Beyond Regal Event Center

IT IS NEVER TOO LATE...

Carolyn Doelling, 74, shares how she became a model after retiring. Doelling had never considered modeling until two years ago, when she was asked if she would be interested during a visit to a California boutique. Now she's a face of designers in print, social media and on the runway.

Doelling had a long career in the banking, telecommunications and nonprofit sectors, but when she retired at 70 she couldn't help but notice the change in the way the world viewed her.

Now she's on a mission to change the fashion and advertising industries and show how people can reinvent themselves later in life, after she admittedly felt "invisible" in retirement.

"It didn't take me long to realize that people have much lower expectations of what I could accomplish, and I also noticed that I started to feel invisible," she said. "So my first thought was I need to do something about that, because I'm not invisible."

"My aspiration is just to be the role model for other people to look and say, 'You know what, she's 74 years old, she's rebooted and reinvented herself, and maybe I could do that, too."

Doelling takes pride in being the type of older model not often seen in advertising. She is part of a group of women looking to redefine beauty, including 73-year-old Maye Musk, who became a CoverGirl brand ambassador at 69, and Ernestine Stollberg, who became a fashion sensation in 2017 at 95 years old.

She was able to land some socially-distant modeling jobs during the pandemic that kept her active, and now she has a goal of walking the runway for a designer in fashion capitals like New York, Paris or Milan.

"I say I'm bucking height-ism, ageism, hair-ism, colorism," she said. "I got all the 'isms' covered."