The Fashion Industry Finally Notices Who It's Been Ignoring

It’s rare for two different shows to cover almost the exact same story in the same week, but that’s what happened with The Business of Fashion Podcast and The Debrief, both digging into fashion’s sudden interest in older female shoppers. The numbers are stark—women over 60 make up 22% of the population but just 4.2% of ad models—and the fact that two outlets independently landed on this story suggests something real is shifting. Brands are waking up to the idea that loyalty and spending power don’t always live where the marketing budget has traditionally pointed.

That same blind spot runs through the rest of the week’s conversations, just in different forms. Emily Dawn Long is building a fashion business without a publicist or traditional industry backing, proving that word-of-mouth and direct relationships can outperform the old gatekeeping structures. Buck Mason’s founder makes a parallel argument about the DTC wave that promised cheap basics by cutting out middlemen: the economics never worked, and the brands that survive are the ones designing with conviction rather than chasing the race to the bottom on price.

Olivier Brun’s turnaround of Bloomingdale’s fits the same pattern from the institutional side—less about expanding to capture everyone and more about curating carefully for the customers who actually matter, then building real relationships with them. It’s the retail equivalent of what the older-shopper conversations are arguing: depth and specificity beat scale and assumption.

Ian Schrager’s reflections on Studio 54 feel like the thematic key for all of it. His claim that people don’t fundamentally change—they just reveal themselves differently depending on circumstance—is really an argument for paying closer attention rather than guessing. Whether it’s an underserved shopper demographic, a designer outside the usual pipeline, or a department store’s actual best customers, this week’s throughline is the same: the industry’s biggest openings are sitting in plain sight, waiting for someone to actually look.