Posing alongside Cara Delevingne, Elle Fanning and Kerry Washington at the 19th annual L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth Celebration on November 21 in Hollywood, Andie MacDowell, 66, stunned in a cream-coloured, loosely draped wrap dress from Lebanese luxury label Harithand.
Looking great is one thing, she reckoned, but feeling good was an even higher priority.
“I did a fitting, and the dress was really tight around my waist. It looks so good, but I woke up, and I just knew it was not the right thing for me to do,” she told People magazine.
“I wanted to wear something that was comfortable. And, of course, immediately, I shamed myself for not being able to fit into this dress. But that’s Hollywood.”
She would know. After being discovered by an agent while on a trip to Los Angeles, MacDowell was 20 when she moved from her small town in South Carolina to New York in the late 1970s to pursue modelling.
She posed for Vogue and starred in ad campaigns for the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Armani and Calvin Klein before setting her sights on an acting career.
She earned a Golden Globe nomination for the 1989 movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape, leading to some of her best-known films, including 1993’s Groundhog Day and Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994.
Since then, MacDowell has continued to work, including in 2021 Netflix series Maid, opposite her daughter Margaret Qualley, 30, one of three children she shares with her ex-husband of 13 years, former model and rancher Paul Qualley.
MacDowell referenced her daughter’s body horror film The Substance, in which Qualley plays a younger version of Demi Moore’s age-phobic character, when talking about her wardrobe woes at the L’Oréal Paris event.
“It’s this expectation, like you see in The Substance, to be something that you can no longer be and that was easier at a certain time in your life, but I can’t,” she continued to People.
“I’m too old to starve myself for 5 pounds nonstop. I just can’t do it anymore.”
She went on to say that the single-mindedness it would take for her to be a smaller size is far too limiting. “If that were the only thing that I thought about, I could do it, but there are other things I want to do in my life,” she continued.
“I want to learn about birds and I want to walk on the beach and I want to be smart and I want to read books. I want to work out, but I don’t want that to be the only thing. I’d rather have the 5 pounds on me and wear something that fits.”
In recent years, MacDowell has also been in the headlines for letting her trademark dark curls go grey after she stopped dying her hair during the pandemic.
“I do think there is power in owning where you are. And it’s not to say that if you’re colouring your hair, that’s a bad thing – I do think it can make you look younger – but there’s also great beauty in not having shame about being an older person, particularly an older woman,” she said on US Today in January.
“I can stand in front of the mirror, and I can see all the bits and pieces that I just hate, but I only have X amount of time left … Am I going to do this for the rest of my life? Am I constantly going to expect myself to look like a 20-something-year-old?” she asked. “I just can’t do it. Not my hair, not my face, not my body.”
