"Age Issue" concentrates on the mature lady, how they influence us within the fashion industry today. From fashion forward individuals to celebrity inspiration, I look into how the older generation have their natural identities taken away from them just to meet the needs of today's fashion brands, I also look into the future for these inspirational women. Will they continue to feature as often in say 20 years time?
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~ Age Issue ~
No matter which high-end fashion magazine we choose to buy, at
some stage the latest advertisement campaign for a fashion brand will surprise us
with the choice of models used in their cutting-edge commercial. This leads us
to question how long can a models career last for in this day and age? Models
such as Valerie Pain, who have had a longstanding career in the business,
continue to feature across many styles of fashion campaign, for example when
Valerie featured in the Debenhams 2010 ‘The Style List’ campaign. Daphne Selfe
is another model who has resumed her fashion livelihood with the likes of Dolce
and Gabbana since her career started out in the 1950’s, when she won a local
competition to be on the front cover of a local magazine. The dazzling
longhaired model continues to mix with the typical adolescent, brandishing her
silver locks across magazines spreads and catwalk expositions to voice her
belief, that people can be any age to model and there shouldn’t be an age limit
to persist their desired profession. Daphne voices her views through her
involvement as an ambassador for the All Walks Beyond the Catwalk organisation,
“variety is the spice of
life and in the All Walks campaign there is an opportunity for everyone to be represented”. All Walks, founded in 2009 by Caryn Franklin, Debra Bourne
and Erin O’Connor celebrates the right for more diversity within the fashion
industry, the right for more variety of age, size and skin colour inside all
fashion professions. For Daphne’s prolonged career in the modelling business,
her beliefs of the use of traditional beauty products and keeping to a natural
regime, are her fundamental logics to have retained her recognisable status and
seen her to feature for current fashion campaigns, including contemporary
designer brand Wunderkind.
Tziporah Salamon; whose career as a fashion dresser is
another inspirational representative, of someone from an older generation who’s
eccentric style speaks wonders to the world, that older woman deserve the right
to feature more widely in the fashion and modelling industry. When asked in a
recent interview if more mature women should be used in fashion campaigns,
Tziporah declared, “Absolutely, women want to see that because they can relate
to the older women”. Tziporah also states how she hopes older women will be favoured
more extensively in today’s fashion advertising campaigns, since they are the
generation who can afford the designer labels, as opposed to the younger women
who cannot afford but are still chosen to be sprawled across the billboards in
the fashion cities. It seems more logical, but it appears younger models are
chosen because the campaign may look more appealing with a young fresh-faced
model in replacement to the likes of Tziporah. Perhaps there could be a hidden
secret as to why younger women are used much more than the mature woman
currently.
Plastic surgeons from the University of Toronto have
suggested, that the increasing use of cosmetic surgery including botox is seen
as an approach to look younger, with consumers looking an average 7.2 years
younger than their real age. This is perhaps an important incentive to stay in
the limelight of the ever-changing fashion business, models could therefore lengthen
their career into their 50’s and 60’s and beyond. Samantha Rose from Fashion
Industry Today stated that women are finding that taking care of their skin is
becoming extra important, to retain in the competitive world of looking young. Future
developments in cosmetic surgery could actuate the longevity of a models career;
Cleveland Clinic stated, “fewer people are growing older gracefully”. Daphne
does not believe in the beauty enhancing methods, “I’ve never had
anything done to my face,” she told the Daily Mail recently, her beliefs that
her natural beauty was the inference for her permanence in the modelling
industry. This has been established through her multiple photo shoots, with Mario
Testino during the Dolce and Gabbana Fall 2008/2009 campaign and Nick Knight in
2009 for a black and white shoot to celebrate the 30th anniversary
of i-D magazine. With today’s market wanting to look
youthful, it would be important for the next fashion campaign to tick all of
the boxes, including the correct choice of model in order to meet the market’s
needs. In today’s society, the age of the model determines the popularity of a
fashion brand, Daphne once asked Nicholas Coleridge, “will I ever get on the
cover of Vogue?” And he said: “Darling, you just won’t sell”. This pops the
question whether age does become an issue when the older woman is featured in a
modern day advertising campaign. Will fashion brands suffer declining sales as
a result of a debateable issue? Older woman have more options now than ever
before to make radical measures to their external natural beauty in order to
continue their career, but does this subtract the main reasons why models are
chosen for the latest high-end fashion campaigns? Tziporah avowed her sadness
that “women aren’t aloud to age anymore”, we live in an illusion of wanting to
be one beauty and she hopes that “we can turn the pendulum back” so the future
doesn’t become an unwanted pressure.
