took care of myself physically. I

(13:48):
would run in five inch I heels for twelve hours
a day. You know, I wasn't taking care of my
body in any way that that would allow for me
to recognize something was really wrong until it was almost
too late. So I have that massive spine surgery, and
as I was recovering from that, which took about eighteen months,

(14:10):
you know a lot of other things started to go wrong.
I started to experience like very strange mood things. And
I attributed it all to the surgery. Right, when you
have heart, brain or spine surgery, doctors will tell you
that your body kind of goes into shock because it
thinks it's going to die. Right, my body doesn't know
on any kind of cellular level that I decided to

(14:31):
have that surgery. Right, so your body is reacting in
the way it would react as if you were in
an accident or anything else. And I thought, oh, the
first time I saw all that metal, all that foreign
material in my body, I was terrified, and not just terrified,
I was anxious and moody, and I kept saying at
the time, I feel like something is eating me alive

(14:52):
from the inside. Ever since I saw that X ray,
I was so flipped out, and my brain started to
do this kind of mental gymnastics where I was constantly
trying to find reasons for things that felt really wrong
to me. And I attributed everything to the surgery, that
it was just physically traumatic, and therefore it's sort of

(15:13):
triggered an emotional response, a physical response, um and and
and really that there was a kind of grief and
knowing that you know I'd gotten to this stage of
my life and my body, you know, wasn't as strong
as it used to be when I was young. There's
a lot of saying goodbye right as we age um.
And then I think as I really started to kind

(15:33):
of feel stronger from that, I went through a lot
of physical therapy. I felt, you know, physically stronger, mentally stronger.
My dad got very sick and I spent the better
part of eighteen taking care of him with my family
until he passed away. And then I had a whole
other set of symptoms that I thought was the physical

(15:54):
manifestation of grief. Food allergy, skin rashes, heart palpitations, all
of these things that I attributed to the way that
he had gotten sick. He had a heart disease, and
he would get skin rashes, and he was, you know,
having trouble keeping food down, and all of a sudden,
so was I. I was like, since when am I
allergic to salmon? And you know, just these weird things.

(16:15):
But in between those two years, I just thought, oh,
this is the physical manifestation of like pain, anxiety, and fear,
or the physical manifestation of grief. But I was actually
experiencing perimenopause and those two symptoms. I mean, those two,
those two things that happened probably amplified my symptoms dramatically.

(16:36):
But I didn't know anything about menopause. I didn't I
thought it was optional. I didn't know it was coming
for me. I didn't know what age you got it out.
I didn't know anything about it. Amy, do you know
what age menopause happens? So I know when my mom
went through menopause. But that's really the only woman I've
ever talked about it deeply with. We never talked about it,
like I don't I don't know anything about it. I mean,
I know it's coming like you go down a roller coaster,

(16:58):
but I don't know when that that dip is happy
going to happen. Right, Yeah, Amy is right. I mean,
the clearest genetic predictor of when you'll have menopause is
when your mom had it. Not everybody's mom is alive.
My mom had a radical hysterictory much younger than when
she would have gone into chronological menopause. So you know,
I did not find she didn't even really talk to
me about it, right, I realized that, you know, most

(17:21):
women don't talk about it. Most moms don't feel comfortable
talking about it. It is the one stage of you know,
sort of female hormonal health that is not discussed as
if it is some icky, dark, scary subject. And the
only way to make things less ikey and dark and
scary is to shine a light on them. And once

(17:41):
I realized that that's what I was dealing with, and
once I realized that my doctors were actually not that
helpful in this regard, I went I went to my
g P, who's known me since I was twenty three
years old, and I was like, I feel crazy now.
I have night sweats, I have brain fog, I have insomnia,
I have flashes, I have anxiety, I have depression, I

(18:02):
have meno rage. I was like, all the thirty four
symptoms you can have. I think I had all thirty
four and then some. The muscle fatigue, the breast tenderness,
the joint pain, the hair breakage, the skin like that
felt like sandpaper. I was like, I don't look like myself,
I don't feel like myself. Help And she said to me, well,
you know, you have autoimmune diseases, and I'm not going

