At 50, I lost my high-flying fashion career of three decades and ended up on benefits. After applying for 150 roles with not one reply, I was in despair…and I know why so many women my age are in the same panic-stricken position

As a former fashion editor for Elle magazine, I’ve helped millions of women choose what to wear. ‘Add a light-hued shoe or a beige mac, update your wardrobe with a new shoulder silhouette’ and so on.

On a chilly, sunny day in March, it was time to take my own style advice. A cream silk blouse, expensive mid-blue jeans, Celine kitten heels, a diaphanous, ankle-skimming cream coat by my favourite designer, Rejina Pyo. Perfectly dressed for a drink at a rooftop London bar? Not exactly.

This was my first trip to the JobCentre.

It didn’t look like it – my outfit was my armour, my last attempt to deflect the humiliation I felt – but at this point I could barely afford to pay essential bills and feed my two children.

I’d downsized the house, asked for bailouts from friends, but now I had no option except to apply for Universal Credit and obey the texts summoning me to an appointment at the Harlesden unemployment office.

Ironically – or perhaps appropriately – Harlesden is the area of north-west London to which Amanda Hughes retreats after divorce in the BBC sitcom Amandaland. Except she’s in the posh bit. I am not.

It’s a far cry from how life was five years ago. Back then, at the age of 47, I was working as the editorial director at Harrods, with a salary well into six figures. I could buy whatever I wanted, whenever I fancied.

Crucially, I was at the top of my game professionally and could seemingly afford to take a leap of faith with the rest of my career.

My CV glittered: I’d worked for Prada, Armani, Net-a-Porter. Like many midlife women – and we are the first generation to climb the corporate ladder to the top en masse – I’d built a bedrock of experience and achievement by myself, with zero help from anyone. Surely no one could dismiss that?

So when my marriage hit the rocks in 2021 and I started unravelling under the stress of it all – a mother to two children born 23 months apart, a huge job, little in the way of support either at home or at work – I decided to leave corporate fashion for a while to regroup.

I secured a book deal, wrote the odd piece for newspapers and magazines, and, with an occasional paid Instagram collaboration to boost my income, ticked along while I re-thought my future.

In April last year, a few months short of my 51st birthday, a short-term contract ended and I decided to plunge back into the world of full-time work. One last big job to take me to retirement. The children were growing, I could lean in with all my might – and that’s how I approached the search.

For an entire month, I made it my mission to send out at least ten job applications per week. I signed up for job alerts on LinkedIn and changed my profile to ‘looking for work’.

I reached out to my ‘network’. I told people I was ‘open to ideas’. I felt positive: a job offer was surely imminent. Four weeks into the job application process, with a creeping sense of unease, I realised not one prospective employer had been in touch.

I’d had no automated responses of ‘thank you for your application, but we won’t be proceeding with your application, blah blah blah’. Nothing. I thought it was weird, but carried on regardless.

Noticing fashion brands had started using ChatGPT to develop their copywriting, social media and general storytelling, all the things I used to do, I knew I had to pivot. By last summer, I had applied for dozens of jobs well beyond the fashion industry – at British Airways, at drinks companies, at small firms, big firms, well-known firms, new start-ups. And still nothing.

Post-divorce, with my own money, I had bought a stunning Georgian house in Margate, Kent, to run as a part-time Airbnb, part-time seaside bolthole. After tax, some of the Margate income covered my monthly rent in the capital – a great set-up – until the Renters’ Rights Act came in and my west London landlord decided to sell.

I started looking for another place to live but rents had rocketed and none of the sums worked. I sold up in Margate and took a gamble on Harlesden. Trust me, no one from Amandaland would set foot in the bit I chose. My house is a ramshackle mess, but I’m happy here, debt-free, and I have the phone numbers of four of my neighbours. That would never happen two miles up the road in gentrification-land.

After moving into the new house in November last year, I caught the flu. In bed surrounded by boxes for three weeks, and isolating from my kids as I was feeling so sick, the wheels began to come off. I’m only 51, I remember thinking. What if I never work again? The house needed fixing but I could barely make it habitable without an income, never mind save for retirement. Or feed us all, or pay the bills.

Inside I began to panic but, having never been on Universal Credit before, I refused to cave, refused to give up hope of finding work. Inevitably, Christmas was a mess. I remember sitting alone in the bedroom in tears, unable to afford presents for the children. Sick of friends picking up the tab; of being the mate who only turns up for a quick drink and doesn’t stay for dinner, I chose to avoid people and stay quiet.

The months that followed were dark. I’d drained all my savings and applied for more than 150 jobs. Nada. Since April last year, I’ve had no paid work whatsoever.

Broke, I stopped buying nice-to-haves, homing in on essentials instead. Boots became a treat. As for ‘spring style updates’, forget about it. One of my lowest moments happened in front of a line of strangers at the till point in Sainsbury’s Willesden Green. Miscalculating my food shop, my card was declined.

‘Let’s try it again,’ said the kind-faced man behind the till.

‘Whoops, declined again. Do you have another card?’ A trickle of sweat formed around my hairline as the line of disgruntled people behind me began to make that collective noise a crowd makes when simmering from sympathetic to irritated.

An emergency phone call to a girlfriend and five minutes later, with £10 added to my bank account, my card went through.

Having a card declined in front of a line of shoppers is brutal. Having your card declined when you’re dressed like you have a lot of money, well, that’s another level of shame.

Yes, I still have the clothes, or some of them. Flying regularly to New York, Milan and Paris, over my three decades in fashion I’d compiled a wardrobe filled with high-quality designer clobber I probably shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

I say ‘wardrobe’; it’s more like ‘pile’. I gave the two larger bedrooms to my children when we moved. I’m in the box room, and my expensive ‘wardrobe’ is housed under my son’s bed in those oversized plastic storage bags you buy from Ikea. Or what’s left of it. I recently had to sell a lot of jewellery on Vinted. I had two choices – sell the Tiffany silver bone cuff or not have enough to eat that week.

