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Ageing in Style

DW staff (jp)November 16, 2006

Hear the words pin-up and calendar and most people will probably think of expensive shoots featuring Cindy Crawford and Heidi Klum. But one calendar printed in Berlin prefers girls who've lived a little.

https://p.dw.com/p/9Ori
Senior citizens show how it's doneImage: picture-alliance/dpa

German photographer Esther Haase isn't interested in flawless fashion. Forget Kate, Giselle, Claudia and Christy. Haase's models are called Lilo, Traute, Hanna and Gertrud, and they're 79, 86, 88 and 91. They don't starve themselves, they don't work out and they don't do botox -- and they're still the stars of a fashion shoot called "Rare Moments of Authenticity."

Growing old gracefully

For the last decade, Haase has been teaming up once a year with the Berlin Nursing Services to publish a calendar that stars elderly patients in outrageous costumes -- designed this year by the grande dame of punk, Vivienne Westwood, who, fittingly enough, is also a lady of a certain age who doesn't do dowdy.

Posing gamely for the camera, the geriatric models wouldn't be caught dead in a beige cardigan or tartan slippers, but nor would they dream of airbrushing away their wrinkles.

Esther Haase fotografiert ältere Menschen in haute couture
Lovely and oldImage: picture-alliance/dpa

"I want to show how much beauty is wasted when we banish the elderly to the margins of society," said Werner Jahnke from the Nursing Services.


"Beauty isn't just the preserve of the thin and the young," the photographer told The Guardian. "I see my works as an homage to age."

Esther Haase fotografiert Ältere in haute couture
Posing just like her younger colleaguesImage: picture-alliance/dpa

The calendar and the accompanying exhibition provide an inspiring contrast to the aesthetics of the fashion world. If some of the models look a little skinny, it's almost certainly not because they're not eating carbs -- and most of them are in fact more on the heavy side.

Not that it bothers the models. They know what their priorities are.

"I may lay my false teeth on my bedside table at night, but I don't want to give up my style," one of the ladies is quoted next to her picture.