All Cats Are Grey

'I don't want models anymore, rather people that you can see already have a life behind them', says Calvin Klein. Female post-Punk veterans Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Shirley Manson (Garbage) and Melissa auf der Maur (Hole, Smashing Pumpkins) have all been photographed for his label, while his ideal male figure seems to be The Fall's Mark E. Smith. Last Autumn in Germany, one after another, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, wheelchair-bound Conservative leader Wolfgang Schäuble, and the Minister for the Environment, Jürgen Trittin, all posed for fashion spreads in the big illustrated magazines. In the USA, around the same time, Brett Easton Ellis published Glamorama, his gory take on the celebrity fashion scene.

Battles of long-term consequence over cultural and economic hegemony are being fought on the fields of fashion, as they once were in Pop. But while Pop exploded when it embraced the young and dissatisfied, the formerly youth-obsessed fashion industry seems to gain ground as it turns toward the elderly. Older fashion designers are wrestling with not-so-young celebrities and politicians over who will define the body in the age of digital capitalism. It's about the traps of ageism after 50 years of popular culture, about the ambivalent glamour of the colour grey, and about the renewed health of long-term junkies like Keith Richards. If, after 50 years of pop culture, people now in their 50s are not losing - unlike their waistlines, hair and teeth - their record collections and the sex-and-drug experiences they associate with them, then there will be definite consequences. One of them is the creation of new markets.

'In his last show, Gaultier paraded a greying bridal pair, and the fashion designer Margiela uses laughter lines as accessories to emphasise the rich simplicity of his designs', German fashion designer Wolfgang Joop noted enthusiastically in his manifesto for a self-confident elite - 'Wrinkles as Jewels' - published in Germany's biggest news magazine, Der Spiegel. 1 In the chart of global fashion players, Joop - a child of a petit bourgeois Germany - is middle-rank. To make up for this, he has become a self-promotion virtuoso, assuming authority on just about every question in the universe. While this multi-faceted entrepreneur (e-commerce, a cookbook, fashion, literature) is mocked by the high-brow regulators of traditional discourse, he continues to hold forth on subjects that were previously reserved for the likes of Jürgen Habermas and Hans Magnus Enzensberger: the liberal-left protagonists of the post-68 intelligentsia. The gradual silencing (or switching of sides from left to right) of this ageing brotherhood corresponds with far-reaching turmoil in many aspects of life.

In the important fields of fashion, lifestyle, sexuality and body politics, lack of discourse has allowed a media figure like Joop to enter the vacuum and become the self-appointed spokesman for a new, mobile upper-class that is enlightened with regard to Pop culture, has a high disposable income and is style-conscious: today, tomorrow and, if all goes well, forever. 'The attractiveness of ageing models, pop-stars and artists that advertise for large companies, lasts for eternity: Lauren Hutton, Carmen dell'Orefice, Lena Horne, Jan de Koning. Today women over 35 appear more mature, but also richer and more beautiful than ever before. In the future women will be most attractive at 36 - thanks to gene-therapy, plastic surgery, fitness and health food. [...] That's why Madonna, as a young mother of 40, does Yoga to relax her spirit.' 2 Joop's detail-obsessed fashion-Utopia happily acknowledges these social developments as the fruit of a post-Fordian society. He translates the dandy generality of Tom Wolfe, and the accompanying sub-cultural capital of a gay lifestyle, into a talkshow format - Camp for the masses. His position as default spokesman also provides a licence for political activity. Last Autumn, the neo-liberal Joop offered his help to the chronically unstable FDP - the German Liberals. The party was delighted. At least the under 70s were; they understood that the fashion ignorance of politicians, and of men in important positions in general, is a grave disadvantage. No Winston Churchill, no Helmut Kohl, no fat men in sack-like clothes anymore.

It took the fashion industry an astonishingly long time to understand that, in the long term, money is mostly in the hands of the older generation. Symbolic figures like Madonna and Cher, and also Joschka Fischer and Tony Blair, have helped hasten this realisation. The upbeat narrative to animate this shift is being delivered by aspiring Renaissance Men like Joop. The Modern lifestyle designer nimbly switches between different roles: the protagonist of tamed dissipation; the sales manager of modern growth industries like fitness and health; the ideological avant-garde of old and new techniques of body design (plastic surgery, gene technology); the friendly spiritual advisor (Yoga, the desire for self-control); and a free-thinker on colour theory. 'Grey is the neutralising colour of late Modernity. A camouflage colour, that covers up opinion, status and even party membership. Politicians don't display bright optimism. [...] The colour grey goes best with laptops, silver Nokia mobile telephones and the polished stainless steel doors of airport toilets and Gaggenau refrigerators. The Home collections from Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein vary between the colour ranges of concrete, stone and chrome', writes Joop. 3 Like a social engineer, the designer formulates a normative model in which grey is cool. It sounds nice and anti-ageist, provided you don't consider those wrinkly, grey-haired bodies that can't afford, or simply don't want, accessories and beauty farms, fitness and health updates, gene technology and surgical remixes.

These narratives not only function as self-assurance mechanisms for a new elite, but also as a catalyst for very real developments. An example: at www.ronsangels.com, US photographer Ron Harris attempted to auction eggs from photographic models in order to give well-off couples the opportunity to 'improve their genetic descendants'. Harris advertised with the slogan: 'Natural selection seeks genes that are healthy and beautiful'. Bids started at around $30,000. In New York City, 'the beauty in White' - 52-year old photographer Sigrid Rothe - is now posing in front of the camera. A representative of the new target group of 'Best Agers' over 50, her popular appearance for Banana Republic was the first step in a late career as a model.

So, if you have a problem with greying, and were disappointed that Philadelphia biologist Kyong-Eun Yoon's discovery of a gene that works against hair colour loss turned out to lose its effect after three months, then that's not so bad: grey is beautiful. The greying George Clooney (39) has had sex with 1000 women! The ice-grey Harrison Ford (57) stands in front of a silver-grey Lancia Lybra next to the slogan: 'It's not how long you go, but how you arrive'. In the same issue of GQ, next to the mental health advice that 'stress is good', is a photo-story about Keith Richards. 4 The Stones' guitarist muses upon his junkie years and is photographed by Peter Lindbergh as a tough-as-nails survivor in black and grey. 'I've never been ill in my life', he told Men's Fitness earlier - if you can afford first-class heroin and regular blood-cleansing you can obviously reap late rewards as a health guru. 5

Excess, runs the subtext of the older man's fashion narrative, is okay as long as you have it under control when you have to be in control. It's certainly a subtext that quite a few salt-and-pepper big businessmen can enthusiastically attest to; they know all about control and excess in powder land - a powder that's a lighter shade than grey.