There were many head-turning moments at the Balmain show at Paris Fashion Week, which was a love letter by the creative director Olivier Rousteing to his childhood home of Bordeaux. There were twisted gold snail shells hanging from ears and as belt buckles; there were metal handbags cast into clusters of grapes, which were later served up on rhinestone-encrusted minidresses and strapless peplum bustiers.
But the most striking aspect of the show was not the clothes on the runway but the age of many of the models wearing them. It was impossible to ignore that scores of them were … well, older, and not just in terms of conventional fashion parlance (which historically would mean 25).
“I feel like we often celebrate one kind of beauty in fashion, which is youthful, and I’m worried about that approach,” Mr. Rousteing said after his show, which included Axelle Doué, 70; Kristina de Coninck, 63; Estelle Levy, 51; and Marie Seguy, 47. In total, 20 out of 57 models were older than 35.
“We tend to forget that the future is also held within women that have had a life,” he said. “For me, that’s what I wanted to show: women that have lived and continue to live their lives, instead of just young girls that have their whole lives in front of them.”
Mr. Rousteing was not the only designer to feel that way. Thanks to growing pressure on the industry to improve representation, women of and above middle age have become a more commonplace sight on the runway. This season, however, it was impossible to ignore their growing numbers. According to the fashion search engine Tagwalk, roughly three-quarters of the top 20 runway shows in both Paris and Milan featured at least one older model. At Vetements and Schiaparelli, the figure was closer to a fifth of all models cast. In New York last month, Batsheva cast only models over the age of 40.
