‘It took me till I was 80 to realise that I’m quite an outgoing and loud person,” says Vivienne Truran. Now 82, she has 829,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts daily videos about her outfit choices, including which of her trademark glasses work best with her look, all in her lilting Cardiff accent.
It all started 18 months ago. “I think I want to be an influencer,” she announced in one of her first reels. “Now, what can I influence people in?”
Wasn’t Truran outgoing when she was younger? “No,” she says. “My husband, Martin, was 6ft 4in. Rugby player, good-looking chap. When he walked into the room, he took the room. So I, like a good wife, was in the background. You can’t have two noisy people in a relationship. It doesn’t work.”
They were happily married for more than 40 years; but Martin got dementia and had a number of strokes, and died in hospital during Covid. Truran has no children, and no siblings. Feeling isolated, she would make a cake and sometimes take a piece to her then neighbour – now talent manager – James Rolling, and they became friends. It was Rolling who persuaded her to get in front of the camera.
He introduced her to his friends as his carer, for a joke; hence her Instagram tag @vivthecarer. They “respect each other and are a good team”, Truran says, but if she could change her tag, she would be “Viv from the Vale … like Jenny from the block”. She describes herself as a “timeless fashionista”, which she says is her third career.
Truran grew up in Cardiff, Wales. She was raised by her grandmother and her mother; her parents divorced when she was three. In childhood, she says, “I thought of myself as ‘a pound a week’, because that’s what my father paid my mother in maintenance … My mother brought me up never to rely on anybody but myself.”
At 16, Truran wanted to train to be a hairdresser, but her mother insisted she join the civil service “because there was a good pension. I was 16!” But, she says, “in those days you did what your parents told you to do”. She worked for the Post Office (then part of the civil service), then British Telecom, and took redundancy at 48 – before reinventing herself as an antiques dealer.
“I realised I was quite entrepreneurial,” she says. “I’d buy something and think: ‘I can sell that for a lot more.’” Back then, “rather than do Google Lens and say, ‘What’s this?’, you had to use your brain.” At her busiest, she ran three antiques stalls. “It was a gamble,” she says. “But you were gambling on yourself, your ability.”
Truran thinks her mother would love her Instagram posts. Even in a care home, after she was diagnosed with cancer, “she would go down for breakfast, then she’d change to go down for lunch, then change to go down for dinner. She absolutely loved dressing up.”
Historically, Truran says she was less interested in fashion, though she did take a pair of her first husband’s swimming trunks and style them as hotpants in the 1960s, and then there was her beatnik phase.
Life as an influencer has given her a different identity, and a routine. “I get up every morning, have a shower, get dressed and make my video. When you’re retired and older, the best thing you can do in your life is find yourself a routine.”
Truran has become so well known that sometimes she gets stopped in the street. “It’s all surreal. People say to me: ‘You’re famous.’ Why am I famous?” she says. “I’m nobody special. I’m just somebody who sits in a house, puts on clothes and chats a lot.” Still, she hopes to reach 1 million followers.
“We’ve got to make the most of what we’ve got and live to the full, because we don’t know what’s around the corner,” she says. “Don’t listen to what other people tell you. Listen to yourself.“
She enjoys subverting age-related expectations. Shopping in a branch of the fashion chain Pull & Bear recently, she noticed young women looking at her in surprise when she leaned forward to pay with her Apple watch. “I do enjoy saying, ‘Look, I might be old, but I’m alive.’”
Her followers have become a kind of community. “I always say to them: ‘Come on. Keep following me on this journey.’ I’m very excited about that. We don’t know where we’re going … but let’s see.”
