About me

Who am I and what is Midlifechic?

I’m Nikki Garnett, I’m 59 and I live near the Lake District in the North West of England. I’m married with 3 sons aged 29, 24 and 22, a cat called Alfie and a dog called Ted. My husband Mal and I run a small creative agency as well as increasingly working together on this blog which I have loved and laboured over for the last 12 years.

Midlifechic is slowly evolving from being the online world that you find here where I talk about style, beauty, travel, family, menopause and other midlife factors. I’m still doing that but I’m starting to add a new, real life dimension by holding reader events both in the UK and abroad. I’m creating them because so many women tell me they’re a bit lonely in midlife. That somewhere along the way their friendships have changed or drifted away – so with such a fascinating bunch of women telling me the same thing, it made sense to connect everyone. I started slowly with small events in 2021 and now they’re getting bigger and more exciting. The whole point is to pull thinking midlife women together to make new friends who are interested in going beyond chit chat. They’re looking for proper conversations about anything and everything.

So you can come here fore style advice and to read my musings on contemporary midlife or you can join in – you choose, you’re welcome either way.

My background

Like many women in midlife, I have a sense of ‘once I was…’ because for 9 years (in my pre-children days) I was a head of marketing at Selfridges with a particular role as editor of their customer magazines. I don’t need to tell you that being editor of Selfridges magazine was a fabulous job. Every day was different and I worked with fabulous (often famous but then not always so fabulous) people and gorgeous products in wonderful places.

Every month I planned the content for a new issue, choosing what to shoot and what to write about. The world’s biggest brands were at my fingertips along with the incredible in-store team and all of their fashion tips and wisdom. One of my lightbulb moments a few months into the job was learning that money doesn’t buy style when a legendary style guru taught me that clothes are like diamonds. She explained that they’re all about the Cs but rather than clarity and carat, with clothes you’re looking for cloth, cut and colour.

So Selfridges was my Oxbridge when it came to learning about style, women, their bodies and what works best. I was fortunate to spend as long as I did working with style mavens and it gave me the tools that I continue to use as the foundation for the pieces that I write about clothes and fashion on this blog. I loved my job and style in those days was a no brainer. However when my second baby came along, the juggling got too much and so, along with my husband (who had been head of the creative studio at Selfridges), I said a sad goodbye and left to set up a creative agency.

New beginnings

We gained some great clients thanks to friends who had moved to high places and began working on brands ranging from New Look through to John Lewis, M&S and Harrods. Somehow I managed to fit in another son… but I still had the feeling that something was missing. That something was the North – as the saying goes ‘you can take a girl out of the North but…’

So, as if life wasn’t full enough, we ripped our little family and baby business up by the roots and transplanted them to a very dilapidated old Georgian house with a view of the sea and the lakes. Whether it was a good plan or not we’ll never know because I have no idea how life would have turned out if we’d stayed South. We’ve been there for over 20 years and it’s been a great place to bring up a family. The boys are all grown up now, we’ve lived through the university years, one is settled and working in London, the younger two have returned home – one just recently from travelling, the other to complete his post graduate qualifications.

We find life near the Lakes very quiet which is good when peace is what we want but midlife is a time for fun and so a few years ago we bought a city pad too – in Newcastle, closer to Mal’s side of the family. Newcastle is a city unlike any other and we go there regularly to let our hair down. We also let out our apartment to trusted Midlifechic readers so if you’d like a taste of our lives there, you’ll find it here.

How I lost my style mojo

But I digress, let’s go back to the beginning of Midlifechic. I started it when I lost my style mojo. Trying to pin down exactly when that happened reminds me of being a teenager and agonising over when a relationship started to go wrong. I think it began when I stopped working at Selfridges and found myself a mum in the playground where I tried my hardest to fit in. When we moved North it was all about outdoorsy clothing – I hated it and it didn’t suit me but it just became a habit.

And life was full. As well as a young family, a business and a house renovation, I had parents to support through a cancer journey and so there was no time for left in the week for me. There came a day when I looked at myself in a mirror and just didn’t recognise anything about the woman I saw there. But I still had a tiny spark of self worth inside and I knew I wanted to do something about it.

And so, in 2016 when my youngest was 10 I started writing this blog as a way of getting my groove back. I found that if I could look at myself objectively in the pictures I posted I could work on myself as a project. I lost the weight I needed to and reinvented my wardrobe. It’s taken a long time but I did it by pulling out all of the old style lessons I’d learned in my training at Selfridges – about understanding your body architecture, your textures, the cuts and colours that suit you and then working them around your lifestyle.

Today

Which brings us to 2026. After twelve years of writing Midlifechic I can honestly say I had no idea of the joy that it would bring. I started it as a personal project, never imagining that anyone else would read it but now the community has grown into a steady 48,000 weekly readers and an engaged Instagram audience of 50k.

The conversations in the comments have become real life friendships and readers have built relationships with each other as well as with me. My core focus is still often about style but it’s widened too, into beauty and travel, menopause, the empty nest, life with adult offspring, ageing parents, work that’s still energising, marriage and identity at fifty-plus and the much bigger question of what we all want this next stage of our lives to look like.

A hub for midlife friendship

In my day job I continue to work with brands using my retail experience and insight into the midlife mindset to advise retailers on what it is that midlife women want. But on top of that, Midlifechic has taken me to all sorts of unexpected places, from Kensington Palace to Paris, Transylvania, Mexico and Colombia.

This year I’ve launched a programme of reader Events and Escapes – UK retreats and day meet-ups, longer destination trips, all built around the Midlifechic community. In 2026 we’ve had three reader retreats in the Lake District where women have spent time focusing on the next stage of their lives, as well as a night in Bristol just for fun. There’s also a salsa dancing week in Colombia coming up. Next spring we have trips to Marrakech and I have great plans up my sleeve for the autumn.

The best part of it continues to be an email coming in from a new reader telling me she’s found honesty, laughter and reassurance somewhere in this midlife world we’ve built between us. After all, a blog is only as good as the community that grows around it.

So thank you for reading. I believe there has never been a better time to be a midlife woman. We’re forging a whole new way of approaching this stage of life, and it’s up to us to keep changing the way society sees both who we are and what we stand for. There’s plenty more ahead. I hope you’ll stay and join me.