At the recent Met Gala, one of the most non-obvious looks of the night came from rapper Bad Bunny who aged himself 53 years to show up as an 85-year-old man. His commitment to the look was extreme, spending hours in the chair getting transformed by Hollywood prosthetics designer Mike Marino. His choice was widely interpreted as a criticism of the inherent age-bias we often see in the fashion industry.
It seems to be having an impact too. This week I also read a story about the iconic fashion looks of older people:
“Old people just look cool. Cooler than the rest of us, for sure. And everything they wear looks cooler by default. Everyone knows it: Fashion brands rake in platitudes every time they cast a senior model and garments associated with the elderly uniformly shape the canon of good clothes. What is the science here? It’s simply that everything, from clothing to cars to people, looks better with some life in it. Everything is cooler with age; a life well lived and all that. That’s partially why old folks make things look cool by default. That’s reality. They are real. (The juxtaposition between the elderly and hip new clothes also helps.) Also, they have a sense of ease that whippersnappers lack. Confidence comes with age (or so they tell me).”
Combined with the idea I shared from a previous week’s newsletter about the shift from men of a certain age talking about “hotspan” versus healthspan where the new focus is “staying hot into your 60s,” there is something fascinating happening here around the current conversation about age. Being older is now cool. Hopefully it stays that way when I get to my 60s too.