Youth. The sweet liquor of life. Doe eyed, rosy cheeked and dewy skinned. We’ve all been enveloped in the dusty pink mist of youth, our prime years of vitality and beauty. Yet as we get older the mist slowly starts to evaporate, the glitter slipping through our grasping fingers. The greyness of age, wrinkles and bad backs that will creep up and replace the spring Bambi of youth. This is what Society’s obsession with equating youthfulness to success and beauty would allude to surely? Chemicals, Creams and Cosmetic surgery. Anything to try and bottle up a bit of that youthful mist. Millions wasted on the holey nets spun by companies to try and capture the quickly evaporating mist. However, there seems to be a new movement in fashion circles, a muttering of change, a new perception. A celebration of Age and I don’t mean yummy mummies I’m talking about celebrating old age. Damn right, Grandma you should be dusting off those knee high pvc boots and puckering up that pout.
Spear heading this change in the perception of beauty and fanning away the choking pink mist, High end fashion houses Celine and Saint Laurent have gone against the usual fashion staple of Arian nymphs. Opting instead for the older women. Celine’s recent campaign featuring the gorgeously chic Joan Didion. Shot by Juergen Taylor the 70 year old looks placidly cool with her neat bobbed shiny with silver hues and over sized black sunnies. With Saint Laurent embellishing its already glittering penchant for rock icons as campaign models, with a country twist in the form of folk goddess Joni Mitchell. Shot by the brands creative director Hedi Slimane, the black and white image portrait of Mitchell, with a wide fedora hat perched on her long pearly locks whispers a folkish charm.
It’s refreshing to see brands celebrating age instead of trying to lead us into this false illusion of eternal youth by airbrushing out the wrinkles that meander across the women’s faces. I really hope this trend for using the older women doesn’t fizzle away, I think we all need to have some sort of reassurance that we don’t need to reach for the Botox as soon as the crows feet start to appear. Surely it’s better to age gracefully with life mapping out our story than bloating it with chemicals as a means to temporally stall the inevitable.
