Why Fashion Brands Are Finally Courting Older Shoppers and Winning Their Loyalty

Women over 60 represent over 22% of the population but only 4.2% of models in advertisements, yet they control substantial wealth and demonstrate exceptional customer retention when properly engaged.

Summary of The Generation Fashion Forgot. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:02:10 — For decades, the fashion industry has been fixated on younger consumers, largely ignoring older shoppers who possess considerable spending power, brand loyalty, and willingness to invest in quality pieces.
• 00:03:36 — Older generations control a significant portion of wealth in the United States, making them particularly valuable customers during economically cautious periods when they continue to shop while others scale back spending.
• 00:04:47 — Fashion brands often hesitate to feature older women as the face of campaigns, fearing it will deter customers, despite evidence suggesting younger audiences find aspiration in seeing chic, successful older women.
• 00:07:22 — Research shows Americans over 60 account for 22.2% of the population but represent only 4.2% of models in advertisements, demonstrating how underrepresented this demographic remains in fashion marketing.
• 00:07:48 — Leading brands are shifting toward multi-generational selling strategies that appeal simultaneously to customers ranging from millennials to those in their 60s and 70s, rather than targeting single age groups.
• 00:10:20 — Older customers expect reciprocal relationships with brands they patronize, wanting to feel that companies are creating products specifically for them and valuing their loyalty and significant spending.
• 00:12:17 — Older customers represent an ideal audience for retail priorities like in-store experience, personal styling services, and community events, yet many brands fail to leverage these existing shoppers effectively.
• 00:13:26 — Influential women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s within local communities function as powerful micro-influencers through trusted relationships, despite lacking social media followings, and represent untapped marketing opportunities.
• 00:17:03 — Designers who serve as brand founders and muses, like those behind Frances Valentine and Ula Johnson, connect effectively with older customers by demonstrating intimate product knowledge and offering both aspirational and relatable figures.

In depth

The spending-power paradox nobody wants to talk about

Sheena Butler-Young’s reporting starts from a blunt observation: fashion has spent decades chasing youth culture even though the customers with the deepest pockets are frequently decades past the demographic brands actually photograph 00:02:10. Diana Pearl doesn’t dispute the logic of courting young shoppers outright — she concedes that younger consumers function as a kind of cultural radar, setting trends and steering online conversation in ways brands genuinely need to track 00:03:26. But she draws a sharp line between cultural influence and purchasing power, noting that boomers control an outsized share of U.S. wealth and, crucially, keep spending even when everyone else pulls back 00:03:3600:03:48.

That distinction matters more in a cautious economic climate. When younger shoppers trim discretionary spending, older consumers are often the ones still showing up at checkout, which makes them a stabilizing force for revenue rather than just a nostalgic afterthought 00:03:54. Yet Pearl and Butler-Young agree this customer is being quietly relied upon rather than actively served — retailers lean on her to push a quarter into the black without building strategy around her preferences 00:09:5800:10:04. Pearl calls this an issue of retention economics: because older shoppers tend to settle into brands they trust and keep returning to the same labels, losing them is costlier than it looks on a quarterly spreadsheet, and winning them demands sustained attention rather than a single seasonal campaign 00:10:14.

The unresolved tension here is that nobody in the conversation claims this is a hard problem to diagnose — both hosts treat the gap between dependence and investment as obvious once stated. What’s left open is why it’s taken fashion this long to act on something so visible in the numbers, and Pearl’s answer circles back to habit and assumption rather than any real strategic rationale.

Why brands still flinch at putting her in the campaign

Separate from courting her wallet is the question of whether brands will let an older woman be the face of a campaign, and here Pearl is more pointed. She traces the industry’s hesitation to broader cultural patterns that treat women’s visibility as having an expiration date, pointing to Hollywood’s well-documented shrinking of roles for women over 40 as a parallel case 00:05:3600:05:43. The fear, as one expert Butler-Young interviewed put it, is that fronting a brand with an older model will alienate the customers brands actually want 00:04:47.

Both hosts push back on that premise using concrete counterexamples. Pearl cites Céline’s campaign featuring Joan Didion and a J.Crew campaign with Diane Keaton and Julianne Moore, both of which were received warmly rather than as liabilities — evidence, she argues, that the industry’s fear of alienation is more assumption than data 00:05:56. Her broader claim is that younger audiences don’t actually recoil from seeing older women styled as chic and successful; instead they find something aspirational in it, projecting forward to a version of themselves they’d like to become rather than recoiling from a reminder of aging 00:06:2000:06:31. Butler-Young extends this with a line about ageism amounting to discrimination against one’s own future self, framing the industry’s avoidance as self-defeating on a personal level, not just a commercial one 00:06:5800:07:05.

The scale of underrepresentation gives this argument teeth: Butler-Young’s reporting found that Americans over 60 make up more than a fifth of the population but barely four percent of the models appearing in advertising 00:07:2200:07:26. Neither host treats the handful of celebrated exceptions as proof the problem is solved — both describe them explicitly as exceptions to a rule that is still very much operative, meaning the aspirational case for older-model campaigns remains more a hypothesis validated by anecdote than an industry norm.

