Golden Girls

It’s 2024, it’s happening!

Older women are increasingly seen on the catwalks and covers – not only well-known models who are continuing their careers, but also those who are only finding success and being booked in their mid-sixties. On the one hand, this seems logical, as they have the purchasing power; on the other, it is nothing short of a revolution.

»Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art,» Eleanor Roosevelt once said. Some examples of such works of art: Kate Moss, fifty, on the cover of Vogue Germany, May issue. On the cover of Glamour Germany: Heidi Klum, fifty. On the cover of Vogue UK, February 2024: Julia Roberts, fifty-six. On the cover of Vogue France, April 2024: Céline Dion, fifty-five. When you open these magazines, Helen Mirren, seventy-eight, and Andie MacDowell, sixty-four, gray-haired and pink-lipped, beam and proclaim that they’re worth it. (Of course, speaking of worth: it goes without saying that cosmetics campaigns by the likes of L’Oréal Paris bring in a hundred thousand times more money than covers.) Even if it doesn’t feel revolutionary, this development is astonishing when you consider that just twenty years ago, models retired in their late twenties.

AGE POSITIVITY
But make it fashion

The motto age positivity – but make it high fashion has recently become the talk of the catwalks. At Balmain’s Fall/Winter 2024/25 collection défilé, designer Olivier Rousteing sent models Axelle Doué, seventy, Estelle Levy, fifty-one, Marie Seguy, forty-seven, and Kristina de Coninck, sixty-three, to name but a few, down the catwalk. Who? Exactly. No-names. With Kate Moss & Co., it would be obvious to argue that they are exceptions and that their recognition factor is more important for the cover than their birth year. But these relatively unknown older models were booked like other models. Out of fifty-seven models at Balmain, twenty were over thirty-five years old. Rousteing explained after the show – because of course there is still a need for an explanation when there is a deviation from the ideal of beauty – that he felt that in fashion we often only celebrate a kind of beauty that is youthful, and he was concerned about this approach: »We tend to forget that the future also lies in women who have already lived a life.»

At Vetements and Schiaparelli, 20% of the models were older. Batsheva only cast models over forty. At Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada invited British actress Kristin Scott Thomas, sixty-three, Spanish actress Ángela Molina, sixty-eight, and the Chinese doctor/social media influencer Qin Huilan, seventy, to walk in the show. In her show notes, Miuccia Prada explained that her collection was an exploration of the ideas of girlishness. »It is a word that we can valorise, from a pejorative gendered noun tied to age to a universal idiom that expresses a spirit of freedom and individuality and is an attribute of a broader whole,» she wrote, proving why she is considered the intellectual among designers. What Miuccia is actually saying is that as an older woman, you can feel youthful, you can feel free, and consequently you can wear whatever you want. This freedom also means that you can color your hair or wear it gray and, in the latter case, even very long. (Unheard of thirty years ago!) What you don't have to do anymore is give in to a practical short hairstyle from the age of forty-five. The old myth that women are invisible to men after a certain age? On the one hand, who cares? On the other hand, you can't imagine fifty-nine-year-old Monica Bellucci entering a room and not being seen.

The fashion industry increasingly represents women of all ages, even if the majority of catwalk models are still predictably young. Of course, this makes economic sense: women who look like the models mentioned above are more likely to be able to afford Balmain than twenty-three-year-olds in college.

And there is no age limit: the exquisite fashion icon Iris Apfel died in March this year at the age of one hundred and two. Up until then, the New Yorker with the short white pixie cut, large, round glasses, bright red lipstick, and eclectic, colorful outfits wore what she wanted and you could sense what made her happy. Iris Apfel became famous on Instagram when she was well past the age of eighty, her account boasting three million followers. Her bio there reads: More is more & less is a bore. Baddiewinkle (born 1928) is also on Insta, modeling rhinestone tops and rainbow hats for her more than two million followers: a raver grandma par excellence. A whole squad of very chic women over fifty, such as Grece Ganhem, Renia Jaz, and Yasmine Furmi, on the other hand, show very doable, inspiring fashion, proving that a) style is and never has been a question of age and b) today you have countless more options than twenty years ago: an upside of the global village called Instagram.

WE ARE GETTING OLDER
But you cannot always tell

The development is entirely logical if you consider the rising life expectancy: in 1970, women in Germany lived to an average age of 73.4. Today (according to the 2020/2022 mortality table), life expectancy is 83.2. It is more than double as around one hundred and fifty years ago, when women only lived to be 38.5 years old. And as we are getting older, our desire to not look like it is increasing. Aging gracefully is a horrible cliché – why should anything suddenly be done gracefully, anyway – and it kind of implies giving up and not tweaking. The term »anti-aging» is now rightly frowned upon, because how can you be against aging? Everyone wants to get old, nobody wants to be old – that still applies. But the alternative to aging is well known.

At the same time, there are more aesthetic procedures and treatments than ever before to counteract fine lines and sagging jowls. When done well, they make it increasingly difficult to estimate age. When the treatments and tweaks are the first thing you notice, however, the person does not look younger, but only like they are desperately trying to escape their age – not a good look.

Women live longer but are also economically more independent than ever before: in 2023, around 40.6% of women in Germany earned their own living. By comparison, it was only 32.8% in 2000. Germany is currently the fourth largest clothing and footwear market in the world and, interestingly, the over-fifties account for over 50% of this market. It makes sense to see many more older faces in fashion.

Aging is not the end of the world. It's not an apocalypse. On the contrary: it's the only option we have. Fighting it is pointless and, as the indestructible Keith Richards, the one person who could out-trick Nekrotzar like no other, remarked: »Growing old is a fascinating thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.»

Living means getting older. We should celebrate the fact that women today have the freedom to be as creative as they want when it comes to fashion, that they can express themselves and their inner worlds via garments. After all, fashion isn't just about clothes, it's about life itself. And that can and must be lived at any age.