Jacky O’Shaughnessy isn’t your typical American Apparel model, but her pose in a new ad emulates the seductive twentysomethings who regularly appear in that company’s campaigns. She sits on the floor, legs splayed wide open, wearing a cotton leotard, tights, and a loose-fitting sweater. But her 60-year-old skin is less taut, her long hair grey. In another recent ad, for Lanvin, Jacqueline “Tajah” Murdock stands straight in a forest green peplum dress, a tight ponytail high atop her head. The styling is standard for a fashion campaign, but Murdock’s striking 82-year-old face lacks the youthful glow of the models usually cast by the French fashion house. MAC takes a similar approach with 90-year-old fashion icon Iris Apfel, who posed for her makeup collaboration with the brand. Wrinkles surround her red pout like rays of sun — far different from the Photoshopped smooth skin of other MAC faces.

Just five years ago, it was rare to see an unknown woman under 30 in an ad campaign for luxury goods, high-end makeup, and affordable basics targeted at hipsters. But now, thanks to personalities like Apfel and blogs like Advanced Style – which celebrates impeccably dressed women of a certain age – older females are beginning to take the spotlight once reserved for Hollywood starlets or models in their late-teens and early-20s.

The trend started about a decade ago with marketers putting real people in ads. Last May the global research agency Millward Brown found that only one in 10 ads features a celebrity, down from 19 percent in 2004, reports Adweek. Meanwhile, society’s attitudes towards beauty have also evolved, and more than ever, consumers are open to seeing people of different ethnicities, body types, sexual orientation — and age — promoting goods on television and in magazines.  

“Without a doubt there’s been a trend certainly for the last 10 years of marketing, away from beautiful models who are airbrushed, to real people,” Jeffrey Buchman, professor of advertising and marketing communications at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told ARTINFO.

And it’s not because women over 50 suddenly learned how to put together a stylish ensemble. “The fashion world has long been interested in older chic women — think Diana Vreeland, Wallis Simpson, Nan Kempner, Gloria Guinness,” said Sharon Graubard, senior vice president of trend analysis at trend forecasting agency Stylesight. “Even during the youth culture ’60s, and disco era ’70s, it was understood that women of a certain age could carry chic, sophisticated clothes, sometimes better than young women. The strange thing is that the fashion industry forgot about this segment in the last decades.”

Shannon Bell Price, assistant chair of fashion design at Pratt Institute, agrees. “I think they haven’t had as much attention before because people thought after the age of 30, you’re not pretty and chic anymore,” she said. “It was a cultural attitude.”

Companies are also targeting deeper pockets. Baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — make up roughly 25 percent of the U.S. population, and their buying power — at $3.4 trillion annually, according to “CBS Sunday Morning,” — shouldn’t be ignored.

“When American Apparel uses a good-looking, grey-haired lady for an ad, what they’re saying to all those good-looking grey-haired ladies out there is that this merchandise is appropriate for you,” said Bell Price.

More comfortable in their own skin after years of having lived in it, older women are more likely to buy products when they see faces their own age in ads. A 2012 study by Ryerson University professor Ben Barry revealed that “consumers increased their purchase intentions by over 175 percent when they saw models who reflected their age; in particular, women over the age of 35 increased their purchase intentions by 200 percent when they saw older models. When models didn’t reflect their age, consumers decreased their purchase intentions by 64 percent.” 

The benefits of casting older women in ads go beyond the direct profits associated with successfully targeting an older age bracket – these images also spark interest in the brand. Whenever a woman over 50 appears in a fashion campaign, a media frenzy follows. Virtually every fashion blog picked up the Lanvin series for fall that featured two women over 60. “It’s just simply something that you don’t see,” said Buchman. “It gets attention.”

Advertisers are always trying to push boundaries, and this trend reflects efforts to venture into new territory. Thirty-two years ago, Calvin Klein incited controversy on the other end of the age spectrum when 15-year-old Brooke Shields recited that famous tagline: “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”  

“You can’t get any younger – Calvin Klein explored the very edge of puberty years ago,” said Buchman. “So why not get older and get attention?”

Click on the slide show to see ad campaigns featuring older women.

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