AGELESS SPIRIT
Hannah Betts looks backwards so she can look forwards, and discovers why 5O is the new 3O
Age is never just a number. Some of us embrace it, others try to delay
it with beauty tricks and lifestyle hacks. But, as the conversation around ageing changes, the closer we are to living in an ageless society. From
octogenarian models to fearless trend forecasters, the voices of ELLE
ask: what does our future look like?
THE LAUNCH OF ELLE UK took place in November 1985 (that’s our first cover, right), an era in which the internet only existed within government, mobile phones were a breaking technology, and computers were the size of boulders. Mrs Thatcher may have been running the country, but sexism abounded and there was a prevailing belief that a woman could not be intelligent and interested in shoes. Into this world sprang ELLE, 227 pages of fabulously fashionable optimism. It is difficult to overestimate how revolutionary this felt – luckily, I was around to recall it. At 14 years old, nothing had ever been so thrilling. As its cover shoot so brilliantly demonstrated, the ELLE girl literally leapt off the page. Here was a woman forever doing something, ever questing – no stiff fashion mannequin was she. The ELLE heroine had attitude, bravura. Every woman wanted to be an ELLE girl, whatever her vintage.
This ageless spirit has always been at the heart of this magazine. Just as I have remained a fan from the ages of 14 to 46, the heroines of its first few years continue to appear on its covers around the world today. This illustrious chorus includes Yasmin Parvaneh (later Le Bon), now 52; Isabella Rossellini, 65; Charlotte Rampling, 71; Kate Moss, 43; Naomi Campbell, 47; Katharine Hamnett, 70; Stella McCartney, 46; Tilda Swinton, 56; Angelina Jolie, 42, and Katie Holmes, 38. Once an ELLE girl, always an ELLE girl.
Three decades on, society is finally catching up with the example that this magazine set. The face of the ageing female is changing, and it’s doing so beautifully – wrinkles, if not warts, and all. The conversation around ageing, and women’s ageing in particular, has evolved dramatically. Back in the Eighties, women of my grandmother’s generation had buttoned up a cardigan at 30 and submitted to middle age. Today, to be 30 is to be at the beginning of things, with an average of 51 years and six months to follow*.
Today’s senior citizens are blue-jeaned baby boomers, silver surfers who are drinking, divorcing and catching STDs with an abandon that makes younger generations look conservative. The over-fifties account for 47% of UK consumer spending, with over-65s investing £6.7bn a year on clothes**. Their influence means that anyone who used to be considered ‘retirement age’ is suddenly a conspicuous presence. September’s issue of US fashion magazine Allure featured 72-year-old Dame Helen
Mirren as its cover girl, together with a declaration that the publication would be dropping the term ‘anti-ageing’. Fifty-year-old Nicole Kidman’s ‘Kidmanaissance’ has been much remarked upon, and the acting careers of 56-year-old Julianne Moore, 51-year-old Robin Wright, 71-year-old Susan Sarandon (an ELLE cover star this month), 79-year-old Jane Fonda and 82-year-old Dame Judi Dench are no less thriving. The fashion industry has been one of the most prominent champions of this zeitgeist shift from grey invisibility to silver chic. In April, 73-year-old model Lauren Hutton was revealed as one of the stars of Calvin Klein’s lingerie campaign, having appeared on the Bottega Veneta runway the previous September. Amber Valletta, 43, and Cecilia Chancellor, 51, walked for
Dries Van Noten, while Simone Rocha championed septuagenarian Jan de Villeneuve and Donatella Versace sent the original Supers (average age of 48) down the catwalk for SS18.
Hannah Robinson, visual editor of The Future Laboratory, tells me: ‘We coined the phrase “flat-age society” to describe a stage where your age becomes irrelevant. Fashion brands are driving a change in consumer thinking through age-neutral campaigns, which demonstrate that age does not matter. Brands are realising that consumers want to be spoken to through the lens of psychographics [the study of people’s attitudes], not demographics.’
