Grey Foxes: Ageing Men in British Heritage Menswear Branded Content

This paper presents initial findings from an investigation into British heritage menswear branded content. Employing visual analysis, it focuses on the representation of ageing (mid-to-late life) men in imagery produced for Instagram. While the brand Instagram accounts employ images of young models, they also present images of ageing men wearing the brands’ garments and shoes. Building on the author’s previous research into how older men perceive representation of men in fashion imagery, the paper highlights how this branded content expands the range of age representation in menswear, an area of fashion that, like womenswear, typically presents a youthful ideal. The paper then goes on to interrogate how these men are styled and photographed to communicate brand meanings of ‘Britishness’ and ‘heritage’ that are homologous with the types of men depicted in the images. It argues that heritage brands use ageing men to present an image of timelessness and an unbroken connection to Britain’s ‘national past’ (Wright, 1995) distinct from the cutting-edge youthful nowness of contemporary fashion. The brands in question are polysemic (Hall, 1980) in their overlapping and sometimes contradictory class meanings; they mobilise both their original aristocratic meanings as brands selling business and leisure clothes to gentlemen, and the ‘subcultural capital’ (Thornton, 1996) derived from the brands’ mid-late 20th century ‘expropriation’ (Fiske, 1989) by working-class subcultures. The ageing men in the images represent both of these masculine archetypes, but whereas the gentleman is already coded as a man in his mid-to-late life, the subculturalist remain associated with youth despite style canonical subcultures’ ageing membership (Hodkindson & Bennett, 2012). The paper concludes that while heritage menswear branded content widens the representation of men in this subsection of fashion’s visual culture, it also reflects nostalgia for older forms of Britishness and the incorporation of historicised youth subcultures into Britain's national past.