The age issue does seize another
opportunity for the older generation of models who still play a significant
part in fashion. Mature women can dress just as fashionable as the younger
individual, as it has become recognised with many younger people taking
inspiration from the older female. Silver or white blonde has become the new
white and grey when it comes to recent hair trends, Fashionising.com has
prompted this as a revival trend for 2012/2013 season. Lady Gaga and Kelly
Osbourne are just some of the celebrities who have taken the risk of changing
their hair appearance, to look like their older counterparts in Helen Mirren and
Meryl Streep; everyone remembers Helen’s appearance on the red carpet in her
black floor length Ellie Sab dress at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. More
commonly Meryl’s powerful character; fashion queen Miranda Priestly in ‘A Devil
Wears Prada’. Without these women, there would be no inspiration for the up and
coming youth. When we think of today’s society and where they get their
inspiration for their day-to-day outfits or beauty tips, people such as fashion
blogger Martina Manolcheva, who’s fashion-friendly blog ‘Marta’s Fashion Diary’
looks back to the iconic women from past decades, to find her inspiration that
constitutes the person she is. Martina states many reasons why the 60’s trend
continues to become popular with the younger individual through her blog post,
‘The Fashion Icon of the 60’s – Twiggy’. Martina as well as many other fashion
bloggers are sometimes driven by current fashion trends and perpetually research
back to the fashion-thriving decades, this states the importance of keeping the
older woman engrossed within fashion. From Twiggy to Naomi Campbell, these
iconic personalities represent fashion at its best. They might not be in the
eye of their audiences as much as they were when they first appeared on the
fashion scene, but they continue to show their ever lasting love affair with
fashion by being involved in projects that see them not being in the public’s
attention as often as they were when they were modelling. Twiggy has been the
face of two extremely successful collections with Marks and Spencer since 2012,
A/W 12 being her most recent collection designed for the more mature woman;
this comes after her persistent involvement in the fashion and modelling
industry. The 60’s pin up, amongst many other mature models of her decade express
their opinion that fashion should not have to stop for the older women of any
generation, it should merely continue to thrive. These beautiful women started
a career with their recognisable natural perspective about them, and since a newfound
surgical procedure to make the older feel more youthful has surfaced, a
supplementary number of younger models are using this as a method to cultivate
their career in the business of modelling. Celebrities such as Heidi Montag,
who has gone from a TV personality to glamour model, are a classic example of
today’s juvenile generation who have the worrying fear of growing old and exposing
to the world a face occupied by wrinkles. Before Botox or other surgical
procedures came onto the fashion scene, models and the adolescent had no choice
but to let nature takes it toll on their bodies. Daphne Selfe and Valerie Pain
are compelling models that convey a message of a long and healthy career in the
business by conceitedly showing off their natural beauty. The success they have
had as a result of this fulfilled manifestation, sees them pose for high-end
designer brands and still continuing within the industry. This creates a message
that the younger generation do not have to go down the cosmetic surgery route to
lengthen their career in modelling, there is this overloading pressure of
looking young that could be a growing problem with future development in the
fashion industry.
It is not just the physical mending of
the human form that is sending the natural image of our models into nihility,
but the incessant debates on how Photoshop has taken over the editoral world and
the augmented digital manipulation of today’s models, that grace the magazines,
billboards and websites across our technological world of fashion. Many faces
of natural beauty today for example, Alexa Chung and Kate Moss are persistent
targets to be look ‘perfect’ to enhance a brand’s image, if there is such a
thing as perfect. Models are being made to look slimmer, the smallest hint of
wrinkles and beauty blemishes are removed whilst perfection is enhanced. There
have been numerous cases where the most beautiful have been transformed into something
that can merely be described as un-human, responsibility held on the modern
technology and development of Photoshop. Technology has shown its fast-paced
development through many ways such as social networking, however in another
light Photoshop and other image enhancing programmes are now destroying the
future of natural human form. ‘Self’ Magazine editor Lucy Danziger once stated,
“photo shopping is an industry standard”, which affirms that enhancing the
natural beauty is becoming an every day normality, creating an invented future
for the editoral industry. Flicking through the pages of Marie Claire and seeing
the same look over and over again in different advertising campaigns, rather
than seeing different natural looks could become the future of fashion.
The age issue is becoming part of the
false advertisement that is perceived in the editoral industry, when magazines
search to find the ‘perfect’ model to feature on the front cover of an magazine,
they are in fact creating the impossible and devising a ‘perfect’ model with
the use of Photoshop. Lindsay Adler stated, “It’s
essential for retouching and creative effects… and has also become an
invaluable tool to help many photographers present fantasy.” Surely
creating the impossible fantasy would push models to say no to technology and
let their natural appearance shine through, before technology becomes
essential. What is perfect? Perfect is merely a word that is used to describe
someone that is ideal for someone’s particular project, so everyone has their
own perception of this over-used term, will the natural face of a beautiful
model be featured more in editorial, or will the un-human trend continue? The
older model looks to becoming a distant memory with the future developments of
the perfecting tool on younger models. It is only organisations such as All
Walks that models of an older generation are still beyond the eyes of fashion experts;
with or without surgery or Photoshop the future existence of the older female
is continuing to loss its battle against the imminent younger female model.
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