(18:24):
to recommend that you go on hormones so you know
you'll get through it. Well, how am I going to
get through it? How? How do I get through it?
I went to my gynecologist and she said to me
use it or lose it. When I was like, I
don't want to. I don't feel comfortable having sex and
sex is painful and I have no interest in sex.
And she was like, yeah, use it or to lose it.
And I what does that mean? And how are you

(18:45):
helping me? And this is when I started to do
my homework. Right just about the same time, this company
called State of Menopause came to me and said, hey,
will you be a beta tester for us? I was like, hell, yes,
I'll be a beta tester. I'm dying to know more
about this. And that's when I started really doing my homework.
There is not a ton of cohesive information for the
average lay person out there about menopause, what it means,

(19:09):
what it is when it happens, and of the people
who are willing to talk about it, most people want
to talk to their friends. They don't even feel comfortable
talking to their doctors. And part of the reason for
that is doctors don't feel that comfortable talking about menopause.
One in four does not feel comfortable about talking to menopause,
to the issue of menopause with their patients. And there's

(19:30):
only two hours of menopause training in medical school, so
of course nobody knows about it. Of course nobody that
wants to talk about it. And also we think of
menopause as this kind of like past your prime, I'm
no longer fertile, and therefore, you know, there's something about
this kind of moment that makes us less relevant, and
and you know, we start to feel invisible. And the

(19:51):
two things that I certainly felt when I started to
go through this was a loss of identity, you know,
like I don't look like myself, I don't feel like myself,
and a loss of agency because I didn't know what
to do about any of it. Nobody was giving me
any answers or any help in a way that I
found helpful to my situation. So when I started beta

(20:12):
testing for this company, which started out just for menopuzzle skincare,
but in four distinct categories. Right cooling, which was clearly
about hot flashes hot flushes, hydration which was really about
what kind of moisture does your skin need? What kind
of ingredients? Does your skin need to kind of retain
moisture and not feel so dry, because your skin can

(20:35):
get as dry as almost a pre diabetic skin dryness.
The same kind of thing relief in terms of the
kind of pain that you can experience, like joint pain,
muscle fatigue, breast tenderness, and repair like when your hair
starts breaking or your nails get weak or things like that.
That was just the tip of the iceberg, right, That's
where we started. And I was a super noisy beta tester.

(20:57):
You both know me, like I don't. I'm not quiet
about my opinions. And so as a beta jester, I
was like, listen, guys, this doesn't work. This cream isn't
thick enough. This one isn't thin enough. If you're doing
a cooling gel that you want to be hydrating. It
also has to kind of have other benefits like does
it protect against cistic acne or pre rosation? Like what
are you doing? Look at all the issues that surround menopause.

(21:20):
So when it came time for this company, which was
making brands right like State of Menopause was a brand
that they owned, uh, they turned to they wanted to
turn into a tech company based on the kind of
custom platforms that they had made for these brands. They
felt like that customizable platform was something that they thought
they could, you know, just go ahead and sell to

(21:41):
other companies. They wanted to find homes for the brands
that they created. And the other brand was gen z
Play was genderalist deodorant, and I was like, listen, I'm not,
I don't know what to do with that. I I
use old Spice or Secret or a natural whatever I
can find. Like, I'm not, I'm not picky about deodorant,
but I do care very much about the state of

(22:02):
And not only do I care about it, I think
that it is limited in its thinking to think that
skincare is enough for a menopause product line. Why did
I want to take it over when I knew one
that I was going to reposition it in the market.
First of all, because I thought it was shortsighted to
think about menopause as a beauty issue. Right as a

(22:24):
this is a much bigger wellness personal care issue that
requires a lot more product than maybe perhaps other verticals.
Because there is no such thing as a menopause vertical.
There is no such thing in the market as a
menopause aisle in your in your pharmacy. There's no such
thing as a menopause footprint in Alta or Sephora or

