All hail her grace Lauren Hutton, First of Her Name, Queen of ’70s Insouciance, Lady of Flowing Palazzo Pants, and Insignia of Women of a Certain Age. Born in 1943, Hutton has been modeling for almost 50 years, and these days she’s kind of a poster girl for … something. Body positivity in the septuagenarian set? Fashion diversity? Aging with grace and a low BMI? A canny grab at aging women’s disposable income? Who can say? It’s aging, but make it fashion. Hutton is beautiful, and her face has lines upon lines, wrinkles spreading from her smile like crepuscular rays from the sun. Though she is visibly older, her looks still stun, and in the past few years, she has been featured in major campaigns (Alexander Wang in 2015, Tod’s in 2016, and H&M in 2017), become the oldest cover girl for Vogue (Vogue Italia October 2017), worked as an underwear model (Calvin Klein fall 2017), and closed a major runway show arm in arm with Bella Hadid (Bottega Veneta spring 2017). Hutton may be the longest-working, most iconic fashion Old, but she’s not alone. Alongside her is 66-year-old Isabella Rossellini regaining her place as Lancôme’s face after a 25-year-absence; then-68-year-old Charlotte Rampling as the façade for Nars in 2014; Helen Mirren and Jane Fonda, then both in their 70s, walking for L’Oréal last year; Maye Musk getting featured in Harper’s Bazaar at 70; Saint Laurent showcasing 70-something Joni Mitchell in its 2015 campaign; and 85-year-old Carmen Dell’Orefice closing Guo Pei’s 2017 show to a blissed-out chorus of “YAS KWEEN” from the Youngs. It’s a lot of gray hair and wrinkled skin in the name of fashion. You could get breathless over these women, all old, and all magnificent. (And all, it must be noted, blindingly white.) Hutton, though, laid the foundation and unfurled the red carpet that these other Olds tread on, for in 1988, at the ancient age of 43, she appeared in a campaign for Barney’s New York. A year later, she was photographed by Steven Meisel for the Gap’s “Real People” campaign. In 1993, she, along with Patti Hansen, then an unthinkable 37, walked for Calvin Klein during Fashion Week in April. In 1996, Revlon hired Hutton to be the face of its “Results” skin care line (called “Resilience” in Europe), a revival that came after a 20-year absence from the company. As a model, Hutton has always been bigger than herself. Models by profession act as giant silver screens for our own projections — who we want to be, how we want to look, what we want for ourselves, and, yes, whom we imagine others (or ourselves) fucking. When a company chooses a model, it’s banking on our collective ideation, making a complex computation based on an esoteric algorithm of image, marketability, press, and buzz. It’s not just about who looks “good” in your clothes or your makeup; it’s also about a calculated guess at the narratives your would-be customers will literally buy. Someone like Hutton tells a clearly glamorous, extremely American story; she is shorthand for an independent life lived well. |
