Maggie Smith’s Face Has Something To Teach Us About Ageing

Almost a year before her death in September, Dame Maggie Smith starred in a campaign for Loewe. Rhonda Garelick revisits the glamour shots and explores what they mean for our understanding of ageing.

We see so few truly old faces in the media, especially old women’s faces.

But occasionally, they are celebrated. In October 2023, at the age of 88, Dame Maggie Smith – who died on September 27 – starred in an arresting ad campaign for luxury brand Loewe, photographed by Juergen Teller. The images they made together are some of the last glimpses we’ll ever have of Smith.

The power of these photos derives partly from their now elegiac quality. But greater power lies in what the photos have to say about life and death, fashion and time, even the planet.

There’s been a slight uptick of older women appearing in fashion shoots lately. Isabelle Huppert, 70, sometimes represents Balenciaga; Ali MacGraw modelled Chanel watches at 80; Maye Musk (mother of Elon) covered Sports Illustrated’s 2022 swimsuit issue at 74; and Martha Stewart did likewise last year, at 81.

Those photos were “glamour shots.” The women – known at least in part for their beauty – appeared with hair and makeup done, lit in soft focus, angling their bodies artfully, pouting, flirting or doing that slightly angry “model stare”. The pictures invite us to marvel at how youthful the women “still look”.

In this way, the images suggest that advanced age is to be celebrated only when overcome, subdued or somehow reversed, shoehorned into conventions created for the very young.

The Loewe photos of Maggie Smith are different.

While lovely all her life, Smith was never a “professional beauty”. Her physical appearance was not her calling card. Instead, as is the case for most of the best actors, her face was a vehicle for thought or emotion, inviting viewers to look through, rather than merely at it.

Not that one could ignore Smith’s distinctive features: her huge, heavy-lidded blue eyes, sculptural jaw and high forehead were instantly recognisable and remained sharp and distinctive until the very end of her life.

But it was the eloquence, not the aesthetics, of her face that drew us in. Her features so easily and clearly conveyed wit, intelligence and self-possession. In her many roles, from Miss Jean Brodie to the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey, Smith barely needed to raise an eyebrow to telegraph concern, withering disdain or twinkling humour. Her face had a balletic mobility that only increased as she aged, apparently untrammelled by surgery or cosmetic intervention.

Smith displays some of that facial repertoire in the Loewe photos, where she looks by turns knowing, slightly sardonic or confrontational, and bemused. In each of the three photos, she clutches a different Loewe handbag. These are luxury items, each costing somewhere between about US$2000 and $4000 (NZ$3285-$6565).

Loewe is an old European brand, a “heritage house”, as they’re called. Its website boasts of its long history: “Founded in Spain in 1846, we’re approaching 178 years as one of the world’s major luxury houses.” Like many such fashion brands, Loewe highlights its age to convey quality, tradition, expertise, value.

But paradoxically, while fashion companies like Loewe showcase their advanced years as worthy attributes, fashion in general is an extravaganza of youth and newness. It is mainly displayed on the exceedingly young bodies of models. And the objects displayed – the garments and accessories – arrive in unstoppable, constantly renewed waves.

Fashion is an endless stream of ever-changing, ever more frequent collections with which legions of fashion writers, buyers and influencers must all “keep up”, some literally circling the globe to keep pace.

To be fashionable is to live in a perpetual “now”, suspended outside of time’s natural progression. This mad cycle has, of course, a financial component, stimulating consumer desire and keeping the industry afloat. But the cost for this is high and the damage serious.

In this way, it contributes to ageism. And because of its overproduction, fashion (despite some valiant attempts at sustainability) is one of the world’s most polluting industries, creating vast amounts of landfill (yesterday’s discarded clothes) and greenhouse gases that are destroying the Earth.

This is a kind of macro-level ageism, a refusal to consider that our planet has a life span, too; that it doesn’t exist in an eternal, invincible youth; and that we are actually accelerating its demise.

Smith’s beautiful aged face invites us to break free of these limitations, to contemplate and appreciate the full arc of a lifetime, in all its stages, without fear and without yearning to turn back the clock. Looking again at her face in the Loewe images in these days after her death is like pulling aside a curtain we normally keep drawn. Maggie Smith reminds us that age itself may be the ultimate luxury.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Rhonda Garelick

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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