The Generation Fashion Forgot

Fashion has long been obsessed with youth, treating young shoppers as both trendsetters and the engine of growth. Yet brands including Evereve, Ulla Johnson, Frances Valentine and Poppy & Peonies are finding opportunities in catering to women in their 40s, 50s and beyond, a demographic with significant spending power and brand loyalty that rarely features prominently in fashion campaigns.

On this week's episode of The Debrief, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young and US editor Diana Pearl examine why brands are still afraid to make the older shopper the face of a campaign, what “multi-generational selling” actually requires, and how founders, sales associates and even a customer’s own social circle can become a brand’s most powerful marketing tool.

Key Insights:

• Young consumers may drive fashion’s cultural conversation, but older shoppers wield significant purchasing power. As Pearl puts it: “What [youth] don’t often have is the spending power... there’s so much discussion about how boomers are the wealthiest generation.”

• Brands will chase an older customer’s wallet but hesitate to put her face on a billboard. Pearl traces this to “a lot of ingrained misogyny in not just fashion, but in our society,” where women over 40 are seen as less interesting to market to — even though, she argues, “when [we] see older women who are chic, who are beautiful, stylish, who are successful, there’s an aspirational element to that.”

• The brands succeeding aren’t just targeting a specific age cohort— they’re building for mothers, daughters and grandmothers at once. “If you can sell to the mother, the daughter, the grandmother... that just gives you access to such a wide swath of consumers,” Pearl says, dubbing it a brand’s “superpower” because it builds “long-term loyalty and deep connection with the brand.”

• Long before the creator economy, community tastemakers shaped what women bought — they just weren’t on Instagram. “There’s always been that girl... who always had the best product recommendations, always knew of the hot new cool brands,” says Pearl. Those women, she says, were the nano-influencers of their time — holding “an immense amount of sway over their friends and their communities.”

• Many of the brands successfully courting older shoppers are founder-led, with personal connections playing a central role in building customer loyalty. For brands looking to replicate those relationships at scale, store associates can play a critical role. Pearl’s advice: “really educating... store teams, particularly store managers, and empowering them to empower their associates, to build those relationships.”

Additional Resources:

• Fashion’s Next Growth Opportunity Isn’t Gen Z | BoF
• Fashion Wakes Up to the ‘Silver Generation’ Opportunity | BoF
• Why Brands Cast Older Celebrities to Court Younger Consumers | BoF

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