(22:45):
any of the other companies where you find product in
that regard. So it was very important to me to
think about, what does a menopause ecosystem look like? How
are we going to create proprietary product that actually really
talks about symptomatic relief, acute symptomatic relief as opposed to
kind of long term health place that you're seeing a

(23:08):
lot in supplements or in vitamins or you know, daily uh,
you know, any anything from you know, gummies, two pills
to to any of that stuff. Right, I was like,
what do you grab for in the moment? That's what
I want our our company to be about. So I
acquired the brand and really, you know, went about talk

(23:29):
about a year to really understand, even after we did
our soft launch, to understand the consumer behavior of this audience,
To understand the needs of this audience, to understand the
nuances around menopause, not just from uh medical point of view,
but from a naturopathic point of view. For people who
can't take hormones or can't afford hormones or you know,

(23:52):
just don't want to take them because they just don't
want to do that, right, Like, what are the other
options available to us? Who else is in market? What
other companies are doing this kind of thing? And what
I saw was not only an incredible opportunity financially, because
the women of this age, if they are coming to
it chronologically between forty and sixty, are breadwinners of their households.

(24:15):
They are certainly the head of finances in their households,
and they are not even being given information to help
them make the right choices for themselves. So what I've
come to learn about menopause is that it is actually
it is such a gift, right, It's not. And I
don't want to be hokey, that's the last thing. I
don't want to be cliche about this. It's a gift,
because yes, it's it's you know, what is the alternative

(24:37):
to getting older is like being in the ground. Right,
we were all lucky to be here, we're all lucky
to be alive. But that doesn't mean that going into
middle age and experiencing menopause chronologically between forty and sixty
isn't it's it's not easy. It's hard. I'm never going
to sugarcoat that, but you know it isn't hopeless and
you aren't helpless. And I want to exist as a

(24:59):
company to help you remind yourself that you have agency,
that you have choices, that there is a proactive approach
to this, and more importantly, that menopause actually should be
seen not as an ending, but a beautiful biological fail
safe that allows you to stop and think, Hey, what

(25:19):
am I doing with my life now? This is the
middle of my life. I'm not dying at fifty, We're
not dying in childbirth right, and we are living to
be in our eighties and nineties. So if you're getting
menopause around to fifty two, you know that's usually the
general time that this is going to happen to you.
This is an amazing opportunity for you to take stock

(25:39):
of where you are in your life. We don't leave
linear lives anymore. Do you want to pivot? Do you
want a new career? Are you still raising your children
or is it empty nest syndrome? Are you taking care
of your parents in terms of elder care? Are your
parents starting to die? This is a very very loaded time,
middle age is not you know, sort of the Middle Ages,

(26:02):
but it is the middle of life and you are
stuck between kids and parents. You are at that moment
where we are at the highest point of decreased earning potential.
It's the highest rate of divorce. It's certainly scientific. American
did a study that said the lowest point of happiness
in a woman's life is between forty five and fifty five.
That's not by accident, and that's not just because of menopause,

(26:24):
but that's because of all the age adjacencies that go
along with it. And now a quick break. I'm talking
about how we are living so much longer thirty forty years.
What do you envision your life will look like when
you're seventy. What I always saw when I turned fifty
was I was like, I am going to take this
decade to turn around the mindset that I've always had,

(26:46):
the things that I've always looked to for external validation
to make me feel like I was worthwhile. That I
think a lot of us do write, you know, in
terms of codependence, it's called other esteem. In in terms
of like codependency and psychology, that we define our own
worth by allowing other people or other situations to define
our identity. So self worth really comes from peeling away

(27:10):
all of what you we consider to be external validation.
Getting the right job, being in the right place at
the right time, having the right friends, knowing you know
what kind of influence we have, how we look, how
much money we have, all of these things that are
external markers of what we consider to be success, instead
of what do you know to be true about yourself?

