During the Fall/Winter 2026 season in Paris, New York, and Milan, I was intrigued to see how many older women were walking the runways. I also felt somewhat cautious. Like many fashion observers, I’ve seen the industry embrace diversity in race, gender expression, and body size in the past, only to reject it a few seasons later for seemingly no reason other than boredom. But I am a committed optimist.
I’ve been enthralled by the way designer Matthieu Blazy has energized Chanel with lightness and fizz over the last couple of seasons, and it was especially delightful to see Stephanie Cavalli on his runway in March. The model, who already has three decades of experience under her belt, has been particularly busy in recent seasons, working for brands such as Tibi and Proenza Schouler, but seeing her on the Chanel runway, with her face free of makeup and her dark wedge of a bob streaked with gray, was a sight to behold. (Even if the 51-year-old’s Chanel ensemble, a ribbed knit skirt and zip-front top, didn’t bowl me over.)
Fashion has typically treated older women—those discerning aficionados over 50 who will soon control 75 percent of discretionary spending—as invisible. Worse still, when it comes to the runway, anything over 30 counts as old, an ageist truth that still stuns me. There have always been diehards like Phoebe Philo, Rachel Comey, Batsheva Hay, and Maria Cornejo who’ve highlighted more mature women. But the presentations in February and March were especially good for this demographic. Bottega Veneta, Louis Vuitton, Tom Ford, and Balenciaga all cast older models. In fact, according to the fashion search engine Tagwalk, which ranks fashion labels by most viewed shows, each of the “top” brands included at least one older model in their lineup.
Momentum has been building toward this age-quake for more than a decade. Back in 2013, fashion editor and stylist Carine Roitfeld, then 58, appeared with her daughter in a Givenchy campaign. In 2015, Joan Didion, 80, starred in an advertisement for Celine when it was helmed by Philo and still possessed its accent aigu. Clad in black and wearing face-swallowing sunglasses, the diminutive, silver-haired author exuded glamorous indifference. That same year, Joni Mitchell, 71, headlined a Saint Laurent campaign and a cast of older models, including Christie Brinkley and Pat Cleveland, appeared in advertising for Barneys New York. And in 2024, 70 percent of the top brands, including Balmain, Vetements, and Miu Miu, cast older women, like actors Kristin Scott Thomas and Marcia Cross, to walk their runways.
While I applaud fashion’s arrival at this pinnacle of age acceptance, there are caveats. (As with any cultural shift, there’s inevitably a but.) Each of the women cast to walk these runways adheres to certain prescribed cultural rules. A few delicate strands of gray in one’s hair are acceptable. (See: Cavalli.) A thick, perfectly coiffed silver mane is okay, too. (See: Carmen Dell’Orefice and Maye Musk.) Fine smile lines at the corners of the eyes or around the mouth are lovely and grounding—but no furrowed brows or deep wrinkles. Skin should be taut. Arms need to be sculpted. Hips must be narrow. The belly should be flat.
So while Blazy, God bless him, was discovering a muse in Cavalli—who also opened his Spring/Summer 2026 Haute Couture show—out in the eviscerating wilds of the Internet, commenters were simultaneously trolling women who didn’t measure up to the fashion industry’s standards.
On Instagram, 69-year-old actor and former model Rachel Ward was criticized for having the temerity to post a video of herself with a full head of messy gray hair, many deep wrinkles, and skin that appeared not to have been tucked, filled, or otherwise tightened. “What the hell happened to her?” one troll demanded. “She has aged really really bad.” Another screeched: “She looks ravaged.”
Actually, Ward, who lives on a farm in Australia, looked quite content. And, I would argue, she looked beautiful. But she did not look like the older women who have been marching down the runways as emblematic of “a certain age.” “I think I was a catalyst for a conversation that I think people have been challenged by,” Ward told Australia’s ABC News. “Women weren’t allowed to have a wrinkle, weren’t allowed to go gray. Why do we feel that we’ve got to pretend that we’re still 40 when we’re 68?” In other words, why are older models expected to look more or less like all other models?
When fashion widens its aperture, it might delight the eye and satisfy one’s sense of fairness, but warm, fuzzy feelings are not the same as a tangible shift in the status quo, which would require the upending of our culture’s definition of female beauty. What exactly does it mean to age “gracefully”? At the moment, it implies doing so without any sign of cosmetic intervention while also looking as though you’re not really aging very much at all.
While sorting through my emotions about the subject, a timely research paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences appeared in my inbox. Louis Boucherie and his research team looked at data on nearly 800,000 models across runways, editorials, and advertisements from 2000–24. They noted body size, race, hair color, and eye color, quantifying what so many fashion observers understand anecdotally: Even though diversity has increased, the look of the average model hasn’t changed. Wondering how often gray hair popped up as a significant characteristic? It didn’t.
Older women—or, more precisely, women who unabashedly look older—do not fit easily into the aspirational stories that the fashion industry tells. The business of selling designer clothes is based on fantasies, on the belief that by slipping into an oversized Chanel shirt and flipping up its collar you become a more dazzling version of yourself. But these stories are not invented in a vacuum; they’re informed by politics, history, and the myriad ways we’ve been socialized. Embedded in the narrative of that perfect shirt is the understanding that by wearing it you’re in pursuit of a more youthful, desirable you. How dare you not be?
When I consider the relationship fashion has with older women, the ease with which it is willing to discount them, I remember Dell Warner, a freelance TV reporter I met when I was fresh out of journalism school and working for my hometown newspaper, the Detroit Free Press. Warner was 66 years old, and she was due to have cosmetic surgery. This was the 1990s, when facelifts and nose jobs were common but not yet subjects that people gabbed about publicly. I asked if I could chronicle her experience. I didn’t want to judge Warner; I wanted to understand her.
She allowed me to stand over the shoulder of her surgeon for hours and witness her facelift and liposuction. The procedures were at once extremely precise and remarkably blunt. But what I most remember is why Warner decided to have surgery at all. She was slim, with a full head of silver hair, a furrowed brow, smile lines and worry lines, too. She was also ambitious, accomplished, and incredibly lively. But that wasn’t how she thought others saw her. “I see myself as invisible,” she told me.
Aging is a very different experience for many of the women who came after Warner’s generation. We have more choices and much more autonomy. Warner dealt with the expectation that she would be a mother by her early 20s. For a time, she lacked the legal right to apply for a credit card in her own name. She might’ve been turned away from a restaurant simply for wearing pants.
Today, designers speak seriously about empowering women through sleek tailoring. Advertising campaigns suggest that a $5,000 leather tote is a perfect repository for a woman’s reclaimed power. Women choose to go under the knife to celebrate themselves. Choosing assimilation rather than having it thrust upon us, these trends suggest, could be the same as liberation from it.
Fashion has had an awakening, rewarding the older woman with starring roles in some of its most important moments—provided she doesn’t stray too far from its enduring ideal. The industry’s standard-bearer remains a thin, white woman—often one so young that she likely could not afford the clothes she’s modeling and is still coming into her power even as she’s asked to project it on the runway.
Fashion loves its version of an older woman. I do, too. But the industry has a long way to go before it fully accepts aging as something natural and beautiful.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
How Cat Cohen Predicted Her Own Stroke With a Comedy Routine
Does a New Exhibition at the Tate Dim the Power of Ana Mendieta’s Legacy?
Our Food Editor on the 8 Cookbooks Everyone Should Have in Their Kitchen
15 Young Collectors Reveal How They Broke Into the Art World
We Took a Bushwick Line Cook to See ‘Tony.’ He Had Notes.
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
