Models Over 60 Surge in Popularity for Fashion and Beauty Brands

A childhood war evacuee in Britain, Ms. Dunscombe left school at 15 and didn’t have a major career until modeling. Now, several years into her modeling career, she’s done lingerie pictures, worn

Prada

in Hunger magazine and been on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar UK. Ms. Dunscombe, who lives in Surrey, United Kingdom, sees her mission as inspiring and advocating for older women. “I get extremely irritated when fashion editors promote the most frumpy of clothes for the older age groups,” she said. “Aren’t they aware of what is going on at the moment? That we are coming to the fore.”

Ms. Dunscombe is part of the fashion and beauty industry’s new silver wave. In recent years, luxury fashion brands, direct-to-consumer beauty brands and mass clothing lines have begun casting older models—much older models. Some are celebrities, but increasingly, they are unknowns.

It would appear brands are finally warming to the idea that women of all ages want to see themselves in advertising.

Beauty giant

L’Oreal

‘s current spokespeople include Helen Mirren, 77, Jane Fonda, 85, and Viola Davis, 57. Maye Musk, “nepo-mommy” of titan Elon, became CoverGirl’s oldest cover girl in 2017 at age 69. (Yes, the industry-wide model jargon of “girl” extends even to women of grandmother age.) Luxury brand Celine famously cast the late silver-haired writer Joan Didion in its ads in 2015. Saint Laurent has more recently featured Betty Catroux, 78, and Joni Mitchell, 79. Models over 50 now regularly walk runway shows including at Valentino, Simone Rocha, Balenciaga, Rachel Comey and more.

Even on the men’s side, Prada has recently employed silver foxes Jeff Goldblum, 70, and Vincent Cassel, 56.

Rachel Comey’s casting often features models over 50. Clockwise from top: Birgitt Doss and Jutta von Brunkau; Giannie Couji; Soo Kwon. PHOTOS: Yelena Yemchuk/Deirdre Lewis/Annie Powers/Courtesy of Rachel Comey

“A youth-obsessed culture is just boring,” said the New York designer Rachel Comey, whose casting is often held up as an example for age representation. Even on her e-commerce site, typically a zone for the most conventional models, she includes striking people of all ages. “Casting people of all ages has always felt natural to me,” she said, because, after all, “we design for people at all stages and moments of their lives.”

That kind of common sense is still rare in the fashion industry, where models are typically in their late teens and early 20s. While there’s no comprehensive tracker of models’ ages, the Fashion Model Directory website estimated the median age of models as 23 in 2019, and a 2022 diversity report from the Fashion Spot clocked only 23 total castings of over-50s on the fall 2022 runways.

In her 1996 article about then-16-year-old model James King in the

New York Times Magazine,

Jennifer Egan described the paradox of marketing fashion via young girls: “Teen-age girls simulate an adulthood they have yet to experience, for the consumption of adult women who then feel dogged by standards of youth and beauty they will never meet. Welcome to image culture’s hall of mirrors.”

The year before Ms. Egan’s article, model and actor Isabella Rossellini was dumped from selling antiaging cream as she aged. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Ms. Rossellini embodied serenity in perfume and skin-care ads for the French cosmetics company Lancôme. But when she was 42 in 1995, her contract abruptly ended.

“Women dream to remain young, so if you are 42 you can no longer represent that dream,” Ms. Rossellini remembers the company’s executives telling her, as she recounted in the 2012 documentary “About Face“ and in several interviews. Last year, Ms. Rossellini told Charlie Rose“I think they made a mistake.” In today’s more hospitable climate, the 65-year-old Ms. Rossellini has started appearing in Lancôme advertisements again.

“So women’s dreams have changed?” Ms. Rossellini asked Mr. Rose of the shift. “They don’t want to be young—they want to be old?”

In response, Francoise Lehmann, chief executive officer at Lancôme, called Ms. Rossellini “the perfect embodiment of the Lancôme brand values of positive and powerful beauty.”

Some of the older models in the spotlight at the moment, stars with extraordinary longevity like Pat Cleveland and Jerry Hall, came up as young models in the 1960s and ’70s, respectively. Bethann Hardison, 80, one of the first Black supermodels who began working in the 1960s, is the subject of “Invisible Beauty,” a documentary premiering at Sundance this month. Ms. Hardison appeared in a

Victoria’s Secret

campaign in October 2022.

A nostalgic taste for ’90s fashion has driven a resurgence in interest in models from that period, including Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, now in their 50s. (In 2017 Versace staged a reunion of these models and others on its runway in a much-publicized “supermodel reunion.”)

But with the demand for older models appearing to be at a record high at every level of the industry, from print advertising to social-media campaigns to runway, older modeling newcomers are joining these familiar faces.

Georgia Makely-Schraeder, the global director of digital and media at Ford Models, said that her agency had done open casting calls for older models to meet demand in recent years. Briefs from brands that once sought only young, thin, predictable models have increasingly opened up, she said: “We’ve seen more inclusion in breakdowns from clients, requesting specifically more mature models or even a lack of an age range, which was new for some of the agents here.”

Rebecca Valentine started Grey Model Agency in London in 2015 specifically to address the burgeoning demand for older models. She specializes in, as she put it, “models over 50 whose faces tell a story” (Ms. Dunscombe is one of her models). Since she launched her agency, she said, “we have seen an explosion” in the types of older models being cast, including “silver haired fashionistas” and “androgynous yoga bunnies.” Suddenly, she said, social media is bringing together “tribes of older people from #silversisters” to “#fitoverfifty.”

“They all moan about being overlooked,” she said, “but more than that, they are a captive market for brands whose media buyers were struggling to reach their market via the old channels.”

Like Ms. Dunscombe, Jocelyne Beaudoin, a prop stylist in New York, started modeling later in life. Now 64, Ms. Beaudoin signed with her agent at 60 and has since worked steadily, juggling her day job and the more lucrative modeling gigs. Her first job was walking in a Rachel Comey show, and she’s modeled jeans (Madewell), hair products (Virtue), makeup (Bare Minerals) and antiques (

1stdibs

).

Ms. Beaudoin said she’s often the only person on set in her age group. “For the other models, I’m an exception,” she said. “So they all sort of flock to me. They all want to know what my secrets are, how do I do it, and how long I’ve been doing it.”

In her first years modeling, she said, makeup artists on set had no idea what to do with older skin. They would spackle her in powder as they do with younger women, not knowing how it would settle into fine lines.

She said that women recognize and come up to her in places like the grocery store, or the hospital, and tell her it’s meaningful to see someone like her in ads.

“If you’re a younger model, in a certain way you’re not as impactful because it’s an expected situation. But for me, it makes women my age feel good about themselves,” she said, “and that’s very rewarding.”

Ms. Dunscombe said that as a 90-year-old model her job was to communicate: “You are not the perfect person. You are simply an example of what everyone could aspire to.”

Write to Rory Satran at rory.satran@wsj.com