Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Fashion's new golden girls

That L’Oreal Paris employed a sixtysomething model could be put down to a fluke. Putting two on the books starts to look like a strategy. L’Oreal Paris’ announcement that it had hired 65-year-old former model Twiggy as a “face” of its hair colour products, barely three months after the brand scooped up 69-year-old actress Helen Mirren, suggests that some brands are ready to engage with the realities of their customer base, such as the growing ageing population faced in many countries these days. A lot of anti-ageing creams are in the balance, and they won’t be bought if the model selling them looks barely 30.

That L’Oreal Paris employed a sixtysomething model could be put down to a fluke. Putting two on the books starts to look like a strategy. L’Oreal Paris’ announcement that it had hired 65-year-old former model Twiggy as a “face” of its hair colour products, barely three months after the brand scooped up 69-year-old actress Helen Mirren, suggests that some brands are ready to engage with the realities of their customer base, such as the growing ageing population faced in many countries these days. A lot of anti-ageing creams are in the balance, and they won’t be bought if the model selling them looks barely 30.

Yet until very recently, the beauty industry’s notion of an older model was a heavily air-brushed (to almost unrecognisable) Jane Fonda. Even these small steps were seen as a relatively brave move. The notion that women become invisible at 40 — as recently discussed by the sensible-sounding Cate Blanchett and refuted by the slightly-less-sensible-sounding Russell Crowe — remains so entrenched in many circles that it has acquired a self-fulfilling monotony. That’s why L’Oreal’s endorsement of Mirren and Twiggy is significant: Campaigns can add or detract millions from a beauty brand’s bottom line. They don’t take risks lightly.

Fashion, on the other hand, has been courting senior citizens for a while. Last autumn, the New York nonagenarian Iris Apfel modelled in a campaign for & Other Stories, the newish Swedish chain that is part of the H&M and Cos family. At around the same time, British It model Edie Campbell was joined by her grandmother Joan in a series of ads for Lanvin. These are not your average apple-cheeked grannies but rather formidably stylish women with razor-sharp bone structures (most, if not all, of them are as skinny as a 19-year-old) with a talent for making piercing eye contact among the doe eyes of much younger models.

But there’s a major caveat here. Fashion currently adores them, because fashion adores extremes. A few years ago it fell head over heels with pop singer Beth Ditto, who was probably the first size 20 many designers had ever dressed. More recently, the industry has embraced Tilda Swinton (a mere child at 54), but with saffron-coloured hair and beige eyelashes. For the moment, fashion relishes Apfel’s “signature” spectacles, which are the size of a Fiat Uno’s tyres. “Extreme” age is giving fashion the frisson it needs. If anything, the momentum towards using old(er) models has increased since the beginning of this year.

There’s Dolce & Gabbana’s campaign featuring glammed-up grandmothers and Jurgen Teller’s portraits of writer Joan Didion for Celine (with the famously forthright Didion shown in all her wrinkled glory). This latter link-up has been everything Celine could have dreamed of. The combination of Didion’s age, reputation as an intellectual powerhouse and the apparent lack of retouching provided a perfect storm of approval across digital and print outlets, sparking endless “is-this-the-start-of-something-big?” debates on Twitter and Instagram.

So is this the start of something big? There are plenty of jaundiced observers in the fashion industry, many of them women in their late 40s and 50s, who have seen some of this before and who suspect that next year the business will be back to vampirising 16-year-olds. Also, they ask, not unreasonably, where are the clothes aimed at older women? They’re there — the loose trousers, easy jackets, crisp shirts of 2015 — but it’s a fair point.

Edgy fashion houses have periodically swooped down on older models — notably Jean Paul Gaultier, Viktor & Rolf and Rick Owens — without noticeably having an impact on the hegemony of the teenage and twentysomething models who dominate the catwalks. Most fashion houses are surprisingly conservative when it comes to choosing their campaign models. They feel safest with a proven product-shifter, which is why a handful of faces become ubiquitous each season.

But fashion brands also like personalities. They’ve been down the celebrity route and they’re bored. Models with a back story, who look as though they’ve been around the block, seen off a few husbands, covered a few wars, or, like Twiggy, became a ’60s legend whose blonde pixie crop set the tone for subsequent generations, are a far more intriguing prospect. They might even lend the brand a moral halo and some gritty texture.

However, they’ll do that only for as long as they are novel. Another three campaigns down the line and Didion could be part of the scenery as fashion looks for another conversation point. Which is why L’Oreal’s announcement is significant: It’s as much a commercial decision as a statement of good intentions. Elen Macaskill, L’Oreal Paris’s general manager in the United Kingdom, personally went in pursuit of Mirren because, as she puts it, “she has an appeal across the age ranges”.

“Younger women think she’s cool and would like to age like her. Older women like her because she’s very irreverent. Would we use someone even older, like Joan Didion? Yes, why not? It’s about women of worth. It’s more than a pretty face and it’s not just about age. There’s not a single entity of ‘women over 50’ — it’s one of the most diverse groups,” she said.

Is this a trend? Demographics support it. Things change slowly. For every 68-year-old Charlotte Rampling fronting a Nars make-up campaign or Jessica Lange, 64, in Marc Jacobs Beauty, there are scores of older models who long ago gave up hope of finding work. But if Mirren and Twiggy make business sense for L’Oreal, older models may become a new normality, rather than news; not objects of curiosity on Twitter, but part of a more diverse mix. That, surely, is progress. The Daily Telegraph

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.