When Dorrit Bøilerehauge was 60, an email from a modelling agency landed in her inbox – she was being scouted for a job. “I was flattered, but I was also hesitant,” she recalls. For decades she had worked in fashion communication and as an academic specialising in fashion at Aarhus university in Denmark. “When I was in the media, or asked about anything, it was never about me, it was about my analysis, my work. Could I combine being a model with being an expert?”
Her two daughters and colleagues persuaded her to give it a go. “I loved it from the very first,” she says. Bøilerehauge also danced until she was 57, so she was comfortable performing. “It’s a dialogue between the model and the photographer. I pay attention – what would they like from me? I try to fill their creative framework. It’s a very focused spot to be in, a dialogue in words but also in movement … And it gives me a lot of energy.”
Now Bøilerehauge, 63, divides her time between academic work, modelling – for H&M among others – and as an influencer on Instagram, where she works with brands including L’Oréal and tries to foster positive attitudes to ageing.
“As an age diversity advocate I get the opportunity to show that mature people can be cool,” she says. In Aarhus, where she lives, Copenhagen and Stockholm, Bøilerehauge is regularly stopped in the street by people who like her style – young people too. “They say, ‘Now I can look forward to getting older. I don’t have to fear it.’ That’s a huge encouragement to me.”
Bøilerehauge has always loved clothes and dressing up. She was born in Odense – “where Hans Christian Andersen lived” – and has vivid memories of her childhood outfits, including, appropriately, red shoes when she was three or four, and a red woollen dress with a white collar worn with a cat brooch. The tail swung, and she recalls “the feeling of making the tail move”.
Her parents had a furniture business, and Bøilerehauge was fascinated by her mother’s dresses: “She loved colours and had beautiful dresses, silk dresses with flowers. I loved to go to her wardrobe and try them on.” Her parents “always supported me in what I was doing, in trusting myself and venturing into new things”.
Bøilerehauge studied business communication at university, but before she decided how to make a living, she wanted “to go abroad. I just knew I had to get out there.”
She went to London, in the early 1980s – “a fantastic time to be there” – and later to Verona in Italy. After a decade in business, she studied for a PhD in fashion communication, and in her career has toggled between business and academia. She took a break from university life to head a Danish design organisation and to write a book on branding, before finally returning to academia in 2017.
Getting dressed, Bøilerehauge says, is itself an act of communication. “And expression. It’s not about being wealthy or luxurious. It’s about playing with whatever you have and giving it an expression to your own liking. It’s a form of creative play for me.”
Has she noticed a movement in fashion towards greater age diversity? “I think it is fair to say that fashion is, by tradition, a young business. It is changing. We do see more mature models now. But it’s not like there’s a forest of mature models. It’s not a revolution,” she says.
Bøilerehauge has mixed feelings when she is told she looks amazing for her age: “I don’t mind, because I know what the intention is. But it’s something we have to talk about. I feel flattered for a second, but then … Well, how do you think people of 63 look?”
It is as if “that’s the worst thing that could happen, right? Looking old. That’s our perception of beauty, and it’s something I would like to discuss. If we think beauty is young and a person cannot be old and beautiful, why is that?”
Bøilerehauge herself didn’t fear the ageing process. “I never had the time. It never came to my mind. Not for a minute. I always thought that grey hair looks fabulous. I have been looking forward to this colour,” she says, touching her undyed, pearlescent hair. “We should embrace age. The more people who do that, the better it gets.”
