The May issue of Vogue features Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep on its cover, both aged 76. Wintour, who led American Vogue for thirty-seven years, appears on her own cover for the first time. The photograph was taken by Annie Leibovitz, styled by Grace Coddington, and both women are wearing Prada. The cover line “Seeing Double: When Miranda Met Anna” accompanies it, and the timing coincides with the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2.
Brand consultant Alexandra Manderstam, co-founder of the CULTISH studio and publisher of On Brand Magazine, summed up the shift with the words “Older women are suddenly everywhere.” For a brand director, the question is who is paying for it, why now, and what to do about it when planning budgets.
What women over fifty spend
The numerical basis is softer in Europe than American coverage suggests. The European Commission's Silver Economy study estimates the value of Europe's silver economy at roughly €3.7 trillion in 2015, projected to reach €5.7 trillion by 2025, growing at around 5% a year. It covers the private spending of EU residents aged 50 and over. If this segment stood alone as a national economy, the study ranks it third in the world, behind the United States and China. The five largest European silver markets, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Russia, together make up roughly 63% of the volume. The study covers the whole 50+ population, not women only.
American data is sharper and is cited more often in the marketing world. According to a ms.now report, women over fifty control more than $15 trillion in spending power in the US and account for roughly 27% of American consumer spending. AARP adds that American women aged 50 and over are the country's largest demographic segment with an annual income above $100,000, and that they make 95% of household purchasing decisions and 80% of luxury travel purchases. Europe has no publicly available equivalent with this level of granularity.
What fashion houses have tried since 2015
The shift visible in May's Vogue builds on a decade of isolated castings, not on a single gesture. In January 2015, Phoebe Philo, then creative director of Céline, cast Joan Didion, aged eighty, in the Spring/Summer 2015 campaign, photographed by Juergen Teller. Refinery29 described it at the time as part of a “recent vogue in fashion and beauty advertising for images that represent women from across the age spectrum”.
In October 2023, LOEWE under Jonathan Anderson published its Spring/Summer 2024 pre-collection campaign, in which Maggie Smith, aged eighty-eight, led a cast of eight faces. Alongside Smith were Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor, Greta Lee, Dakota Fanning, Rachel Jones, Fei Fei Sun and TAEYONG. The images were again by Juergen Teller, with creative direction by Jonathan Anderson.
A few months later, in January 2024, Proenza Schouler debuted with Pamela Anderson in its Spring 2024 campaign, at the age of fifty-six and without make-up. Anderson described her approach in a quote for Vogue France from the previous September, saying “I don't want to compete with the clothes. I'm not trying to be the prettiest girl in the room.” Helen Mirren has been the face of L'Oréal Paris since 2014, when she took over the Age Perfect campaigns.
The eight-year gap between Joan Didion at Céline and Maggie Smith at LOEWE was slow. Between LOEWE 2023 and the 2026 Vogue cover came the Proenza Schouler campaign, UGG's AW25 campaign with Sarah Jessica Parker, and standard fashion week castings. Isolated gestures have become a production norm.
Creators over fifty and their audience
Luxury fashion houses' brand spend tracks where attention on older women has moved in the digital layer. Carla Rockmore, a Canadian-American fashion stylist from Dallas, has more than a million followers on TikTok at the age of fifty-eight. The trade press calls her “real-life Carrie Bradshaw.”
Lyn Slater, a former social work professor and fashion influencer under the Accidental Icon brand, has stepped away from the platform, and in her book she describes how she “stopped being a unique person and became a brand.” The contrast between Rockmore and Slater illustrates a tension that makes the over-fifty creator segment strategically interesting. Their audiences have purchasing power that the average TikTok user does not have.
In a comment under Alexandra Manderstam's original post, podcaster Jamie Stein added that “women over 50 are now one of the fastest-growing groups of entrepreneurs in the U.S., and more women are starting entirely new chapters, businesses, and careers later in life.” Data on the age dimension is available in the US. According to the Kauffman Foundation, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity in the US is in the 55 to 64 age band. The Small Business Administration reports that women-owned businesses in the US grew more than three times faster than male-owned businesses between 2012 and 2019. A comparable European indicator broken down by gender and age is not publicly available.
Casting over fifty as a production routine
Vogue's May 2026 cover was presented in marketing materials as groundbreaking. In budget terms, it is the result of an eleven-year arc that ran through Joan Didion, Maggie Smith, Pamela Anderson and Helen Mirren. Casting an older face has stopped being a risk and has become a production routine that reflects where the money is.
In Europe, according to the EC study, the female over-fifty segment is part of a market roughly the same size as the world's third largest economy. Europe lacks the granular American data on the female part of this segment, but partial trends in cosmetics, luxury, travel and wellness spending serve as an approximation. Attention is moving towards creators such as Carla Rockmore, whose audience overlaps with this segment more than the audience of traditional fashion media does.
For planners of brand budgets, this means two things. The shift that Vogue made visible in May was already visible in the budget decisions of LOEWE and Proenza Schouler two years earlier. The question of whether to invest in this segment is already one cycle behind. The open question is how much, and through whom.
Comments