2012 fashion Herve Leger Apparel

It's a message that's starting to resonate with some of her peers, she said, as her generation embraces the idea of style as personal and unique instead of simply something you follow. "It's about the freedom to dress and wear what you want, and that's what Lynn and these women are all about," she said. "It starts from style but it flows into all aspects of their lives. They've taught me to take care of myself and be kind to people, with simple things like saying hello and treating people with respect." "It's humanity at its most dramatic," Hurley said. "These women go through a lot, deaths, illnesses, personal health, but they're classy about how they deal with it." "It's been healing for me to continue to express myself during my husband's illness and death and during the grieving process," she said. "The feedback I get from friends and followers on the blog also helps get me through. We hold each other up." In her lighter moments, there's her biannual "hat room transition," in which she takes out her spring and summer hats and tucks away those for fall and winter. She wore a lilac-print dress and a felt hat, a little spring, a little winter. "In the middle of the hat room transition, in the middle of the seasonal transition, in the middle of the [Style Crone's] transition," she wrote, "an outfit of transition was created with the inspiration of lilacs." The realities of age aren't lost on these women. They've had time to grow up, to experience life's emotional extremes and still wake up the next day. Those twists and turns have not only infused their personality but also the way they dress and see themselves as they age. "After my 50th birthday, I saw a picture of myself and it startled me, the wrinkles in my face," said Salamon. "In that moment the reality of my age became apparent. Do I love my herve leger wrinkles? No. But I don't dwell on them. I look at my smile, my neck, my shoulders, other parts that are beautiful." Judgments around ageism are part of why the Idiosyncratic Fashionistas prefer to conceal their last names and their actual ages. Both have full-time jobs and don't want the "frivolity" of their extracurricular activities to undermine their professionalism. "If I didn't work for a living I wouldn't care," Valerie said. "I'll never be a spring chicken again and I'm fine with that. I just wish all these things weren't attached." For many, that's where blogs come in, as a means of working through the kinks of aging within the framework of style. After 33 years together, Judith Boyd's husband was diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2005. Throughout the stress of Nelson's treatment, Boyd realized that piecing together outfits seemed to help her and her husband. "He loved it when I walked out the door dressed to the nines," Boyd said in a recent phone interview from her home in Denver, Colorado. She launched her blog, Style Crone, in 2010 inspired in part by Advanced Style. It began with a series of photographs that were part of the couple's ritual during her husband's treatment. "Nelson would take a picture of my chemo outfit as we were waiting and I would blog as he was receiving chemo," the retired psychiatric nurse said. "It was a way to lighten the experience and to talk about it." Nelson died in 2011, and her grief poured into her clothes and onto her blog. In a post titled "The Color of Grief," she wrote how disoriented and confused she was three months after her husband's death; she couldn't even choose an outfit.