At Batsheva, Fashion Never Grays

February 21, 2024

The fashion industry has an age problem. Kaia Gerber was 13 when she signed to IMG. Brooke Shields was 15 when she told the world, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.” A 14-year-old Sofia Mechetener was described as “sultry and sophisticated” in a piece that was, ironically, meant to document her age-related controversy. While we’re about a decade past the era of casting literal preteens, there’s still a severe lack of age representation within fashion. Hegemonic culture has always equated youth with beauty, and the industry has so far proved no exception to this rule. While people like Junya Watanabe have come in with their genius casting of older men on the runway, it feels as if people are still trying to forget that women don’t always look like children. Of course, the stigma surrounding female aging is as culturally proliferating as ever. The skincare industry is built off of manufactured fears of aging, condemning crow's feet, smile lines, and sun spots. Advertisers profit off of our desires to erase all evidence of life, but here's where Batsheva comes in.

With her latest show, designer Batsheva Hay refuses to relegate women over forty to “grandma fashion.” And while grandma fashion seems to be one of the thousands of trending “-cores” (ex: coastal grandma, whatever that means), Batsheva says that fun clothes don’t burst into flames the minute you start going gray. The FW24 collection even plays on the industry’s less-than-affectionate nickname for women over thirty, with "HAG" in giant letters embroidered across knit sweaters. Aging doesn’t have to be regal and poised — it can be juvenile and fun. Oversized voluminous dresses with polka dots and bright colors remind us that we’re all just overgrown children.

By Izzy Capulong
Photos Nikole Naloy

What is it about youth that obsesses us as a culture? What is it that's keeping casting directors and retailers from casting older models? Some say it's a question of attractiveness; sex does sell, after all. But here's the thing — you don't have to want to sleep with someone to acknowledge they exist. And maybe that gets to the politics of desirability and the social capital carried by the state of being wanted. But then, if modeling is about attraction and desire, that opens the fashion industry up to much more insidious critiques. Even with the gradual disappearance of literal children from the runway, what remains (aside from the legal questions surrounding child labor) are the ethical dilemmas, asking what it means to have a child as the face of a supposedly sexy brand. There are entire dissertations to be written about fashion’s obsession with assigning adult sexuality to an ostensibly young body. Nora Turriago writes it best in her 2016 HuffPost piece, explaining, “There is something distinctly unsettling about watching a pubescent girl stalk down the runway, styled to look beyond her years and wearing expensive clothing intended for children.”

With bows, colors, and volume, the post-COVID “dopamine dressing” of the past few seasons has been about healing our inner children. But perhaps there’s a way to do that without completely disregarding the inherent beauty of aging. What is more beautiful than a life well-lived? Working in the fashion industry, I’ve seen some of the most beautiful models get chewed up and spit out by legacy agencies the minute they stop looking like how they did in middle school. My mom always told me the world doesn’t end after high school. She was right. And fashion doesn’t end when you turn forty, or at least, it shouldn’t.

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Escaping the Glass Cage

November 19, 2024

For years, she stood still, watching life rush past her, a quiet observer behind the glass. Now, the glass is broken, and she steps out into the unknown. She walks through the city, caught between two worlds—part of it, yet apart from it.

Her journey is quiet but bold, searching for something she’s never understood, something just out of reach. On church steps and under glowing city lights, she questions everything: the rules, the past, and where she truly belongs. Each step feels both freeing and uncertain.

A curious soul in a borrowed life, she keeps moving forward, leaving behind only whispers of her escape, like a fleeting shadow in the night.