RED WOMAN
25 years ago, Red was launched as a magazine to speak to women embracing ‘middle youth’. Then, it was a new phenomenon, but two and a half decades on, Laura Craik asks how much has changed
‘A few years ago, my husband, Bruce, announced he might like to be a snail farmer. This idea came to him at a particularly low point in the never-ending debate that rages in our household: How Can We Get A Life? It’s a question that exercises most full-time working people, if they can ever grab a moment to think in the giddy hurtle between the office and the supermarket, home and the school run. Whatever happened to fun?’
This paragraph appeared in the launch issue of Red, 25 years ago. But it could equally have been written today. A quarter of a century later, aren’t we all still consumed by the same issues that Red set out to cover in 1998? And to the struggle to find time to think, parent, work and party, in 2023 we could also add the additional responsibilities of walking the dog, tending to our ageing parents, shopping for a hybrid-working wardrobe, updating our social media, nurturing our mental health and trying to save the planet. So onerous are the pressures of modern life that even the most robust of us could be forgiven for wailing, ‘Stuff the Zoom call – bring on the snails!’
Now, 25 years after Red launched, everything and nothing has changed. But how fascinating it is to consider the differences. In her Editor’s Letter, launch editor Kath Brown wrote about ‘a new kind of attitude, where age isn’t an issue any more’, detailing how ‘Red is a magazine that respects your intelligence and puts a smile on your face’. She also coined the term ‘middle youth’, which she defined as ‘people who have acquired their fair share of responsibilities but who also still want to hold on to a youthful attitude to life’. The term caught the public imagination, with Brown even finding herself on the evening news. ‘It was a good catchphrase that really caught on,’ remembers Brown now. ‘Red was aimed at women who grew up without growing old. They were very different from their mothers: they were having kids but still going to see Coldplay, we always used to say. They still dressed in a certain way, too. We talked a lot about “edited choice” and “effortless style”, because we were aimed at this very busy woman who had a career and kids – anew phenomenon at the time.’
These days, ‘middle youth’ has morphed into ‘midlife’, a subtle rebrand that perhaps reflects how those of us in our 40s and 50s aren’t so much clinging on to youth as entering into a new life phase that doesn’t need the validation of
