Men of a certain age have long come in and out of fashion. Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, European portraiture immortalized tailored tunics and the older aristocrats who wore them. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, celebrating “breeching,” the practice of putting a boy in pants for the first time, was all the rage. Skip ahead to 2012, when, in its fall campaign, Prada balanced the winsome youth of the actors Jamie Bell and Garrett Hedlund with the steely eyed bravado of Gary Oldman and Willem Dafoe. Then, in 2016, there was the then 80-year-old model and viral sensation Wang Deshun, better known as China’s hottest grandpa, who appeared in advertisements for Ermenegildo Zegna.
But if seniors have sometimes been presented as stunts, this season has felt different, with the tone shifting away from tokenization and toward sincere objectification. Junya Watanabe’s fall 2019 runway show consisted almost entirely of classically handsome men with what the designer described as “silver swagger.” At Berluti, older men walked in marble-printed shirts and long leather trenches, while Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia, the godfather of dadcore, enlisted models who looked less like literal fathers and more like the colloquial daddy — or, to venture even further down the corridor of slang, the zaddy. (Both terms connote an older man with a measured confidence, but zaddies also have a certain extra something.)
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As some guys scramble to stop the clock with creams and cryotherapy, more and more are accepting — embracing, even — the passage of time. It’s also refreshing to project wisdom onto salt-and-pepper beards at a moment when men in power sometimes come off no better than colicky babies. Surveying the collections this season, I was reminded of a photograph from Adam Kimmel’s spring 2009 look book of a ruddy, Santa-like 70-something John Baldessari that I used to have tacked to the wall above my bed. My boyfriend at the time hated it. But there was something undeniable about Baldessari (and, for that matter, Larry Bell, Dennis Hopper and Tony Shafrazi, who also modeled the clothes). I didn’t want to be with him — Kimmel wasn’t selling sex — I wanted to be him. I wanted to have the knowledge and the experience that Baldessari clearly had. And I wanted to look as fully formed as he did in that picture, in black pleated pants, a matching T-shirt and an unbuttoned safari jacket, all of which Kimmel had put on an old man so that younger ones like me might pay attention. In an industry that champions youth bordering on prepubescence, it sometimes takes gray hair and wrinkles to feel truly provocative.
