Over at The Guardian, we're faced with the multi-dimensional question: Why does fashion hate old people? The industry that has long been criticized for championing youthfulness and ridiculous body image issues like a bunch of bloodsucking vampires hell bent on eternal life and seems to have it in for the elderly. Hadley Freeman goes all the way the fuck in on for a cool minute, her primary point being that fashion essentially prays on our worst thoughts about ourselves and channels them into cold, hard cash.
It's very rare to find older models as representatives of fashion. The scant examples recently like Joan Didion for Céline and Joni Mitchell for Saint Laurent seem very obviously outside the norm and more like a one-time deal. The myriad think pieces that result from older models appearing in fashion ads that result don't seem to have any immediate effect either. And yet the fashion industry knows that old people are their most important shoppers as they actually have the scratch to spend on luxury goods, while the youth that designers feature heavily in their shows are brokebois with little to no spending power.
Granted, all this applies more heavily to the women's side of things with constant reminders in magazines and online that they should always strive to be younger, but—and back to the main point here—does fashion really "hate" old people? Particularly those over 40? For menswear dudes, the older guy, whether he's in his 60s or 70s and a grandfather or just a Cool Dad™, seems to be our new style role model. While women are in this terrible situation of constantly wanting to look younger, it seems as if guys want to look at least a little older, skipping all the annoying parts of adulthood, skipping directly to paternal figures swagged out in both style and life. Fuck, maybe we're truly embracing the fact that we're washed. There's just something special that happens when we see a guy like Lino Ieluzzi eating an ice cream cone.
Still, most of the time we're all subject to slim and trim models selling youthfulness exuberance. Does this mean that old people need to be better represented in runway shows and ads? Maybe. I think, if nothing else, it would be smart business for brands to channel older consumers and continue to increase sales in the demographic that has the money to blow.
