Isabel Walker was taking her adult daughter out for her 36th birthday. She had wanted to do “something unusual and special”, so first Walker accompanied her to get her colours analysed. While the specialist draped swatches over her shoulders and assessed the best fit for her skin tone, Walker kept chipping in, “because I know a bit about colour analysis. At one stage I was a beauty editor for a magazine.”
Finally, the analyst turned to her. “She said: ‘You should be doing this kind of work.’ I said: ‘Nonsense. I’m far too old. I’m 72.’ But she wouldn’t let it go. She said: ‘You’re born to do this.’”
“All my life I’ve loved clothes. I’ve loved colour. I’ve always been a shopaholic.” We are speaking on a video call; Walker is wearing a blue patterned cardigan and her fingernails are red. In fitting rooms, strangers always ask her advice. “And I just thought, why not? I took the plunge.”
Earlier this year, Walker trained in colour analysis, learning how to determine a person’s season and, therefore, which of 16 sub-season palettes best suits them. She is now two months into her new business, in Watford, Hertfordshire, where she specialises in post-menopausal women, and mother-and-daughter sessions.
This is Walker’s fourth career, she says; they have all come about by accident, life having “moved through chance events”.
She grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in north London, and “rebelled” by rejecting religion. She married a doctor straight after university, and started as a journalist on a local paper in Nottingham, where she often covered health and medicine. She ended up as health and beauty editor on Living magazine, via stints as health correspondent for the Daily Mail and Sunday Telegraph.
But she had severe preeclampsia in her first pregnancy, and her very premature baby didn’t survive. She was helped through subsequent pregnancies by a doctor with whom she co-authored a book on preeclampsia, and in 1992 they co-founded the charity Action on Preeclampsia.
In a way, she says, the charity and book are lasting memorials to the son she lost. Walker has two adult children with her second husband.
After nearly a decade running the charity, she handed over to someone with greater fundraising experience. Next came 15 years in communications skills training – the result of a chance conversation at a dinner party.
“I have a philosophy that I never regret anything,” Walker says. “I just say: OK, I’ve made the decision. Let’s plough ahead. Let’s not think about what I might have done instead or maybe it was a mistake.”
But lately she had begun to feel restless. The communications training work was declining, and she had no wish to slow down. “I love work,” she says. “I’m 72 and way beyond retirement age, but I really don’t want to retire because I can’t think of anything that I particularly want to do that I can’t already do in my spare time. I want my time to be filled. I feel like I’ve got as much energy as I had when I was in my 20s or 30s.”
Working with colour has already proved transformative. People are not always the season they thought. “The drapes tell the story, and they don’t lie,” Walker says.
“It’s an analytical process. It’s about clothes and colour. But it’s also about people. People are endlessly interesting … It gives me a huge kick. I can see the difference it makes to them.”
Walker herself learned that she was an autumn, and not the winter she had been advised when she’d written about colour analysis in the 1980s.
“That is a very important part of my identity now. I started wearing softer colours. Got rid of all my black. I think that people will now notice me rather than think: ‘Oh, gosh, that’s a bright dress she’s wearing.’ Suddenly I feel happier in my own skin.”
Other lifestyle changes have followed. “I’m not going to buy very much, but I’m going to buy intentionally, sustainably, and be prepared to wear whatever I buy a lot.
“This is the future for me,” she says. Though she isn’t ruling out a fifth career. “Who’s to say there isn’t going to be another turning point and another opportunity that I’ll just say yes to?”