(27:32):
What do you love about yourself? And I thought, oh
my god, this whole time that I've spent in my
life waiting for somebody to tell me I choose you write,
whether it was my partner or a television channel or
anything else. In like, I was like, I'm going to
take my fifties and I am going to change my
entire mindset where I am the one who does the choosing,

(27:53):
that my personal validation is going to come from me,
not any external validation. And I am going to take
this decade to prove to myself what I'm capable of doing.
I don't know what that looks like yet, but that
was the goal. That's the horizon for me. I said.
By the time I get to sixty, I'm not only
going to have changed the way that I allow myself

(28:14):
to interact with other people. It's going to be on
my terms, whatever those terms look like as I evolved.
So when you ask me what I think about seventy five,
I actually can't wait. I don't know what it's going
to look like. I just know that I will be
infinitely more evolved in my thinking than I am right now.
And I believe that I will be able to value

(28:36):
time and my relationships and whatever work I'm doing even
more because as we age, I think time becomes a
commodity that's more and more valuable to us. You know,
we have less of it to play with. And so
by the time I'm seventy five, I want to be
living my life out loud, but I also want to
be doing it on my own terms. You've evolved so

(28:57):
much professionally in the last thirty years. How have your
romantic relationships evolved? Oh, I mean that's something I talked
about all the time, right. I dated men, you know,
all of my life, and and then I was incredibly
lucky in two thousand eighteen to meet my girlfriend, who

(29:17):
you know. Now we've been together almost three and a
half years and I don't know what took me so long.
I mean, frankly, I wouldn't say that it was like, oh,
you know, it's about being straight or being gay or
identifying in any particular way. It's that I fell in
love with the best person that I've ever met in
my life. And I can't I can't begin to say

(29:40):
what that means, right, I think all of us when
we meet our person. No. In fact, I don't even
know if I knew right away, because I was like,
oh my god, I'm questioning myself, is this like a
fat Is this? You know? What is it that I'm
doing here? How am I experiencing these feelings? And it's
part of the reason that even you know, even in
when I hadn't been doing television as regularly, like you know,

(30:02):
I wasn't coming into your living rooms every Friday night anymore,
I really wanted to be very careful in the way
in which I started to talk about my relationship with Cat,
because I wanted us to keep it private, not out
of any kind of shame. I don't believe in that.
But what I did believe was that it would be
foolish to be like, I am dating a woman only
to turn around to be like, well, it was a

(30:23):
relationship that was nascent that then didn't work out, right, Like,
why why go public with something that that would clearly
make such a big splash if I wasn't really sure
of what I was doing. And you know, the great
thing about it was that when I we and you know,
sort of made a conscious decision, both of us to say, Okay,
it's time. I started to see you know, lots of

(30:46):
whisperings on on social media about you know, do Stacy
have a really hot girlfriend? And I was like, yeah,
I do, but I want to control the narrative again,
the same thing the way I talked about style. I
want to be the one controlling the narrative about what
my life looks like and how I am presenting that
to other people. And that's when I announced it on
I think it was the last day of Yeah, Cat,

(31:09):
Cat's here, so I'm asking her, you know, it had
been a year that we had been together, and I know,
I just said, you know, hey, i've seen I've seen
the gossip, and I'm going to set you straight. Not
that it's any of your business, but now that I
see that other people are talking about it's time that
I talk about it. And I also recognized that it
was very easy for me to do this. It was

(31:32):
very easy for me to say I fell in love
with this person. I know that I am a white
woman of privilege, and I don't have an employer. You
can't fire me. What is it you're gonna You're gonna
unfollow me. I don't give a ship, you know what
I mean? Like those are there were there were no consequences.
My family loves Cat more than they loved me. Like

(31:53):
nobody shunned us, nobody. You know, my dog is no
longer my dog, Like she loves Cat more than me.
Like I just have come to terms with the fact
that people like Cat more than me. That's it. I'm
over it. It took me a second, but I'm fine
with it. And the bigger issue was that I just
recognized that there were no true consequences in the way

(32:13):
that the people who have had to fight to be
who they are, I only stand on their shoulders. And
I am very careful about constantly repeating that because the
people whose family has abandoned them and the people who
were not allowed to be who they were or were,
you know, violence was committed against them because of who
they were. That is not the position that I have

