Fashion's obsession with youth has been much-noted – so much, it seems, that the industry has started to pay attention. The latest new faces to light up campaigns and covers? Retirees.
Ari Seth Cohen's hugely successful blog Advanced Style has been flying the flag for older beauty since 2008 – Cohen's street-style shots of wonderfully dressed octogenarians have won him fans from Mary Portas to Henry Holland. Since then, Cohen's eye for older style has gone global; Lanvin used 62-year-old Tziporah Salamon to model its autumn/winter 2012 collection as part of a real people campaign and M.A.C Cosmetics sold out of the makeup range worn by 91-year-old Iris Apfel in an advertising campaign earlier this year.
Hipster high-street label American Apparel usually causes a stir because its models look too young and wear too little, but earlier this year an entire campaign for the brand was fronted by a grey-haired model of 60 called Jacky O'Shaughnessy. "When I was 13, my mother brought me to New York City to be interviewed by the leading modelling agency at the time. I was told I would need to get my nose fixed and lose 10lb. It was more than I wanted to deal with," O'Shaugnessy told an American magazine. Her belated foray into modelling has been "the polar opposite of being told I needed a nose job and to lose 10lb. The photos were liberating."
The latest model in this vein is someone a little more familiar, in a cosy, Sunday afternoon way. Angela Lansbury, the 86-year-old star of Murder She Wrote, graces the cover of the latest issue of cult magazine the Gentlewoman, a publication that has previously featured Adele, Christy Turlington and Céline designer Phoebe Philo on its front page. In a shoot by Terry Richardson, the photographer known for his stripped-down approach to fashion shoots, the woman who played Jessica Fletcher models a series of kitsch looks, even donning his signature black-rimmed glasses on the cover.
One thing Lansbury isn't, according to Penny Martin, editor of the Gentlewoman, is a gimmick. She wants the trend for older women in fashion to become a permanent shift. "It's great when women who are not ordinarily included in mainstream media are featured purely because they're great, rather than representing some awful theme, like the 'Age Issue'," she says. "Editing a women's magazine is a bit like planning a fantasy house party, full of women you admire."
This season, Lansbury is the guest of honour.
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