The leading models in top ad campaigns for the past few seasons have shared an unusually attainable beauty ideal: age. Céline made quite a stir by casting Joan Didion in its spring campaign; she’s joined in the recent 60-plus modeling set by Joni Mitchell for Saint Laurent, Charlotte Rampling for Nars and Jessica Lange for Marc Jacobs Beauty. At age 93, Iris Apfel upstages her 22-year-old co-star, Karlie Kloss, in Kate Spade’s spring ads. Yet as Benjamin Moser of Zurich’s Senior Design Factory explains, he and his partner Debora Biffi were impelled to create their concept store, design studio and series of workshop projects because they saw a dearth of products specifically crafted for older people’s physical needs that also gave them “the confidence to not feel like they need to hide because they are old.”
Moser and Biffi met in 2008 as students at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, where they collaborated on a senior thesis project that responded to news reports announcing that a third of the Swiss population would soon be over 50. Despite these demographics, Moser felt that aging signified sickness and limitation in Switzerland’s youth-driven culture; chic, energetic and empathetic interior and product design addressing older people’s concerns was missing in the market. So was an intergenerational bridge, which the team started building in 2011 through workshops — initiated in an atelier in the Zurich train station — where older and young people cooked meals and created projects in collaboration. Eventually, Moser and Biffi expanded these workshops, which Moser describes as “spaces where old and young people can get together without mistrust of each other,” to Tokyo, Berlin, Seoul and New York. And back in Zurich, Moser and Biffi launched their Senior Design Factory concept store and studio in the Viaduktstrasse — a strip of modish Swiss, German and Scandinavian shops inside the arches of the old “Wipkinger” train viaduct. Many of the twenty- and thirtysomething shoppers attracted by the Viaduktstrasse’s denim stores and design showrooms visit the Senior Design Factory to buy their grandparents and mentors what Moser describes as “exciting-looking products that do not remind people of a hospital or retirement home.”
These items include an electric-blue wood cane, a walker with a seat made from high-end, automobile-interior-quality leather, physical therapy aids, Danish homeware in chipper colors and durable materials and a hearty selection of organic dietary supplements and kitchen products. Regular customers to the shop and clients of the pair’s interior-design business explain their physical limitations to Moser, and he focuses on finding furniture and items that accommodate older people’s lessened mobility and sight while appealing to a more youthful aesthetic. It’s an objective with long-running potential, since, as he predicts, “When baby boomers are 80, they will appreciate trendier and more exciting design.” He hopes his customers will be “open for the future” — whether that means modeling for high-end brands or just feeling more stylish and comfortable at home.
Viaduktstrasse 31, CH-8005 Zurich, senior-design.ch.