Changes in the beauty industry, where ageing was the sworn enemy, are also increasingly apparent. Vichy now boasts a range called Slow Age rather than Anti Age, while Dove is celebrating women of all generations. Today’s aim is not unfeasible transformation or a return to your teenage face, but keeping skin as healthy as possible for as long as possible. With this has come an appreciation for the beauty of the mature face, with a new generation of poster girls such as Jane Fonda for L’Oréal, Jessica Lange for Marc Jacobs’ cosmetics, and Charlotte Rampling for Nars. Advances in technology mean we’ll look younger for longer, too. Karen Cummings-Palmer, a health coach who specialises in age management, explains: ‘Laboratory-grown skin and 3D-printing are part of the not-too-distant future. Women will also embrace technology that turns their skincare routine into a medi-facial [medical-strength cosmetic treatments]. [They will use] gadgets at home, such as lasers and microcurrents sitting alongside exfoliators and serums.’
Even today, advances in diet, exercise, injectables and radio frequencies mean that one can look fresher at 50 than one did at 30. A pilates-fit, fillerenhanced friend of mine, who’s in her mid-fifties, falls into this category – a fact conveyed to her by her own mother. Still, she’s enjoying every moment of this midlife flourishing: ‘I love my face and body far more than I did in my youth. Looking good is a reflection of being healthy, and I intend to stay this way.’ I also prefer my appearance in middle age; my face is more characterful and less like a cloud. Like my body, it has paid its dues and it’s emerged more my own. An older face also means that one gets patronised a lot less. For anyone fretting about turning 30, allow me to reassure you that life only gets better. The older I get, the happier I am.
There are also other factors that seem too sci-fi to fully conceive, but will affect how we view female beauty and ageing. Psychologist Linda Blair contends: ‘We’ll see a time when you don’t have to be a woman to carry a baby. Already, advances in fertility treatments allow a baby to be conceived in a laboratory and embryos to be frozen until needed. This has a profound impact in terms of what it means to be young. Ageing in women has always been about signs that one is no longer fertile – the slack skin, non-lustrous hair and lips becoming less full being indicators that we’re no longer of reproductive age. When this is no longer necessary, these attributes won’t be the be-all and end-all.’
Being old will also be less stigmatised because many of its negative consequences will have vanished. By 2019, the anti-ageing market will be worth £151bn*. In Silicon Valley, the ultimate status symbol is investing in age-resistant technology. Predictions include lab-grown organs, genes that can be edited to eliminate disease, life-extending pills and back-up brain downloads – and that’s before we get into the realm of cryogenic freezing.
Future forecaster extraordinaire Faith Popcorn, CEO of BrainReserve, a futurist marketing consultancy she founded in 1974, argues: ‘Some say that the person who will live to be 150 has already been born. There are huge medical-technological leaps going on with gene-tinkering and things such as the Stentrode Project [a mesh implanted into the brain to connect us to both the internet and a medical team]. We’ll augment ourselves with nano-scallops [microscopic robots that swim through the blood stream and repair damage]. Getting old tomorrow will not be the same as today. Our minds and bodies will be optimised and elevated right up until the end.’ And just when you think it’s sci-fi enough, Faith continues: ‘There is a huge surge of innovation around making DNA-specific products that enhance and extend our lives. There are vitamins you can buy based on your personal biochemistry to optimise your health, and some companies offer services tailoring nutrition to a cellular level, which they then adapt to the customer’s microbiome. At the further edges of innovation, some enterprises are working to create biologics that can restore cellular repair and regeneration, even of brain tissue. There will be amazing advances that explain why some of my fellow futurists say we’ll achieve immortality by the end of the century.’
Immortality or no, as Karen Cummings-Palmer maintains: ‘Today’s twentysomethings will have the opportunity to enjoy a middle and old age that feels remarkably like their youth.’ It is entirely possible that this will create not an age-neutral, but an age-positive utopia. It makes me think of Miley Cyrus’s recent video for Younger Now, in which she links arms with a posse of glamorous octogenarians and reflects that ‘no one stays the same’ and ‘change is a thing you can count on’, a conclusion she has reached at the grand old age of 24. The one thing we can certainly share at every age is the desire to keep moving forward – a sentiment that’s very ELLE, and very now.