Is the nature of later life and our cultural understanding of it changing? Do fashion and dress play a role in this? Does the fashion industry reflect and shape contemporary ideas of ‘moving younger’ at older age? How do older people experience their age in relation to dress? Exploring questions about the ways in which fashion and age can and do intersect, Julia Twigg brings concerns about age, where youth usually reigns. While fashion studies, by focusing on the youthful and transgressive, have traditionally reproduced the norms of the fashion system, there is a lot to be learned from bringing age into the focus of this field. Fashion and Age shows how the investigation of clothing and age enhances our understanding of age as a ‘master identity’ that constitutes social difference. Twigg challenges common assumptions about both new possibilities for ageing and dressing ‘successfully’ – which often means nothing more than youthfully – as well as about older consumers as ‘frustrated shoppers’. Her analysis is sensitive to both, how cultural ideas and conventions regarding fashion and dress configure women's embodied identity, as well as to how such ideas and conventions are negotiated and resisted. This balanced account contributes to debates about gender and age, identity and the body, consumerist lifestyle, the reconstitution of ageing, and the politics of ageing.

Fashion magazines have, as Twigg observes, a hard time catering to older readers, while keeping up their positive image, which is inextricably linked to the ideals of beauty and youth. Drawing from interviews with fashion editors and journalists, Twigg shows how their strategies to negotiate these contradictory demands primarily rest on concepts like ‘ageless style’ and ‘anti-ageing’. Fashion magazines represent and shape a positive cultural image of later life by offering their readers imaginative spaces to escape the lived reality of older age, and by providing advice about how older women can age youthfully. However, precisely by doing so, they also limit the possibility of growing older successfully quite literally to editing out the signs of age. An equally contradictory dynamic can be observed in how the fashion industry addresses older consumers. As for fashion editors, a central challenge for the fashion industry is to reconcile negative images of later life with the inherently youthful image of fashion. To meet the demands of older consumers, it needs to cater to their wish for attractive, successful and fashionable – that is youthful – styles. However, these styles do also have to be fit to the customer's older bodies, and to cultural assumptions about how they have to be dressed in appropriate ways. Fashion designers adjust cut and colours to do justice to bodily and cultural change. They have to balance the ideal of youthful styles with the physical reality of bodily ageing. While design directors assess the general trend of ‘moving younger’ in positive and celebratory terms, Twigg points us to the fact that the availability of youthful styles does not merely free older women from negative cultural conventions about age-appropriate looks, it also imposes new limitations.

Julia Twigg's account of the fashion system shows just how pervasive cultural norms about the age-appropriateness of dress are. This becomes especially clear where older women have thoroughly internalised such norms. Drawing on in-depth interviews with older women, Twigg finds that respondents often find it difficult to strike the balance between neither dressing ‘too old’ nor ‘too young’. Yet, they do not explicitly challenge the limiting ageist assumptions about how their older bodies can (not) legitimately be displayed in certain styles, they seem to take them for granted. This is not to say, however, that there is no room for resistance. Twigg illustrates how such resistance, given the often contradictory demands posed by consumerist culture, is necessarily ambiguous. Older women's choice to opt out from the world of fashion can be interpreted as retreat, as much as it can be read as resistance to the imperative to adopt youthful looks and lifestyles. In contrast, older women's choice to adopt youthful and sexy looks can be interpreted as confirmation to dominant norms about femininity, as much as it can be read as resistance against ageist ideas about the asexuality of older women's bodies. Twigg's assessment of women's biographical narratives about their ways to dress across the lifespan shows how there is as much continuity of style as there is change.

Twigg's work is positioned at the crossroads of cultural gerontology and fashion studies. Readers affiliated with each of these fields will find themselves drawn into her stunning argument about how fashion and age do indeed intersect. Her detailed account of the ways in which the design of clothes is age-coded makes it directly relevant to fashion designers. Women of any age, to whom fashion is dear, will find this book to be an exciting and illuminating read.