As a woman, you reach a certain age where you start to become invisible. It's an odd sensation, as if someone has thrown an invisibility cloak over you. It's a sort of inversion of the old joke of sticking a Post-it note with a daft message to your back, the joke now being that people on the street look straight through you.
It has little to do with aesthetics; it's more chemical than that. Women, more than men, occupy space in the world's consciousness in correlation with youth. But in the past year, a curious thing has happened. Older women have become increasingly visible in the arena in which, above all others, nubile youth has long trumped all else: fashion.
Of all the spheres of influence in which youth and beauty could be relied on to rule with an iron grip, fashion has long been the most ruthless. (Best ever fashion-world horror story - I'm assuming it's apocryphal - is about parties held by Rachel Zoe's mini-me starlets in Los Angeles at the height of the size-zero obsession, where the guest list consisted of a pair of weighing scales at the door, and no girls weighing more than 45kg were allowed in.)
Yet next season's Dolce & Gabbana advertising campaign, unveiled last week, stars Madonna, 51. Hot label of the moment Celine - the campaign every model must have wanted this season - has chosen a veteran face from the 1990s superwaif era, Emma Balfour, 40. Balenciaga stars Stella Tennant, 39; Louis Vuitton, whose new collection was dubbed "And God Created Woman" by designer Marc Jacobs, featured Elle Macpherson, 47, on the catwalk and stars Christy Turlington, 41, in its latest print campaign.
Glossy magazines at both ends of the style spectrum have chosen older models for their latest issues: Macpherson is on the cover of the new Tatler, while Dazed features Kristen McMenamy, 46, as the face of an issue dedicated to "iconic models" on sale now.
Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin are a Dutch photographic duo who have been working together for two decades. They recently shot a new campaign for Yves Saint Laurent starring 26-year-old Daria Werbowy. Until not long ago, 26 was very much past one's prime, as a model, but the duo recently told vogue.com that "models like Kate [Moss] and Daria are mature, they've grown up, they're women who have had a life and experience".
"For about five or six years now, we haven't shot anyone under 18 for that reason, but also for the fact that we feel the modelling business should not promote girls working under this age. They're not out of school - their bodies haven't developed yet and they don't have a sense of self. Sometimes they haven't had sex yet. It's hard to project all these things on someone who hasn't had that experience."
Such common sense is revolutionary. Until recently, few in the industry would acknowledge that there was something a bit shallow and moronic, and possibly even dubious, about taking a 16-year-old model with a head full of Justin Bieber daydreams and dressing her up as a sophisticated femme fatale, arranging her supine on an unmade bed while dripping with diamond bracelets and US$1,500 handbags, and wearing a bored-of-it-all expression. Extreme youth was part and parcel of the fantasy of fashion.
The new visibility of older models is part of a shift in fashion from fantasy to wearability. For the past 10 years, one adjective has reigned supreme above others in fashion. If it was good it was "fabulous". In the Oxford English Dictionary, fabulous has two meanings: extraordinary, and also "having no basis in reality; mythical". Our obsession with fabulousness was always very much about a yearning for the impossible, a boom-time obsession with pushing boundaries. The word now feels like a compliment from another era.
The age of austerity dawned early this year in the fashion world. In March, the Paris catwalks were full of grown-up clothes in sensible, wearable colours. Fashion had a new buzzword to replace fabulousness - "believability".
Francisco Costa, designer for Calvin Klein, cast Kristen McMenamy and Tennant for his most recent catwalk show in New York. "I wanted a cast that really represented a customer I design for, and that's not really a 16-year-old," he said after the show.
"The woman who puts my clothes on needs a certain level of sophistication. We wanted to acknowledge the women who have always worn our clothes: women who have their own identities, have full lives, have kids."
Next month, the all-important September issues of the glossy magazines appear. Rumour has it that the cover girls for the US giants run as follows: Julia Roberts for Elle, Halle Berry for Vogue, and Jennifer Aniston for Harper's Bazaar. If this is true, Aniston - at 41 - will be the youngest of the three. If older women can reappear in fashion, then anything is possible. There may even be hope in Hollywood.
