Salma Hayek: older, wiser — more affluent

One of the hottest trends this season has come not from the catwalk but the advertising pages of the fashion magazines. It is the emergence of women with established careers, hewn often outside the world of fashion, as “spokesmodels” for
luxury brands.

The line-up, which has sent social media into a frenzy, includes Iris Apfel, 93, for Kate Spade; Joan Didion, 80, for Céline; Joni Mitchell, 71, for Saint Laurent; and Julia Roberts, 47, for Givenchy.

At Milan Fashion Week, Salma Hayek the Oscar-nominated Mexican-American actress and producer joined the group of stylish — older — outsiders fronting campaigns. At 48, Hayek is not someone who would traditionally have featured in fashion advertising. She is fronting the campaign for Pomellato, the Milanese jeweller acquired in 2013 by Kering, the luxury group run by her husband, François-Henri Pinault. With the ambition to offer jewellery that women would buy for themselves, Pomellato was created by an Italian entrepreneur in the 1960s to tap into the effect that emerging feminism was having on consumer habits. With that mind, the choice of Hayek makes perfect sense.

“Women working and being independent are now a financial force and this has given us a voice,” says Hayek at the launch of the campaign in Milan. “The fact is that now we are earning a place in society where we are not only decoration.”

Older women with substantial spending power are growth areas for luxury and consumer goods. The so-called silver consumer is particularly alluring in the US and western Europe, where people in their fifties and sixties hold most of the wealth.

At the opening dinner at 10 Corso Como, Pomellato’s chief executive Andrea Morante was keen to point out that he had struck a deal with Hayek the actress, not the wife of Pinault, and her (undisclosed) contract had been agreed through her agents in Los Angeles.

“I could have stopped working when I got married but I like to keep my independence, and I think my husband loves it,” Hayek, who has a young daughter with Pinault, adds with a burst of laughter.

Of the campaign images, which were shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott and show Hayek in a swimming pool in Los Angeles clad in tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels, Hayek says she had “so much fun”.

The actress-turned-model who earned Oscar, Golden Globe and Bafta nominations for her portrayal of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo in the 2002 film Frida, thinks the film industry is lagging behind fashion in appealing to older women.

The problem with the movies, she says, is who pays: “At the moment it is the man who mostly decides what film is going to be seen and the movies that make the most money are the man-driven movies.”

By contrast, mature women as a financial force are changing the face of the fashion industry. The trend inevitably mirrors the rise of female executives, such as Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who has urged women to “lean in” to further their careers, and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

And it’s not just gender rules that are changing, but attitudes to race, too. Hayek, among whose movies coming out this year will be the animated film Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which she produced and performed the voice work for, has been witness to some of these changes since her breakout role in a Mexican soap opera in the 1980s.

“When I started, there were magazines that refused to put a Mexican on the cover or someone brown,” she says. “Now look at us — we are not doing
too bad.”