Something is shifting in the cultural conversation around age. After decades of older people being sidelined in film, fashion and advertising, pop culture is starting to tell a different story. One that is sharper, more honest, and long overdue.
From a 92-year-old with 1.4 million Instagram followers to a retired spy running circles around everyone half her age to a beauty campaign that put grey-haired women front and centre and broke the internet.
To understand where later living design needs to go, it helps to look at where culture already is.
The Retirement Home That Solves Murders
Netflix’s The Thursday Murder Club stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie as a group of retirees who spend their time cracking cold cases at their retirement community. Sharp, funny and fully in command, they are about as far from the passive, background figures that older characters are so often shown as.
Author Richard Osman said he wanted his characters to have new adventures, find mischief, and understand that while there are fewer years left, you can still use all of them. That is a quietly radical idea. And one that resonates far beyond the screen.
Image credit: Giles Keyte for Netflix
Iconic, On Their Own Terms
The beauty industry is having its own reckoning. REFY sBeauty’s Iconic Never Gets Old campaign spotlit older women confidently doing their own makeup with no filters, no softening, no apology. The response was immediate. Thousands of comments, huge shares, and a conversation that ran well beyond the brand’s own audience.
What made it land was not the product. It was treating older women as the ones defining the standard, not chasing it.
Image credit: Refy
The Rise of the Grandfluencer
Beyond beauty and screen, something quieter has been unfolding on social media. The growing presence of older adults online has given rise to a new kind of creator: the grandfluencer. Joe Allington from Lichfield, known to millions across TikTok and Instagram as Grandad Joe, became an overnight sensation during lockdown when a video of him in an empty supermarket, asking people to look out for the vulnerable, gained 42 million views. He was 87. He has not stopped since.
Image credit: @grandadjoe1933
What This Means for Later Living
The people choosing later living today are the same people responding to these cultural moments. They watched The Thursday Murder Club and felt seen. They noticed the REFY campaign and shared it. They are not waiting to be told that age is something to celebrate. They already know.
And yet walk into many later living developments today and the design still tells the old story. Safe palettes. Inoffensive furniture. Art that no one would ever actually choose. Spaces that, however well-intentioned, quietly communicate that the person moving in has left their life behind.
The most successful later living spaces will be the ones that treat residents as the protagonists they are, not as people to be gently managed. Spaces with real character. Confident choices. A point of view. The kind of place that feels like it was designed for someone with a life to be lived.
That gap between how this generation sees themselves and how their environments reflect them back is where the real design opportunity lives.
We ask: does your space reflect the resident you are trying to attract, or a version of them you have quietly decided they have become?
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