There were many head-turning moments at the Balmain show at Paris Fashion Week, which was a love letter by the creative director Olivier Rousteing to his childhood home of Bordeaux. There were twisted gold snail shells hanging from ears and as belt buckles; there were metal handbags cast into clusters of grapes, which were later served up on rhinestone-encrusted minidresses and strapless peplum bustiers.
But the most striking aspect of the show was not the clothes on the runway but the age of many of the models wearing them. It was impossible to ignore that scores of them were … well, older, and not just in terms of conventional fashion parlance (which historically would mean 25).
“I feel like we often celebrate one kind of beauty in fashion, which is youthful, and I’m worried about that approach,” Mr. Rousteing said after his show, which included Axelle Doué, 70; Kristina de Coninck, 63; Estelle Levy, 51; and Marie Seguy, 47. In total, 20 out of 57 models were older than 35.
“We tend to forget that the future is also held within women that have had a life,” he said. “For me, that’s what I wanted to show: women that have lived and continue to live their lives, instead of just young girls that have their whole lives in front of them.”
Mr. Rousteing was not the only designer to feel that way. Thanks to growing pressure on the industry to improve representation, women of and above middle age have become a more commonplace sight on the runway. This season, however, it was impossible to ignore their growing numbers. According to the fashion search engine Tagwalk, roughly three-quarters of the top 20 runway shows in both Paris and Milan featured at least one older model. At Vetements and Schiaparelli, the figure was closer to a fifth of all models cast. In New York last month, Batsheva cast only models over the age of 40.
Some of the older women on the runways were model legends, many of whom are now regular runway returnees. At Vetements, the actress Marcia Cross, 61, best known as Bree Van de Kamp in the Noughties television series “Desperate Housewives,” closed the show before taking a bow with the supermodels Natalia Vodianova and Carmen Kass.
At Balmain, though, Mr. Rousteing said that given the ages of many of his clients, he wanted to recognize those who actually buy his clothes. Calvin Wilson, the casting director of Establishment Casting, which cast the show, said that their intent had been to include lesser known faces, many of them models who were also working in jobs outside the modeling industry.
“We created something more emotional by using more anonymous faces,” Mr. Wilson said. “They offered blank spaces for the audience to ask questions about who these women were and how we see ourselves in them.”
At Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada cast the actresses Kristin Scott Thomas, 63, and Ángela Molina, 68, but also Qin Huilan, 70, a Chinese doctor turned social media influencer from Shanghai. In her show notes, Mrs. Prada said that her collection was an exploration of clothes from children to adulthood and, in particular, notions of girlishness.
“It is a word that we can revalue, from a pejorative gendered noun, anchored to age, to a universal idiom expressive of a spirit of freedom and individuality and one attribute of a richer whole,” she wrote.
It was a sentiment espoused by Ms. Huilan, a longtime Prada and Miu Miu client, who posted on Instagram about being approached by Miu Miu about modeling in the show through her direct messages. (They used Google Translate to overcome the language barrier.)
“I took action to prove that age is not a problem!” Ms. Huilan wrote.
“Who would have thought that at the age of 70, I would be standing here on the runway today? Come on! Look! This is Paris! Look! This is Miu Miu’s runway!”
