Maye Musk on ageing, reinvention, and why she no longer has anything left to prove

There are women who grow into fashion, and there are women fashion grows into. Maye Musk, at 78, is firmly the latter. She walks onto Harper’s Bazaar India’s set in New Delhi with the confidence of someone who has long stopped auditioning for anyone's approval. 

Musk watches the props being unwrapped and lights adjusted, with genuine, unguarded delight. "I wondered where they were going with all of it," she laughs, gesturing at the crew. "Now you see it. So exciting.”

A mother to three public figures—Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca—Musk is also a registered dietitian who built her practice from scratch as a single mother with no child support, and a best-selling author with titles like A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty and Success that found its way to shelves across the world. But what strikes you most, in conversation, is that Musk doesn't perform wisdom. 

When she speaks about the hard years in her life—the difficult marriage, the financial strain or the long stretches where modelling felt like someone else's life—there is no drama to her telling. It's happened and she got through it. 

Her second book, Timeless, out in English this September, goes into exactly that territory: life after 50, the years "when many people are starting to give up". What follows is a conversation about the full arc—six decades in fashion, the discipline that lives beneath the composure, and what Musk has learned about reinvention and the sustaining freedom of having nothing left to prove.

Musk started modelling as a teenager. She stopped at 22 to get married and raise three children, then picked it back up at 28—an age the industry considered, at the time, well past the point of no return. So she built her nutrition practice in parallel, seeing up to 25 patients a day, taking catalogue shoots on the side, and holding everything together without child support. Fashion was a side door she kept propped open.

By 31, she was in high demand as a model and continued part-time; in her 60s, she was doing high fashion. Musk still sounds faintly incredulous about all of it. "If someone had told me as a teenager that I would be in Delhi for a top fashion magazine at 78, I would have thought they were crazy,” she says. “Yet, here I am, working alongside a very creative team.”

What changed, she believes, is that the industry finally caught up to something that was always true: older women buy beautiful, expensive clothes, and fashion had simply stopped paying attention to them. "The industry has truly realised that older women are a significant market who appreciate and purchase high-end fashion." Once that realisation set in, she found a niche in shoots and runway shows that required an older model for mother-of-the-bride and eventually, grandmother roles.

Musk doesn't have a romantic answer for how you keep a career going across six decades. Her agencies always knew her patients came first—bookings were confirmed three weeks out—and her nutrition practice was the anchor around which everything else moved. "This practice enabled me to provide a home and food for my family," she says. 

Social media turned out to be another engine. Her first New York Fashion Week came about because a designer found her on Facebook. Photographers followed with test shoots (often unpaid but useful) and a platform many her age treated with suspicion—which became a genuine professional tool. Currently, Musk has over 1.4 million followers on Instagram. 

“While it can often be difficult for models to talk about their own successes, I found that using these platforms was a vital way to let people know about my work,” she confesses. 

What Musk hadn't anticipated was what it would mean to younger models to simply have her in the room. "It feels wonderful to know that my path gives them hope for their futures," she says. Sustaining that path required an unflinching honesty about her own body and health.

Musk has worked as both a straight-size and a plus-size model, and she speaks about it with the frankness of someone who spent decades advising patients on nutrition rather than performing any version of body positivity. When she gained weight, she left modelling entirely—completing a hospital dietetics internship and finishing her first Master of Science—and maintained her connection to the industry through a modelling school that started as a dietetic scholarship fundraiser and became its own business.

When the industry's interest in diversity brought her back, she was clear-eyed about the trade-off. "I knew my health would eventually suffer. Unfortunately, it did, as I began experiencing back and knee pain." The correction came at 41, when Musk immigrated to Canada and followed her own dietary advice strictly for eight months.

"I need to be careful with my diet. I plan ahead and do not allow any fried or sweet foods in my home,” she reveals. Her siblings consider this her greatest achievement—more than any professional milestone. That discipline runs through everything Musk does, and it shows up most plainly in the body. The first thing you notice about her on set is the posture. It is perfectly straight, almost without effort. She credits her father, a chiropractor, who made it non-negotiable for all his children. It's one of the few things that was simply given to her—everything else Musk built herself.

Her relationship with beauty trends has always been pragmatic. She has moved through all of them—from the full Twiggy aesthetic of her teens to the natural look that followed, adapting each time without sentimentality. Her actual definition of beauty, though, has remained fixed. “I've always said beauty is your attitude. If you meet a beautiful girl who has a bad attitude and is arrogant, she is no longer beautiful,” Musk explains. “If you meet a plain girl who is really nice, smart, and interesting, she becomes beautiful." 

For someone with such crystal-clear views on how a life should be lived, it's perhaps unsurprising that writing came next—though Musk herself wasn't sure anyone would want to read about her life.

A book agent in Toronto disagreed, and that conversation became her first book, A Woman Makes A Plan. Her children pushed her to include the difficult chapters. "It wasn't easy," she recalls. "But I have found that many people—both women and men—relate to them.”

Timeless goes further: deeper into the years after 50, the things Musk couldn't have articulated while she was still living through them. "I found that people fear ageing and change. I hope they handle it better now. There is still so much ahead of you. You just have to explore." Her children appear in this book too—their harder stretches alongside the triumphs. "They are the most precious part of my life,” she adds. 

Musk hopes Indian readers find their way to it. The Hindi edition of her first book brought her to Mumbai for a launch that was, by her account, genuinely glamourous. One suspects she will be back.

Near the end of the conversation, the obvious question comes up: what's unfinished, what does she still want? "I actually don't feel that I have anything unresolved because I am leading a fantastic life traveling round the world," she says. "Exploring different cities and cultures always interests me and continues to drive my passion for travel.”

The crew is packing up around her. Outside, the city moves at its own pace. She looks exactly as she did when she walked in—easy, amused and entirely herself. Musk would tell you none of it was a plan. And that all of it was worth it.

Credits:

Editor: Rasna Bhasin (@rasnabhasin)
Interview: Malika Halder (@malikahalder)
Photographer: Soujit Das (@soujit.das)
Stylist: Gopalika Virmani (@gopalikavirmani)
Make-up Artist: Itika Chugh (@fashionmakeupbyitikachugh)
Hair Artist: Umang Artist (@umang.artist), at Anima Creatives (@animacreatives)
Editorial Coordinator: Shalini Kanojia (@shalinikanojia)
Style Assistant: Grace Soni (@grace__soni_)

Maye Musk is wearing the Ethereal top with an abstract coral reef–inspired belt with sculptural organic textures, by Richa Khemla.

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