Not a Mentor. Not an Intern. Something Better.
Hit the ❤️ if this post resonates. (TY)
“Menterning is what happens when wisdom and wonder meet at the same table and everyone walks away changed.” (School of Thought)✍️
At 97, Iris Apfel found herself in unfamiliar territory: standing under the unforgiving fluorescent lights of a corporate photo shoot, being told by a 22-year-old assistant how to “find her light.”
She blinked, once behind her signature saucer-sized glasses, once more to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating, and then did exactly what the assistant suggested.
“Well,” she later told a friend, “you’re never too old to take direction. Especially from someone half a century younger, wearing sneakers that cost more than my first apartment.”
Iris wasn’t there as a guest of honor or a consultant. She was the talent. She’d just signed with one of the top modeling agencies in the world. And despite a lifetime of breaking boundaries in fashion, she joked that she felt like an intern again, learning angles, lighting, hashtags, and how to pose for an audience that lived mostly on phones.
But here’s the twist: while Iris was learning from a younger generation, the crew was quietly absorbing everything from her:
how to own your presence,
how to color outside the lines,
how to be unmistakably you in a world that constantly begs for sameness.
One stylist said, “It was like working with a piece of living history, who also happened to be the most punk person on set.”
That’s the magic of mutual exchange. Of showing up not just to teach but to learn-always. Iris wasn’t above the moment. She was inside it, curious, open, and willing to shift from mentor to intern and back again.
I recently heard a word for this.
Menterning.1
Menterning blends mentoring and interning, recognizing that learning is a two-way street, no matter your age, title, or how long you’ve been in the game.
It invites us to show up with both wisdom and wonder.
Iris might not have known the term, but she lived it.
And maybe that’s the lesson: in a world obsessed with expertise and next big things, the most radical thing we can do is keep learning from each other, with each other, across generations and job descriptions. And with a little bit of fabulousness, too.