Older models (as in a lot older) are getting a lot of attention lately, with 91-year-old New York style icon Iris Apfel on the cover of fashion magazine Dazed & Confused (and rockin’ the look in Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo). As Sarah Ditum comments in the Guardian, this upends some preconceptions in a modeling industry that encourages 20-year-old aspirants to knock a few years off their ages.
That’s despite the fact that the cohort that spends the most on clothes is women between ages 55 and 74. “The only reason that’s unexpected is because we perpetually tell ourselves beauty is youth and youth beauty, and fashion is about beauty so it must be for the young. That’s a funny sort of disservice we do to ourselves, because the practical experience for a lot of women is that getting older is actually pretty wicked,” writes Ditum (meaning wicked good). As an old person in training, she’s happily anticipating becoming more fearless and more fashionable.