Will the trend of older women in fashion continue?
“Age has become something that brands are really proud to highlight,” Ms. Van Houtte said.
Even beyond the runways, a movement has grown in which fashion, or fashion-adjacent people, prefer to emphasize rather than erase their age. Former supermodel and current Estée Lauder ambassador Paulina Porizkova, 61, is leading the discussion on Instagram, where she reveals her laugh lines and age-related weight gain in makeup-less photos and underwear videos for her 1.4 million followers.
They are joined by Ms. Buck, who posted a close-up bathroom mirror selfie before the most recent Celine show, captioning it, “The face I never thought I’d have.” The shot, she said, inspired a more positive reaction than anything else she had done. And then the recent discussion of menopause and perimenopause has supercharged a new segment of the beauty market and it’s been led by women like Ms. Watts, Halle Berry and Gwyneth Paltrow.
This is a significant change in an industry that has long been renowned for attracting youth. And it stands in a world where audiences are inundated with images in which every sign of age – every wrinkle, hollow, age spot – has been filled in, tightened, filtered, lifted or otherwise erased. Speculating on what anyone has done, even for someone in their 30s, has become a parlor game that everyone can play, and artificial intelligence has made constant revision and reinvention part of our visual diet.
A reaction to the airbrushed era is emerging.
salute the silver dollar
“Agencies and the industry face a practical reality: Older women have the purchasing power to buy what is being presented, and they have a desire to see themselves and their life experiences in these spaces,” said Roma Gordon, a 52-year-old former model who returned to the catwalk a year ago.
Ms. Gordon began modeling as a teenager in Jamaica in the early 1990s. She had some success, but her career never really took off and she stopped after a few years to finish college and then manage a modeling agency. A year earlier, after her partner’s death, a friend convinced her to get in front of the camera again.
In September, she was booked for Dario Vitale’s first (and only) Versace show, and in January, she walked the Chanel couture runway, followed by the Chanel ready-to-wear show. Now, she said, she is having her best season yet. And she is not alone.
