Well Done You: Positive Ageing, Negative Comments
- FITH Futures
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Fashion keeps 'discovering' that a woman over fifty can still be a muse. The casting isn't new. The surprise every time it happens still is.
The "fashion house uses an older model, world reacts with shock" story is really starting to wind me up. It resurfaces every few months dressed up as news, and every time, I'm expected to sit through the same faux-astonished commentary, as if nobody had ever previously considered that a woman over fifty might photograph well.
Madonna was 51 when she first shot for Dolce & Gabbana, back in 2009. Carmen Dell'Orefice has been modelling since 1946 and is still working in her nineties. Isabella Rossellini has been Lancôme's face on and off since 1983. Paulina Porizkova is back at Estée Lauder thirty years after she started there. Stephanie Cavalli, told by the industry she was "too old" at 38, opened Chanel's Haute Couture show this year at 49. Gillian Anderson closed Miu Miu's show at 57. I could keep going. None of this is new, and I'm tired of watching culture pretend otherwise.
What actually gets reported, each time, is the reaction, not the casting: a slightly patronising "well done you, you look good for your age," dressed up as a headline. And that's the part I find genuinely biased, patronising and myopic, not the casting itself.
Here's a small experiment I keep coming back to. Ask someone in their twenties to picture a Gen X woman and describe her, and you'll get some version of the same image nearly every time: soft around the middle, a beige cardigan, a short, carefully set head of grey hair. It's not a cruel image, it's just wildly out of date, built from a template of what "middle-aged woman" looked like decades ago and never updated since.
I'd stop short of saying Cavalli represents some new statistical norm. She's still exceptional and aspirational in the way every model on a runway is - by design. What gets me isn't that. It's simply how far she sits from the woman in the cardigan people are still picturing.
Step back from that specific reaction and there's a bigger assumption sitting underneath it, one I think about a lot for work: how culture supposedly moves at all. The usual framework treats it as a single conveyor belt, invented at one end by the young and arriving filtered and diminished everywhere else on a delay. I think that framework is simply out of date.
We live in a narrowcast culture now, with dozens of parallel niches running alongside each other rather than one mass culture cascading down. So, there's no single queue to be ahead of or behind on. Gen X haven't opted out of that queue. The queue itself doesn't really exist anymore - not in the shape people still assume it does. We're interested in different things for different reasons, on our own terms, and not running a few seasons late on someone else's.
That's the same bias most "positive ageing" coverage runs on too, even the well-meaning kind, and it's the bit that grates most.
Congratulating an industry for finally noticing a 49-year-old assumes she was, until that moment, standing outside culture altogether, waiting for permission to be let back in by people twenty years her junior. It's virtue signalling built on exactly the same bias it claims to correct; one generation's idea of where culture starts, applied to everyone else as though it were simply how things work.
It's worth knowing who's actually making these decisions, too: just 5% of UK advertising employees are over 55, according to the industry-wide All In Census. Most campaigns are built by people who've never worked alongside anyone the age they're supposedly trying to picture.
That gap in understanding has an official version too. The Department for Work and Pensions' own "50 Plus MOT" imagery is a tidy example: grey hair, reading glasses, a gentle stoop, built for an age bracket that starts at 50 but pictured as considerably older than that. A 50-year-old today is as likely to be mid-marathon training as mid-MOT, but the visual shorthand hasn't caught up.
When even a government campaign built specifically for this age group gets it wrong, it's not hard to see where the wider confusion comes from.
Fashion is further along than most of the rest of the industry, which I'll give it credit for, even though it's a low bar. It's still tokenism rather than genuine representation, one Rossellini or one Cavalli standing in for what remains a very narrow idea of who gets seen. It’s the same limited gesture the industry makes around size or race. But general marketing hasn't got even that far.
Wavemaker's 2023 "Finding the Gen X Factor" report found that 87% of Gen X feel underrepresented across TV advertising, despite being on track to become the wealthiest generation in history.
Gen X appear in just 4% of ads, against 31% of the population, while just 25% of TV ads feature someone aged 50 plus. Only 13% of Gen X feel represented by the brands supposedly targeting them at all.
This is the gap we built FITH to close. When an entire industry runs on one idea of where culture comes from, and calls its own surprise a virtue, the fix isn't another 'brave" casting decision. It's checking the picture in your head against the person actually in front of you, and admitting there's more than one place culture starts. The assumptions are wrong, and in this case, they're wrong about which decade they're stuck in, and how today’s culture actually flows.
Comments