(32:33):
been in. I have been in a position only to
celebrate my love, and it really reminds me how many
people came before me that fought for my right to
be able to do that with no consequence. Stacie, I
have to ask. I'm sure a lot of our listeners
want to know how you and Cat met and fell
in love. We met through a mutual friend who brought

(32:56):
Cat to a fundraiser that I did with Liza Reiner,
who is amazing actress, and a friend that we threw
a fundraiser for Cynthia Nixon when she was running for governor,
and Kat came and I really, I feel very strongly
about this recollection. I write, Babe, you you agree with
me on this one. Um. We met, our friend introduced

(33:17):
us and we shook hands and Kat held onto my
hand and the first thing she ever said to me
was oh, Wow, You're so beautiful, And I remember thinking, oh,
it's on, it's on, like whatever this is, whatever this is,
it's on. Um. And we didn't have our first day
for a while. And also I met Kat when my

(33:40):
dad was really really sick and One of the first
things that I said to her was, you know, I
am happy to make plans, but there's only a fifty
chance on any given day that I will actually be
able to come to them, right. You know, I'm so
honored to be invited to anything, but the fact is
that if my dad needs me, I have to go there.
So I sometimes I'm going to cancel last minute. And

(34:01):
I said that to all of my friends. I really
tried to be as open and honest about what was
going on with me at that time as possible, and
Kat and I got to hang out a few times.
But then I remember we we spent the marathon day together,
which was November three, right that year, the third. I
think it was the third. I'm asking Cat for confirmation here,

(34:21):
but I think it was November three. Our friend, our
mutual friends, who who had introduced us, was running in
the marathon. I have great friends who throw a marathon
party every year that I always go to because the
marathon is one of the most joyous days in New
York City in my opinion. So we spent the day
together and we had the best day. Like we saw
our friend, we like high fived her when she was

(34:41):
running the marathon. We hung out, we had a great time,
walked home together, and Kat had said to me on
the third, Hey, my birthday is November nine. I would
love for you to come to my birthday dinner. And
I said I would love to. And that day I
had to call her and say, my dad is sick
and I can't come. And one of the saddest and

(35:02):
most poignant things I think about our relationship was that
my dad died the next day. He died on November ten,
And not only did Cat come to the funeral, which
like completely blew my head off, she never got to
meet my dad, which is like one of the greatest
regrets of my life. But I also knew that I
was like dealing with incredibly kind individual, somebody who would

(35:24):
show up for me without really knowing me or knowing
where our relationship was going to go. Um to be
supportive in that way was really really remarkable. I'm crying,
Amy and I are both crying, which is very rare
that we both cry at the same time. He really
is just one of us. It's so sweet and and bizarrely, Amy,

(35:45):
don't you agree. Like we've had a lot of guests
on our show fall in love with women after years
of dating men. It's it's something about our show or
the guests we choose to actually talked about it. Yeah,
is it really? That's like? I actually I love that.
I really think there is something to that. You know,
this idea in midlife also feeling more free. So the

(36:05):
idea that you know, after dating men for you know, decades,
that I would fall in love with a woman and
feel more loved and seen than I ever have in
my life. You know, really, it's just one of the
happiest circumstances that's come out of my journey. So, Stacy,
we're going to go to the speed round now where
we're just going to ask you quick questions and you

(36:27):
give us quick answers. Amy, do you want to try
to start? Stacy? What book are you reading right now?
It's called Bending Reality, How to Make the Impossible Probable
by Victoria's Song. And this was just given to me
by a really good close friend. And what show are
you binging right now? What is your morning routine? Well,
it's really interesting that you say that, because I've just

(36:48):
changed my morning routine. Usually it would be that I
would stay in bed, get my phone, read the news,
get depressed, and then get up, And now both Cat
and I would just be like, oh, got another another
day in hell. But now I get up. I try
to breathe or meditate for five minutes five five five, Right,
I'm not trying to do I'm not I used to

