Irish Country Living meets Eileen Smith the day before her 80th birthday around the corner from her home at the Intercontinental Hotel in Dublin.
However, Eileen is no ordinary 80-year-old woman. She is one of Ireland’s top online fashion bloggers. Period.
On the social media picture sharing platform Instagram, she boasts 50,000 followers under the alias ‘eileenstylequeen’ and in 2018 she won Fashion Influencer of the Year.
How the mother of four and grandmother of 13 came to be the social media sensation she is today – something she humbly refutes – is quite a simple story.
Two of her daughters live a distance away from her, Suzanne in Limerick and Audrey a little bit further away in Sydney. With all three ladies interested in fashion, they would regularly message about their latest purchases.
“The three of us did it for a while and then Suzanne asked me, ‘Why don’t you go on Instagram? It’s a bit of fun’. I said, alright and I started putting up a few photographs. Aoibhe Devlin, she’s big on Instagram, she gave me a shout-out about a year ago, even less than that. All of a sudden so many people started following me.”
Eileen posts pictures of her outfits daily, in the full-length manner she became accustomed to sharing with her daughters. The appeal of her account, she feels, is the journal-like way in which she approaches it, saying what she is going to do each day. Over 70% of her followers are aged 16 to 26.
Active ageing
Meeting anyone around the time of a milestone birthday, be it 30, 40, 50 or beyond, can be a sticky one to navigate. But not with Eileen, she noticeably beams when we wish her a happy birthday. On the topic of ageing, we want to know her thoughts?
Eileen attributes her sprightliness principally to staying active and getting out and about. She is a member of a golf club, a bridge club, walks most days and has a group of seven friends whom she says are like her sisters. They meet up weekly and also regularly go on holidays together.
“We have bridge night on a Monday with eight people and two tables. So we play bridge and we have supper. We go to a different house every week. We’ve done it for about 30 years.”
The best way to plan for getting older, the influencer says, is to pick your hobbies for later in life and start at them when you are about 50, so the skills are well-established by the time you retire.
“You need to have it in place, to be doing things. Sometimes it takes a while to learn these things and to get good at them.
“I have a little note beside my bed and that note says: ‘Get up, get dressed and get out.’ Do you know the winter days when you don’t want to get up and get out? I look at it and it is like somebody nagging me. I think sometimes we need a little push as we get older.”
Travelling is something Eileen does extensively and always has. Her husband Larry is a retired Emirates pilot, having worked in Aer Lingus previously. He gets two airline tickets every year for his wife to visit their daughter in Australia. For the last seven years of Larry’s career, he and Eileen lived in Dubai.
Famous face
Eileen is very modest about her online status. She didn’t tell her friends she was on Instagram until Kildare Village asked would they all come down to visit, then she had to let the cat out of the bag as to her success. She is also still very surprised that so many people stop her to say hello, up to 15 times a day and she gets recognised in Australia too.
“This Indian guy in Sydney, he was with his mother. He said, ‘Can I have a photograph with you please?’ I said, ‘Okay’ and so his mother took the photograph. He said, ‘I am a nurse and I work in the hospital across the road. All the girls are Irish, they all follow you, so when I tell them that I met you they’ll be disgusted that they weren’t here,’” laughs Eileen recounting the story.
With regard to her own style, the influencer says that keeping it plain and simple with a couple of nice accessories has always worked for her.
“I dressed to suit myself from a very young age. I don’t like fussy clothes, they don’t suit me. I have a classic taste, rather than a mad taste. I have a friend and she’s just mad with colours and everything she wears, but it suits her.”
With her positive outlook on life, Eileen is a powerful ambassador for older people and ageing. Showing that like her style, keeping it plain and simple is most effective.