Age is no barrier to wanting to look good: women on body image, age and advertising

Most fashion advertising in the UK uses and targets young, slim women (and/or men). The purpose of this paper research is to ask whether this approach is relevant and appropriate to older women, who make up a large and growing segment of the market, and who generally have more disposable income to spend on clothes.

Adapted qualitative techniques were used to examine two groups of women, one younger and one older. The Contour Drawing Rating Scale was used to examine the women's self‐image and the ideal size they perceived models should be. Triadic Sorting with laddering interviews revealed how the women perceived some recent adverts.

Although the older women, on the whole, were larger than the younger women, they displayed a greater level of satisfaction and contentment with their body's size and appearance. Both groups felt that fashion models should be larger than they are currently and the older women, in particular, felt that the advert using “normal‐sized” women was the most effective in selling product.

Directed towards the creators of fashion advertising and fashion retailers, this research was one of the first attempts to uncover how older women view fashion advertising. It reveals that while older women do not necessarily expect to see women of their own age in adverts they do require that the models are more reflective of “normal‐sized” women going about “normal” activities. In short, to interest them in the products being sold, they need advertising to be relevant to their everyday lives, without being condescending or resorting to escapism.

This paper represents one of the first research studies in the UK to explore older “normal” women and their perceptions of body‐image related to fashion advertising. It also uses specifically adapted qualitative methods to achieve its purpose.