(37:09):
do vedic meditation twenty minutes in the morning, twenty minutes
in the afternoon. That doesn't feel doable for me right now?
Is the CEO of a startup I am. I am
a busy lady. So I try to do five minutes
of breathing or meditating, five minutes of writing in my journal,
five minutes of reading a book that matters to me,
that that fills me, and then I'll read the news
and then I get to work. We can't end without

(37:31):
talking about your hair. Tell us about you know you're
you're in the face of panting. You're no known for
that gray streak in your hair. Tell us about your
hair today and what it takes to maintain it. Well,
I don't do anything to maintain it. I'm not gonna lie.
You know. It's this my my gray streak is obviously
have a lot more gray than I used to. But

(37:52):
I've had it since I was about eleven and a half,
so I've never ever considered getting rid of it. In fact,
part of my panting contract, I was like, you can
cut my hair, you can style my hair, but you
cannot die my gray streak, like that will never happen.
And they were fine with that. But you know, part
of it was that I've never associated with age. I
was like, I am like a cartoon character. I'm like

(38:13):
Cuella de Ville. I'm like Rogue from X Men. Well,
Lou has been listening to our whole interview and he
always comes in with the final and usually the best
question from the male perspective. Oh bring it. I got
this idea that every time somebody is talking, you get
a chance to to actually hear what they're thinking. So
I get a chance to get inside your head. And

(38:35):
you have a lot going on of this. Let me
just say two things about that. One, Um, I did
go to mass Or for philosophy, um psychology and literature,
so you know again, yeah, I I definitely like thinking,
but also I mean Gemini, so there are a lot

(38:55):
of me in here, and we're all doing a lot
of thinking at the same time. It's like, why I
don't have a favorite color because none of us in
here can decide. That's how I think about it. There's
a lot, there's a lot of that's incredible, but one
of the one of the answers actually, and you kind
of you kind of did a great way of segueing
into it when you started talking about menopause. I was like,

(39:17):
what do what? I was it was very fascinating, And
now I got some some YouTube videos to look at, right, Um,
but I was just thinking, damn, women go through some ship.
I was just in my heart like like, I'm sorry,

(39:40):
but yeah, Actually, it's really interesting that you say that,
because I think that in a lot of ways. Um,
you know, I've I've started writing a kind of a
menopause memoir, and I'm just going to share with you
what I'm thinking about calling it right now, right, which
is hysterical. And part of the reason is that we
are constantly women are constantly being accused of being hysterical, right,

(40:02):
And there's something incredibly funny about that to me. But
what that is truly based on, right, is that through
this kind of patriarchal lens where just physiologically, men's hormones
don't fluctuate as much or in the same way over
our lifespans the way women's hormones do physiologically, we have
decided we have placed a value judgment on hormonal fluctuation

(40:26):
as more hormonal fluctuation is bad and less hormonal fluctuation
is good, and that somehow, being you know, more hormonally
challenged in terms of that fluctuation right and not being
so rigid somehow has given people permission to say, well,
you're hysterical, you're being hysterical, And I'm like, that's not
what it is at all. It's that women's physiology is

(40:50):
not understood well enough for us to really understand why
hormonal changes create a ripple effect in the way that
we behave, in the way that we're seeing, in the
way that you know, nobody understands female reproductive health in
the way that we should, because it isn't just about reproduction,
it's about hormones. So for me, this idea that women
are hysterical is such a bunch of ship. How can

(41:12):
a man support a woman in their lives that are
going through these transitional phases of pre menopause, of menopause,
and impost menopausal. Oh okay, first of all, Lou, I mean, really, yes,
let's can we just all clap and be like that's
a bit, that's a It's such such an incredible question.
And it is actually one of the pillars that I
talked about when I talk about my brand, which is
called State of Menopause. Right, there are certain things that

(41:34):
this brand and the mission that we have is to do,
and you know, I would say it's de stigmatized for sure, right.
We want to de stigmatize menopause of people are just
not afraid of it, right, in the same way, we
want to contextualize it so that you understand that menopause
is not this final frontier. We want to contextualize it
in the lifespan of hormonal health, right, so that you

