As The Devil Wears Prada returns to cinemas, the industry it satirised still hasn’t reckoned with its most glaring blind spot: the women it refuses to see.
Fashion’s Age Equation
In the film’s most memorable scene, Miranda Priestly dismantles a young assistant’s assumption that fashion has nothing to do with her — tracing a single shade of blue from the couture runway to the bargain bin, and exposing the invisible hand that shapes what all of us wear. It is a speech about power and influence. It is also, unintentionally, a speech about who gets left out of that chain entirely.
The cerulean speech endures because it tells an uncomfortable truth: fashion’s decisions flow downward whether we acknowledge them or not. The industry chooses. The rest of us follow. And for decades now, one of fashion’s quietest choices has been to look past the woman over fifty, the woman who, by every financial measure, is the most important person in the room.
Today, with the long-awaited sequel to The Devil Wears Prada opening across the UK, it feels like an opportune moment to ask the question the fashion world has been avoiding: why does an industry that relies so heavily on women over 50 continue to design its image almost entirely without them?
The money doesn’t lie
Women aged 50 and over represent the single most affluent spending demographic in British fashion. They are not a niche. They are not an emerging market. They are, by any honest financial reckoning, the industry’s most reliable customer and they have been for decades. Yet open the September issue of any of the major fashion publications and you might find them represented in a single feature, if at all, usually under the heading of “ageless beauty” or some other gracious euphemism for erasure.
The mathematics of this make very little sense from a commercial standpoint. The aspiration economy that fashion has always traded in — the idea that a garment transforms you, elevates you, makes you legible to the world — does not switch off at thirty-five. If anything, it intensifies. A woman in her fifties has the income to act on aspiration. She has the taste, the confidence, the wardrobe architecture to make genuine, considered choices. She is, in the language of marketing departments everywhere, a highly qualified buyer. And yet she is almost invisible on the page.
The aspiration economy does not switch off at thirty-five. If anything, for a woman with the means and the confidence to dress entirely on her own terms; it intensifies.
Two women walk into a boutique
Rachel Allpress, founder of Stoned & Waisted, a fashion house that speaks directly and unapologetically to this demographic, has observed something that any honest retailer would recognise: women over 50 do not form a single, uniform market. They divide, broadly, into two distinct archetypes.
There are women who want to be guided, who trust the house to tell them what the season looks like, and who find freedom in that curation. And then there are women who arrive already knowing exactly who they are. They are bold, they experiment, they push back. Both are wonderful customers. What they share is that neither of them is looking to disappear.
This taxonomy is more useful than anything the fashion industry’s own demographic data tends to produce. It resists the temptation to flatten older women into a single “mature” category and instead acknowledges the genuine diversity of self-expression that comes with age. The woman who wants to be dressed beautifully by people she trusts is no less engaged with fashion than the woman who has spent thirty years developing a personal aesthetic so refined it intimidates the sales assistant. They are both fully present in the market. They are both largely absent from the magazine.
Ageless as erasure
When older women do appear in fashion media, the framing is almost always the same. The word “ageless” is deployed with genuine admiration but functions, on closer inspection, as a form of conditional approval. It says: we can celebrate you, but only insofar as you do not remind us too forcefully that you have aged. The silver hair must be artfully tousled. The lines must catch the light poetically. The whole effect must read as timeless rather than specifically, honestly, sixty-two.
This is a subtle but important distinction. A truly age-positive fashion culture would not require its subjects to transcend their age in order to be featured. It would allow a woman to be dressed beautifully, shot beautifully, and presented simply as a woman with no editorial footnote about how extraordinary it is that she looks this good. The extraordinary should, by now, be ordinary.
The street, at least, has always known this. Anyone who has spent time in London, Milan, or Paris or for that matter in any British market town on a Saturday, will have seen women in their fifties, sixties, and beyond who are dressed with a clarity, confidence, and genuine individuality that puts most runway imagery to shame.
What the industry gets wrong about aspiration
The defence that fashion routinely offers is that it is selling youth itself, that aspirational imagery requires a young body because what the customer is purchasing, symbolically, is the vitality and possibility youth represents. This is an argument that made some limited sense in the mid-twentieth century, when fashion was genuinely aimed at a younger generation reacting against their parents. It makes almost no sense now.
The contemporary older woman did not miss the fashion revolution. She lived through it. She was there for the supermodel era, for the rise of designer culture, for the democratisation of luxury. She has been a fashion consumer, in many cases, for forty years. She is not aspirationally attached to youth as an abstract concept — she has her own aesthetic vocabulary, formed over decades, and it is often far more interesting than anything that emerges from a first collection.
She was there for the supermodel era, for the rise of designer culture, for the democratisation of luxury. She has her own aesthetic vocabulary, formed over decades.
The invisible hand, revisited
Miranda Priestly’s cerulean speech ends with a sting in its tail: the assistant realises, with dawning discomfort, that she is not as separate from the fashion machine as she believed. The choices were made for her, long before she reached the shop floor. That is the nature of influence. It works best when it is invisible.
The inverse is also true. When fashion decides not to represent a woman , when it quietly edits her out of the imagery, the campaigns, the editorial, that too is an invisible choice, felt but rarely named. The woman over fifty walks into a boutique and finds clothes that were not quite designed with her in mind, by a brand whose advertising suggests she is not quite the intended audience. The choice was made upstream. She just lives with the consequences.
The sequel arrives today at a moment when that invisibility is becoming harder to sustain. A generation of women who grew up with this film are now precisely the demographic that fashion continues to underserve. They are watching. They are spending. And they are increasingly inclined to spend with brands like Stoned & Waisted that have the intelligence and the commercial courage to actually look at them.
