The Morning: Gray on the runway
The New York Times
Good morning. The situation in the Strait of Hormuz remains volatile. And the cease-fire in Lebanon appears to be holding. We have more news below. But first, our chief fashion critic explains a surprising trend she noticed on the runways of Paris.
Ageless beauty
I first started noticing the gray hair and laugh lines when I was sitting beside the Tom Ford catwalk in Paris last month, watching his collection parade by. You don’t normally see such signs of age at Fashion Week — or, to be honest, pretty much anywhere else these days, at least not when we are talking about women held up as avatars of beauty — so these models really stood out. And once I saw them there, I saw them everywhere: at Givenchy, Chanel, Bottega Veneta. They weren’t just the usual ex-supermodels, like Cindy Crawford, whose fame obviates their age. They were great-looking women who also didn’t look like they were trying to remain forever 25.
It was such a contrast to the heavily manufactured and airbrushed imagery that has become the norm in the celebritysphere that it started me wondering what exactly was going on — and whether this represented merely a momentary trend or a more meaningful shift. (You can read my full story here.) Today, I’m going to explain what I found. Representation matters“Age has become something brands seem genuinely proud to highlight,” Alexandra Van Houtte, the founder of the fashion search engine Tagwalk, told me after I got back and emailed her to check whether her data supported what I thought I had seen. That sent me down a rabbit hole on social media, and I realized that not just brands but also more and more women were signposting the … well, signs of their age: posting pictures of their makeup-less faces, not fuzzed out with filters but bared for all to see. Paulina Porizkova, one of the models who defined the 1980s and ’90s, is happily (and mercilessly) chronicling her own aging — and has amassed a giant following because of it. So are some former editors and actors. Modeling agencies have taken note and are actively scouting older models.
(Fun fact: The fashion industry does not call older models “older models”; it calls them “generational models.” Another fun, or maybe not so fun, fact: In the fashion world, “old” generally means anyone over 30 — though the models and women currently getting most of the attention are in their 50s and above.) Still, fashion has a mixed record when it comes to inclusivity, and while the industry seems to have finally, truly, embraced racial diversity when to comes to the runway and marketing, it has also almost fully abandoned recent efforts to engage with size diversity. Which way is the age case going to go? Fad or structural change?The more people I spoke with, whether fashion insiders or observers, the more multilayered the answer seemed. It is deeply intertwined with not just the obvious driver of economics (older people have the power of the bank account), but also politics, culture, gender expectations, and the way social media and A.I. are shaping our ideas of how we should look.
“There’s always two poles in any movement,” Joan Juliet Buck, the author of the Substack Every Day Until I Die and the former editor of French Vogue, told me. “There’s this pull toward being post-human, shinier, newer, cloned, etc., the sense that people have elevated the lacquered surface of the machine over the body.” And, she said, there’s a corresponding pull toward “I’m real.” Increasingly, a group of tastemakers are gravitating toward the real, in both the analog and digital worlds. That’s why the consensus among those I spoke with was that this shift is more significant, and perhaps more permanent, than the usual pendulum swing of age-is-in, age-is-out. This time, it might actually stick. Ask Vanessa: Each week, Vanessa answers a reader’s fashion-related question. You can see recent editions here, and submit your own question via email or X. (Questions are edited and condensed.)
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Representative Eric Swalwell resigned from Congress and dropped out of the California governor’s race after several women accused him of sexual assault. (He has denied the accusations.) What does his case tell us about Congress? That #MeToo is alive and well. It’s a good sign that most people believed the women and that Swalwell was held accountable, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks write for The Hill: “If you believe that #MeToo was a blip on the radar, a passing moment, we would submit that perhaps you are wrong. Perhaps the movement hasn’t gone away at all, but has instead quietly become the norm.” That our political culture still fails women. After the accusations emerged, many in politics said Swalwell’s conduct had been something of an open secret, writes Naomi Seligman for MS NOW: “What so many people knew did not keep Swalwell from climbing the party ranks. It did not deter his allies and donors from encouraging his run for California governor.”
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“Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke: Burke’s best-selling debut novel takes us behind the scenes at Yesteryear Ranch, home of a popular and polarizing Instagram account run by Natalie Heller Mills, a self-declared tradwife. Married to a politician’s son, creator of content about tending chickens, baking bread and raising screen-free children, Natalie is an advocate for dialing back advances for women. That is, until her carefully curated world begins to crumble. Suddenly, she wakes up in 1855, the very era she’s idealized — only to discover that it’s a lot colder and grimmer than she imagined. For more: Read our review of “Yesteryear,” and a profile of Burke, who spun TikTok popularity into a book deal.
This week’s subject for The Interview is the actress Charlize Theron. We spoke about her new movie, “Apex,” but also about her experiences growing up with violence both inside and outside her South African home. Your father was an alcoholic. As someone myself who has dealt with alcohol abuse in our family, it is an incredibly difficult thing, especially for a child. When did you realize that your own home life was different from your friends’? Pretty young, I would say. I have memories from when I was really young, seeing really drunk people, and it scared me. Like, people crawling on the floor drunk. But that became so consistent that it was every Friday, Saturday, maybe even every Wednesday. My dad had built this big bar inside the house. That wasn’t unusual. A lot of South Africans create a space in their house where they can drink. But it became where he lived. He was a full-blown functioning drunk, but he had moments where he would go missing, we wouldn’t know where he was, and he would usually return in a state that was pretty severe. It would get messy and loud, and my mom’s not a wallflower either. She wasn’t just sitting and taking it. She made it known that she wasn’t happy about his lifestyle. So it really caused a lot of verbal abuse. Personally, for me, the worst thing was they would ice each other. There would be a big fight, and then they wouldn’t talk for three weeks. I didn’t have siblings, and that house just went silent. Was he violent toward you? He was scary. He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw me against a wall, but he would do things like drive drunk. There was a lot of verbal abuse, a lot of threatening language that just became normal. When I was around 12 or 13, I remember my mom using the word “divorce” for the first time. We didn’t know people who were divorced. My parents weren’t religious, but it was culturally one of those things you didn’t do. They had been married for 25 years. So when she said, “I think the best thing for us is for me to separate from him,” it was scary because I didn’t know what that would look like. I was almost talking her back into staying, because the alternative felt so foreign to me. But I think she knew and she was trying to figure out ways to get me out of the house. She sent me to a boarding school specifically because she wanted me to get out of the house. She was very aware of what it was doing to me. It’s so strange — all the memories are there. And it’s not that I don’t try and think about it, but going in such a linear manner, it becomes almost more clear when you talk about it this way. Because people tend to just isolate it and want to talk about one thing. But it helps to explain that these things build, and they build, and it takes years for things to go as wrong as it did in my house. Read more of the interview here. Or watch a longer version on YouTube.
Build your lats with this gigantic pull-up bar. It’s a beast to store, but it’s the best of its kind. See who’s outside your door — even when you aren’t home — with these smart doorbell cameras. Flaunt your awesome, maybe-a-little-bit-performative vinyl records using these display techniques. (Grab a turntable, too, while you’re at it.)
Emily Weinstein, the editor in chief of New York Times Cooking, loves escovitch. It’s a Jamaican delicacy of pan-fried flaky white fish, seasoned with allspice and adorned with bell peppers, carrots, onions and Scotch bonnet chiles — all soaked in warm vinegar. This week, she’s making a version with snapper, along with Bò Lúc Lắc and three other great dishes.
Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was comeback. Can you put eight historical events — including the Treaty of Paris, the first chimpanzee in space and the writing of “The Hobbit” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz. And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Crossplay, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themo...@nytimes.com.
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