(41:58):
understand why, um, it belongs in the conversation at every
stage of life, that this is something you should know
and expect before it happens. We want to normalize that conversation.
And when I see normalize it, that's different than de
stigmatizing it. That means it should be very easy for
you to find care practitioners and doctors that are willing
to kind of talk you through it. But even more importantly, friends,

(42:22):
significant others, partners, kids, all of your family members and friends.
Really to kind of have that communication open so that
you can ask for the help that you need. Well,
you know, going through some issues that may actually be
quite stressful. And you know, men understand andropause, right, which
is a lot less complicated. There are really only two

(42:43):
symptoms that surrounded It's a rectile dysfunction and hair loss.
And you know, we joke around what do men do
when they're having a midlife crisis. They like take gro
gain and buy agrad, get a sports car and a
younger girlfriend. But like, we have thirty four symptoms at
the same time, and yet it's the highest rate of
divorce for us. We're not having Yeah, we're you know,
we're perceived as having a midlife crisis and that we

(43:05):
have to white knuckle through it instead of actually being
able to get to the other side and have a
midlife renaissance. And that's where men can truly be helpful.
Where we can men and women both but should be
able to look at aging as in a really proactive
positive way, that women should be allowed to age, that
we should be loved for being allowed to age, that

(43:27):
having wrinkles and you know, not having the same body
you had at does not make you less attractive or appealing,
and men need to remember that that is actually something
that that matters in the way that we talked about this,
and that we should be afforded the same kind of
respect at any age. Well, that's a hard interview to

(43:48):
sum up. So Stacy is so many different things, and
I think, you know, I was super fascinated to hear
her conversations on middle age and menopause because it really is,
like once used thinking about it, like this is something
literally every woman goes through and we just don't talk
about it. Um. But I wish we've gotten to dive
more into her childhood. Yeah, I think that, um, Stacy,

(44:10):
you know, she grew up in New York City, she
like I did, and she definitely has kind of like
a tough city girl mentality, which I think actually is
the thread that took her from being this like fashion
icon who strongly stated their opinion but also is beloved
by her fans to now almost becoming an advocate for

(44:31):
middle aged women to say the rest of your life
is going to be the best of your life. And
I love that, and I sort of I'm excited she
makes me excited about menopause. I know that sounds ridiculous,
but like she does make it seems super fun. I mean,
she met the love of her life after she went
into menopaus you know, not like not like I'm like
bringing on like, but I'm just saying, like she does
make it seem like, you know, the fifties are awesome. Yeah,

(44:54):
but like maybe that is like her continuation of that
kind of tough girl thread sam right of like reimagining
what we've been told is like, frankly kind of like
the end for women, Like we just don't even really
talk now we do, but maybe like twenty years ago
a woman who's over fifty year like, but now it's
like we have decades of our career left, a new
love life, like all of these things. Yeah, I think that.

(45:16):
You know. I keep saying I'm turning fifty this year,
and I was excited to throw a glass half full
party because I feel like I've halfway through my life.
And everyone's like, that's so optimistic. I'm like, but don't
you all think you're going to live to a hundred?
Like I just always assume that, but now it's my
plans are delayed so maybe it'll be a fifty one
year old party. But I do think that the more

(45:38):
people that talk about things like aging in such a
positive way, the more resources will have and the stronger
will feel when we get to that that point. So
kudos to Stacy, and she has a lot to say.
I feel like we could have heard from her for
hours longer completely Thanks for listening to What's Her Story

(46:01):
with Sam and Amy. We would appreciate it if you
leave her review wherever you get your podcasts, and of course,
connect with us on social media at What's Her Story podcast.
What's Her Story with Sam and Amy is powered by
my company, The Riveter at The Riveter dot c O
and Sam's company, park Place Payments at park place Payments
dot com. Thanks to our producer Stacy Para and our

(46:23):
male perspective Blue Burns