Welcome to Unstyled. I'm your host, Christine Barberick, co-founder and global editor-in-chief of Refinery 29.

Each week, I invite a notable person to come in and talk with us as we explore the funny, inspiring,

sometimes heartbreaking tales of life, work, and love, as told through the things that we wear.

Here's what you probably already know about Stacey London.

She's been a magazine editor, a super stylist, the star of a mega hit TV series, red carpet sage, a designer, all sorts of fashion-related

vocations that have put her on the map as not just a style guru, but in every girl guru.

Someone you and your mom want to help manifest your dream uniform while also being your nutrition

doula, matchmaker, and life coach. You probably remember that Stacy was a guest

on the first season of Unstyled, but I asked her to come back because today, you could say that

Stacy is a different person than she was six months ago. This past spring, Stacy underwent a seven-hour

surgery, a rare and science fiction-esque procedure that essentially severed her spine

in two and fused it back together again with titanium plates, rods, and some superpowers, too.

After five months of physical therapy, learning how to walk all over again isn't something

many of us will likely ever experience, but she had to do it, and through that, she's been discovering what it's like to find yourself

in your 40s, starting over again, not just with a new spine, but with a new view as a single

woman after her relationship of two years ended in the middle of a summer holiday.

Before all this happened last year, Stacey penned an essay on Refinery 29 loosely called

the evolutionary woman, a piece that began as a standoff addressing the so-called rules

dictating what women of a certain age should wear. But her story became a personal and

public manifesto about living a life off the grid of what's accepted in society as an unmarried,

child-free woman, and how instead those perceived disadvantages made her not just purposeful in her choices,

but powerful. Reading it now feels like a salve for me, and a lot of women who've ever felt stifled

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