And still the job applications were sent off into what seemed like a total void. A friend told me to send my CV for her to check over. ‘Stacey!’ she later told me, ‘this is such an old lady CV! You have to be ATS friendly, use young keywords, shave 20 years off, remove all education dates.’

She wasn’t joking. ATS, I discovered, stands for applicant tracking system – specialist recruitment software that uses AI to scan CVs for ‘keywords’ that match what the employer wants.

Was I being filtered out by the AI processes now widely used in recruitment? Was it my age? My sex? Both? Could it be that my decades of experience working for the very biggest fashion brands in the world made me undesirable or even invisible to employers?

The penny began to drop – and with it came anger.

I’ve always worked. At the age of 12, it was the local chemist. At 15, I made burning hot teas at Edinburgh Zoo. Between 16 and 18, I worked in an old people’s home emptying pots of wee and cleaning bedrooms. Working Saturdays and Sundays as a schoolgirl didn’t feel unusual.

I was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, a former mill town on the outskirts of Manchester. Mum always had three or four jobs on the go. I was three when she left my dad, and for three years she and I shared a double bed at my nanny and grandad’s house.

When she remarried, I was six, and we moved from the north-west of England to Scotland. She still worked several jobs. ‘Work hard, and everything else will follow,’ is the code programmed into my DNA.

But now, at least for midlife women, that sensible, responsible mantra appears broken.

Enraged at the idea that women in midlife have to reduce themselves to only a fraction of their working lives to appear younger, I decided to post some of this frustration and bafflement on Instagram. The response was extraordinary.

My phone blew up with tales of other midlife women in exactly the same panic-stricken position. A former managing director now using food banks. A former executive for a High Street brand who is on Universal Credit aged 55. A chemical engineer cleaning holiday lets for cash. An NHS consultant unable to find work and living in a relative’s box room after her divorce.

The fact is, women over 50 are too often seen as unhireable – as stuck in the past, stubborn or ‘difficult’. Listen to some of the feedback my midlife correspondents glimpsed, overheard or were told: ‘Overqualified, probably bossy, like her but let’s leave it.’ From a conversation between two HR professionals, one aged 40, the other younger, talking about a 55-year-old applicant who was otherwise ‘perfect on paper’.

‘She looks permanently grumpy! Keep her on a freelance contract, I don’t want to look at that face all day long.’ From one of my Insta correspondents who applied to move from a freelance to permanent role, via an office secretary who overheard the CEO saying this to HR.

‘Too expensive for someone who probably can’t handle the latest tech – and let’s be honest, she’s halfway to retirement anyway.’ From a 54-year-old correspondent who was accidentally copied on an email not meant for her.

Midlife women want to be measured by things that count – what they’ve learned and what they deliver – but now there’s a new gatekeeper in town: AI and automated screening.

Absorbing every prejudice we’ve spent decades fighting, AI reads a long career as a liability. It clocks a graduation date and does the maths. Trained on years of biased human decisions, the AI systems have simply learned to make the same call faster. AI holds a mirror to society and by continuing to allow these prejudices, so the 50-something woman is screened out before a single person lays eyes on her name.

This isn’t merely unfair, it’s pouring exceptional talent down the drain. And it’s causing real human suffering: women aged 50 to 67 don’t just want to work: we have to. Which is why I found myself setting off that day in March in my Celine kitten heels.

Unused to wearing proper shoes any more, by the time I arrived, the self-hating demons inside my mind had settled in for the long-haul. I didn’t know if I was going to faint or throw up.

Climbing the five steps towards reception, the automatic glass doors clunked open. Before my brain had a chance to absorb the new environment, a security guard body-blocked my entry. ‘Proof of appointment,’ he said. I stared at him blankly. It was hardly the Balenciaga show, I hadn’t expected to be asked for an invitation.

Digging around my bag for my phone, I didn’t have wifi to log on to the government website I’d only ever accessed from my laptop. ‘Found it!’ I said, what felt like five hours later. I needed ID too. Flashing my passport, I was finally directed towards a lift. ‘Third floor,’ said the bored guard, not even looking my way.

God knows what my appointed handler, Ahmed, must have thought as I plonked myself down in front of him, a vision in cream and expensive sunglasses, Prada handbag perched on my lap.

Removing an array of snazzy stationery, ready to take notes, I could feel myself disassociating. Toes curling inside the tight points of my Celines from shame. Should I shake his hand or go in for a double-cheeked fashion kiss? Imagine.

‘Let’s go through your job searches,’ said Ahmed, swivelling his screen towards him with a loud creak. ‘How’s it been going?’

I couldn’t help it: a large tear made its way down my cheek. Well, Ahmed, not great, as it happens.

But I’ve made a decision. I have taken off the Loewe sunnies, at least metaphorically, and am showing the world what this inexplicable midlife talent drain looks like. It’s time to regulate the use of AI recruitment tools and cut out their age bias. Companies must be held responsible for the way they use inherently discriminatory tech.

Alone in this misery, midlife women have been bottling up how they really feel. ‘Surely you can get a job?’ say our families and friends, incredulous.

Reading thousands and thousands of messages from women, all in the same position, I decided to set up an online community appropriately named Encore. It’s early days but the response has been phenomenal, unexpectedly so. Hundreds have already pledged their support and TV companies across the globe want to cover it.

If it appears I’ve found a new vocation in my campaign against age discrimination, it goes without saying that this is not what I thought I would be doing at the age of 52. But I am, if nothing else, exceptionally good at adapting to circumstance. Midlife women generally are.