WRINKLES ARE IN FASHION. Not the ones linen trousers acquire, but the fine lines that accrue on an elderly individual’s face. Lately, the fashion world is celebrating those 60-and-up for their style.
Kyle Kivijarvi, a 36-year-old fashion consultant, runs Gramparents, an Instagram page that posts user-submitted photographs of rakish elders out and about on the street. To date, the three-year-old account has racked up over 129,000 followers. In a typical image, a white-haired fellow layers a tweed overcoat over a striped blazer.
Last year, 30-something friends Andria Lo and Valerie Luu released “Chinatown Pretty,” a photo book that lovingly captures the fashion sense of advanced-age Chinatown residents in cities including Oakland, New York and Chicago.
Also last year, Hsu Hsiu-e, 84 and Chang Wan-ji, 83—a married couple who own a laundromat in Taiwan—became global social media stars thanks to their Instagram account, @wantshowasyoung. The pair pose in compelling outfits styled from clothes their laundromat customers have left behind. The account is now up to over 654,000 followers and the pair was recently named the ambassadors for Taipei Fashion Week.
Mainstream labels are also fueling the trend. In a newspaper ad this month, New Balance announced that it had named Teddy Santis the head of a new American-made collection. In the ad, Mr. Santis—the designer behind New York label Aime Leon Dore—was flanked not by chisel-jawed millennial models, but by a phalanx of elegant elderly New Yorkers. Nearly all wore their own clothes, apart from the New Balances on their feet.
