Fashioning the sixties: fashion narratives of older women

The popular media suggest that we are witnessing a fashion for older women' and that the latest new faces to light up campaigns and covers' are retirees (The Guardian, 16 September 2012). Do fashion designers know this? On the one hand, Sir Christopher Frayling, former Rector of the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom, observes that we need a change in mind-set for the art school of the future since design students' attitudes to designing for older people is that it is really boring (Start the Week', BBC Radio 4, 19 November 2012). On the other hand, the sculptor Antony Gormley states that Art schools are the things that reinforce agency in the world'. This paper emerges out of an ongoing conversation between a group of women friends about how they feel about clothes and the fashion choices on offer to them. The women constitute a sub-group of women in their sixties who grew up in the 1960s, against a background of cultural revolution' in British fashion that emerged out of the art schools.