Multi-generational selling as a hedge, not a gimmick

Rather than treating age-inclusive marketing as a standalone fix, several of the brands Butler-Young profiled — Ulla Johnson spanning roughly 35 to 65, Frances Valentine skewing older, Poppy and Peonies closer to millennial mothers — are explicitly building for multiple generations within one house 00:07:4800:09:3600:09:4100:09:46. Pearl frames this as a structural advantage rather than just good optics: a brand that can sell to a mother, her daughter, and her own mother simultaneously insulates itself against generational churn, since any single age cohort will eventually age out or lose interest 00:08:2800:08:56. The risk of not doing this, in her telling, is that a brand built around one generation’s taste has no guaranteed successor once that generation moves on 00:09:07.

The complication she’s honest about is that multi-generational selling is operationally harder than it sounds, because different age groups discover and engage with brands through entirely different channels and expect different things from the shopping experience itself 00:08:3700:08:43. That’s not a problem solved by messaging alone — Pearl argues older customers specifically expect a reciprocal relationship, wanting evidence that a brand is designing with their body, their lifestyle, and their taste in mind in exchange for their loyalty and spend 00:10:2000:10:4100:10:46.

The Ulla Johnson example surfaces the clearest evidence that this reciprocity pays off: its chief executive told Butler-Young the brand sees a seventy percent retention rate, which both hosts flag as a remarkable number precisely because it stems from designing around an actual customer the founder meets in-store rather than an imagined target demographic 00:19:4200:19:4900:19:51. Those same loyal customers aren’t just repeat-buying staples — they’re actively seeking new pieces each season and treating existing purchases as heirlooms, which Pearl reads as proof that this audience is anything but tapped out commercially 00:20:0000:20:05. The implicit indictment is that brands are leaving obvious revenue on the table by not matching that appetite with attention 00:20:1200:20:14.

The influence economy hiding in plain sight

One of the more surprising threads in Butler-Young’s reporting involves influence that never touches social media. The story’s opening anecdote — Ever Eve’s co-founder Megan Tamte making her 82-year-old mother the guest of honor at a flagship event, with that mother’s circle of 70- and 80-something friends in tow — becomes a template for a kind of grassroots marketing fashion mostly ignores 00:11:4800:11:5600:12:05. These women, Pearl notes, were receptive to exactly the tactics brands claim to prize: styling consultations, willingness to buy a full look rather than a single item, genuine engagement in-store 00:12:1700:12:2200:12:2400:12:2700:12:30.

Pearl’s broader argument is that influence has always existed outside paid platforms — there’s always been a trusted tastemaker in any social circle, the friend whose recommendations carried weight long before influence could be monetized through a feed 00:12:5300:13:0000:13:1000:13:1500:13:20. She argues this dynamic is especially pronounced among women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who wield real sway within tight-knit local communities — book clubs, card groups, retirement communities — even without a single public post to their name 00:13:2600:13:3200:13:3700:13:4400:13:4900:13:5400:14:00. Her suggestion to brands is concrete: find that person, bring her into the store, let her host the next event, rather than defaulting to the assumption that reach only comes from an Instagram following 00:14:0500:14:1100:14:2200:14:3100:14:34.

Butler-Young complicates the point slightly by noting this isn’t strictly an either/or — many of the designer-founders in her story do have substantial social followings, Elise Ahrens of Frances Valentine among them, suggesting digital and community influence aren’t mutually exclusive but simply underused in tandem 00:14:4500:14:50.

Turning the insight into practice — and avoiding a new stereotype

When the conversation turns to execution, Pearl keeps returning to the founder-as-muse model exemplified by Ahrens, who co-founded Kate Spade decades earlier and now, in her sixties, designs for and models alongside women her own age while maintaining a sizable Instagram following 00:14:5600:15:1000:15:1700:15:23. The appeal, Pearl argues, is a combination that’s hard to manufacture through a hired model: founders like Ahrens and Ulla Johnson bring an intimate, lived understanding of fit, fabric, and construction specific to an older body, paired with an aspirational lifestyle that still feels attainable rather than remote 00:16:0200:16:0800:16:1600:16:5200:16:5700:17:3000:17:42.

At the retail level, both hosts argue the same logic should extend to staffing. Pearl’s case is that pairing older shoppers with noticeably younger sales associates creates a credibility gap — she uses her own experience as a 34-year-old bristling at styling advice from a 22-year-old to illustrate how much more pronounced that mismatch becomes for a customer in her 50s or 60s 00:21:1800:21:2300:21:35. Her prescription is to hire older sales associates deliberately, treating relatability and depth of product knowledge as hiring criteria on par with traditional retail skills, and to resist assumptions about what an older customer wants to wear — covered-up, conservative silhouettes — in favor of simply asking each individual what she wants to show off 00:23:2100:23:2700:23:3800:24:0500:24:1000:24:15.

Scaling this beyond small, founder-led labels is where the conversation turns more tentative. Pearl’s advice — train store managers to empower associates, diversify marketing channels beyond TikTok toward streaming and Facebook, and identify local tastemakers market by market — is directional rather than a fully worked playbook, and she frames it as requiring real market-by-market customization rather than a single national formula 00:25:1500:25:2300:25:3900:25:5300:26:07. Both hosts close by warning against swapping one stereotype for another: the goal isn’t to assume older women want modesty any more than it is to assume they want youthfulness, but to recognize, as Pearl puts it, that this age group is not a monolith and that aging itself looks different than it did a generation ago 00:27:5100:27:5800:28:0800:28:38.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.