The Older Woman
It’s not just the young models and actors who are grabbing eyeballs.
Sure Marc Jacobs likes to cause a little stir now and then. If Louis Vuitton’s former creative director did it last year by wearing a lace dress to New York’s Met Ball, this time he’s found something equally pause-worthy. He launched 64-year-old actor Jessica Lange, as the face of his first beauty campaign.
A sexagenarian fronting a make-up campaign is unheard of anywhere. That of one of the hottest fashion labels in the world is simply sensational. A YouTube grab of the campaign is out. It shows Lange’s highly sexualised mouth narrating the words of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ from The Wizard of Oz. In an interview to Dazed magazine, Jacobs describes Lange as “narcotic”. The designer is a provocateur alright, but he’s also one our greatest observers of cultural trends. His attempt, he says, is to subvert fashion’s obsession with youth.
Jacobs isn’t the only one speaking for the older woman. In 2011, his contemporary and competitor Tom Ford (who once helmed Gucci and saved it from bankruptcy until he chartered his own course from 2011) came out with an equally sexy advert. Ford’s campaign showed an ageing wrinkled couple in the heat of a sexual moment. It was lurid, and beautiful too. It fit Ford’s collection idea — of a return to old-fashioned glamour — like a glove. His runway shows used models aged between 20 and 70.
It would be a bluff to state that fashion or the beauty business is over its ageist ideals. The world will continue and aspire to chase irreversible youth and unattainable thinness. Photoshopping celebrities will continue, despite their ensuing apologies. But the shift in aesthetic attitudes towards autumnal figures is notable. As is the case in Meryl Streep, Lange and Christie Brinkley who modeled for bikinis at 59.
This week sees the release of a film fronted by two former leading ladies of the ’80s Bollywood. Newbie filmmaker Soumik Sen brings together superstars Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla as the respective hero and villain of his Gulaab Gang. The hits of his trailer have created YouTube history, and the film is among the most anticipated ones of the year. The two actors brought such a fresh breath of elegance on Karan Johar’s chat show, something that was sorely missed in the giggle-some gaggle the host likes to curate.
Dixit played the enchantress in Dedh Ishqiya earlier, a lady of wealth who conducts a swayamvar of qawwals for herself. Sridevi’s 2012 film, English Vinglish, is still discussed as the perfect comeback for the actor. She plays a sari-clad mother who is desired by a dishy French chef.
Interestingly, the only thing going against Alia Bhatt — who plays a young girl kidnapped on the eve of her wedding in Imtiaz Ali’s Highway — is that she looks too young. A too young-Bollywood heroine? At 21, Bhatt resembles a young boy in some scenes, not a woman set for nuptials.
Mattel, the makers of Barbie, are writing in a severe fall in the sales of their doll. The blonde girl with unrealistic proportions is losing her appeal.
While we continue to gaze at older woman with new eyes, the ladies are having the last hurrah.
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