How Does Vogue Negotiate Age?: Fashion, the Body, and the Older Woman

Abstract

This article addresses the role played by clothing and fashion in the constitution of age, exploring the changing ways in which aging is experienced, understood, and imagined in modern culture through an analysis of the responses of UK Vogue. As a high fashion journal, Vogue focuses on youth; age and aging represent a disruption of its cultural field. How it negotiates this issue is relevant to both students of fashion and of age. Older women in Vogue only feature sporadically, and predominantly in ways that dilute or efface their age. The current ideal is one of “Ageless Style” and cultural integration. But this has not always been the case. In the 1950s UK Vogue regularly featured a distinctly older women in the form of the fictional Mrs Exeter. No such figure appears—or could appear—today, and this article explores the reasons behind this, in the changing social and cultural location of older people in contemporary consumption culture.

KEYWORDS:

• age
• consumption
• body
• identity
• fashion
• dress
• Vogue
• Mrs Exeter