As you know I have recently launched a 40 Over 40+ experience and on my landing page I used the following words "Where are all the photos of women over 40? Real women, living real lives? It seems that you're only photo-worthy if you're a bikini-perfect 20-something-year-old or younger. There is a great deal to celebrate about reaching the 40+ milestone – getting older is a privilege many don’t enjoy."
5, or 6 days ago the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article titled "They’re Cover Girls. They’re in Their 70s" written by Rory Satran. There is so much positivity for women, and men, 40+ years old, in the article that I thought I should extract and share here.
"90-year-old Frances Dunscombe only began modeling at age 82 after the death of her husband. Ms. Dunscombe is part of the fashion and beauty industry’s new silver wave. In recent years, luxury fashion brands, direct-to-consumer beauty brands and mass clothing lines have begun casting older models—much older models. Some are celebrities, but increasingly, they are unknowns.
“A youth-obsessed culture is just boring,” said the New York designer Rachel Comey, whose casting is often held up as an example for age representation. Even on her e-commerce site, typically a zone for the most conventional models, she includes striking people of all ages. “Casting people of all ages has always felt natural to me,” she said, because, after all, “we design for people at all stages and moments of their lives.”
That kind of common sense is still rare in the fashion industry, where models are typically in their late teens and early 20s. While there’s no comprehensive tracker of models’ ages, the Fashion Model Directory website estimated the median age of models as 23 in 2019, and a 2022 diversity report from the Fashion Spot clocked only 23 total castings of over-50s on the fall 2022 runways.
In her 1996 article about then-16-year-old model James King in the New York Times Magazine, Jennifer Egan described the paradox of marketing fashion via young girls: “Teen-age girls simulate an adulthood they have yet to experience, for the consumption of adult women who then feel dogged by standards of youth and beauty they will never meet. Welcome to image culture’s hall of mirrors.”"
I will follow up with more in my next blog as I find the article shows that with age comes wisdom, positivity, and life experiences whilst retaining a powerful beauty.
Thanks for reading. Please be in touch to learn more about my work and to book a portrait or personal branding session with me.
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