The fashion world has long lived by that well-known adage ‘beauty before age’, but flick or click through the pages of any fashion mag or site today and you’ll find that times are changing.
Almost every big brand’s spring/summer ‘15 ad campaign’s lens favours the older woman. The oft-featured Italian nonnas at Dolce and Gabbana move to centre stage with the young’uns. Octogenarian American writer Joan Didion (much to the internet’s delight) shares the spotlight with 14 year old Freya Lawrence at Céline, as do three veteran models with their daughters at Lanvin. Burberry’s line-up sees Naomi Campbell star with Jourdan Dunn, in a shoot similar in style to the brand’s fragrance ad last year, starring Kate Moss with Cara Delevigne. Some brands have even gone as far as throwing the baby faced models out with the bathwater: see Madonna’s return to Versace and Joni Mitchell for Saint Laurent.
It’s true that this shift has not simply come overnight. The fashion-set have long been obsessed with the likes of 90 year old icon Iris Apfel and Ari Seth Cohen’s Advanced Style blog (and now book and documentary), which features street style photos of New York’s “most stylish and creative older folks”. Cohen describes his work as “proof… that personal style advances with age”, but this is proof for which fashion designers and editors need only look, behind those big sunglasses, to themselves.
For a long time, they have been reluctant to do so all the same. In 2013, the then 64 years old Miuccia Prada explained in an interview with T magazine that she wouldn’t put an older lady on the runway saying, “Mine is not an artistic world, it is a commercial world. I cannot change the rules… I’m not brave enough. I don’t have the courage.” Just one year later, Rick Owens and Jean Paul Gaultier plucked up the courage to do just that, sending older models down their runways in Paris wearing their AW14 collections. What a difference a year makes: that brave leap of faith in AW14 now seems like little more than a toe-dip in the fountain of old age, amongst the silver-haired spreads of SS15.
This change of tides, with its influx of older models, is ultimately positive for an industry that, while being creative, needs to be tethered to reality, as it is so often accused of not being. Brands have clearly been starting to realize this in recent years as 2014 saw the arrival of transgender models and a greater number of ‘plus-size’ models on the runway and in print, and so older models were the necessary and natural next step. There is clearly some skepticism as to whether this is the industry recognizing the potential of appealing to wider audiences, or more cynically understanding the power of shock and spectacle as a talking point. Either way, the result of the change is for the better as women see that, just like their quality designer handbags, they get better with age.
