By Allie Cohen
For any 20-year-old concerned about retirement, you’ve probably heard about the threat looming over our Social Security benefits due to demographic changes. Specifically, lower birth rates, higher life expectancies, and an overall increase in older people as the baby boomers continue to age have made our population older; making demographic changes the bread & butter of all conversations related to retirement and social security. However, unlike retirement and social security, the fashion industry has yet to factor these demographic changes into its discussions.
This is because the fashion industry has a limited scope of what they define as beautiful, especially with numbers; according to an article in Glamour, the peak age of physical beauty is consolidated within a few given years – specifically, 30. This limited age range has resulted in the fashion industry hyper-focusing on younger consumers, which may potentially cost them 14 billion dollars over the course of 20 years.
Beauty Ages: Consumer Demographics in the Luxury Market
Although people’s concern with appearance tends to drop with age, for example, 80 percent of women under 24 consistently worry about their appearance, and this drops to 52 percent by age 55, according to an article in Today, consumption of beauty products and clothing does not decrease. In fact, studies indicate that spending increases on beauty products as people get older. Specifically, in the U.S., those aged 50 and older account for half of all consumer spending, with individuals between ages 55 and 64 outspending the average consumer in nearly every category, including clothing and beauty. Additionally, older people have increased their spending on fashion by almost 21% between 2011 and 2018, as reported in The Guardian. Projections by The Fashion Law also expect further spending increases: the International Longevity Center expects that individuals aged 50 and over will be the fashion sector’s “key consumer base” by 2040.
Despite these indicators, only 10% of marketing dollars are targeted towards the 50+ audience in America, leading one to question whether ageism and age-phobia have immobilized the beauty industry from jumping on a multi-billion dollar opportunity.
Immobilization
The anti-aging market – a market that focuses on reducing changes that occur during aging – has long been a catalyst for perverse ageist and age-phobic rhetoric that has grossly contaminated our views on older people. For example, the term “old lady” was used so much as an interchangeable term with outdated in the 2019 Project Runway show that it garnered the attention of a retired professor of architectural design to reach out to both the Washington Post and the show to discuss the implications of using such rhetoric. Aside from hurtful words, industries, specifically advertising, have altered requirements for job positions to box out older workers by using meticulous wording. For example, a study conducted by AARP found that many job descriptions for advertising include five key ageist phrases: “recent college graduates,” “digital natives,” “energetic person,” “cultural fit,” and “five to seven years of experience.”
Employing ageist rhetoric to box out older workers has led to a disproportionate representation of young people in the advertising industry, and because of this, the majority of advertising efforts are most likely conducted with younger people’s wants and needs in mind. In turn, this has resulted in inequities in marketing efforts amongst different age groups. For example, according to Vogue, only one out of every 200 models during Spring/Summer 2020 was above the age of 50. Moreover, this lack of representation of older models in the fashion and beauty industry may discourage older consumers from pursuing efforts to maintain their appearance, and hence, from buying products.
Comfort is Key
As previously mentioned, studies have shown that men’s and women’s concern with their appearances drops with age. Yet, the reason why they drop with age may largely be because the fashion markets don’t cater to them, causing their care for appearances to diminish. For instance, a person may worry about their appearance, but as appearance is less important than years of their life, they are unwilling to invest as much effort into appearance. However, if more clothing and beauty products were catered towards older consumers, then older consumers would be more willing to focus on their appearances. This is further reflected in the fact that women older than 75 stop spending on fashion altogether, even though they have significant savings, and say they are still interested in looking stylish, due to feeling unsexy in their clothes. This can be resolved by focusing on adapting clothes so older women can feel sexy, yet age-appropriate: as proven by Benedetta Barzini, the now 78-year-old who rocked Simone Rocha’s AW17 show in 2017, accompanied by Jan de Villeneuve (then 70), and Marie Sophie Wilson (also then 70). In doing so, the fashion industry will make it less time-consuming and less expensive for older consumers, as more options mean more price ranges, making beauty comfortable. Moreover, the fashion industry must ditch their outdated (pun intended) modes of thinking about beauty to provide more options for people of all ages to feel beautiful; which in doing so, will result in generating billions of dollars.
