This Is (Still) the Golden Age of Old Folks Selling New Clothes
Some people say 30 is the new 20. But, if you're the business of selling clothes, 50, 60, and 70 is the new 20. Famous elderly pitchfolks aren't merely the best way to lure consumers — they also make clothes look better.
Boomers and Gen-X-ers, clad in comfy walking shoes, quietly strode to the forefront of fashion campaigns over the past few years, reflecting a growing consciousness of how obviously cool old people look in clothes.
Consider 82-years-young Christopher Walken modeling for Saint Laurent, 69-year-old Whoopi Goldberg clad in Ami, or even Hedi Slimane lensing 82-year-old Bob Dylan in black CELINE leather.
These labels are otherwise tapping K-pop stars and buzzy young singers to sell their $4,700 jackets and $800 sneakers, remember.
And it's not only famous French labels platforming the cool olds.
Middle-aged (and then some) famously strode SUNNEI's Spring/Summer 2025 runway, Burberry has cast older models in campaigns as recent as Winter 2024 and Summer 2025, and Zegna's Summer 2026 collection was rife with handsome old fellows, some even older than dapper ambassador and occasional model Mads MIkkelsen.
KITH lookbooks just as often feature the absurdly handsome Lono Brazil as they do mature actors like Bryan Cranston, Ed Norton, Adrian Brody, Jerry Seinfeld, and 79-year-old Succession star Brian Cox.
This formula works. In 2022, then-68-year-old Jerry Seinfeld engendered KITH's most viral campaign ever, with a sole Instagram post notching over 283k Likes, 7.7k comments, and too many memes to count (perhaps less because Seinfeld looked cool and because, well, it's Jerry Seinfeld in KITH. Supreme, similarly, has tapped established names to kick off its seasonal collections for over a decade — remember Neil Young for Supreme? — and only just brought 68-year-old Spike Lee on board, who's now like an eight-time Stone Island model.
Despite these many disparate companies ostensibly operating in separate markets — "streetwear" as opposed to "luxury," as if those signifiers mean anything — they're all aiming to tap the same immediate appeal offered by the co-sign of a famous, venerable actor or musician.
On one hand, there's the lived-in, world-weariness of a wizened model. They give the clothes they're wearing an air of authenticity.
It's why those Aimé Leon Dore Ma & Pa New Balance-inspired ads are immediately appealing and why it's so striking to see Neil Young wearing a Supreme Bogo.
This is less about the clothes and more about the models wearing them, how these signifiers of youth culture are reframed as mature: Clothes made "real" once a "real" person wears them.
But there's also the instant cool afforded by any appearance of a well-known face, doubled by seeing someone associated with movies or music wearing stylish duds, tripled when that person is an older actor not necessarily synonymous with luxury clothing.
Like, who cares whether or not Anthony Hopkins actually wears LOEWE or that Brian Cox knows what a KITH is. Old folks don't just look cool in clothes: They make clothes look cool by comparison.
This article was published in August 2023 and updated in June 2025.
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