The Crone is Couture
Myth and the marketplace of wisdom: how the archetype of the wise woman became a luxury brand.
In the archives of myth, every era rewrites its gods to match its lighting.
This week marks the beginning of New Lore Order, and a meditation on one of culture’s subtlest revolutions: how the archetype once known as the witch, widow, or elder has become the new face of intellect, and authority.
The Crone then, is not just a demographic bound by age, but a decision. Sometimes seventy. Sometimes thirty-seven and done apologising.
The Return of the Elder
Before she was a meme or a moodboard, the Crone, modern culture was a cautionary tale. She lived at the edge of the forest and the story, barefoot, unbranded, inconvenient to anyone with a plot to protect. Now she has a skincare line and a gallery residency. What we’re seeing isn’t simply the celebration of age, but the re-emergence of an archetype, it is the woman who has seen everything and is finally too tired to pretend otherwise. Her image made the journey from exile to export in record time , and her wisdom arrived pre-edited for clarity. Whether anything else survived the shipping is another question worth asking, which I will get back to at some point.
Every culture built a version of her. Baba Yaga stirring the cauldron of consequence. Hecate at the crossroads, triple-formed, torches in hand. Phra Mae Thorani wrung water from her hair to drown illusion. Leonora Carrington understood the type decades before the algorithm did. She wrote The Hearing Trumpet in the 1950s; the world got around to publishing it in 1974, which feels right for a novel about a woman nobody listens to until it’s too late. Marian Leatherby, the 92-year-old protagonist in The Hearing Trumpet (1974) is a portal, and far from tragic. She is almost deaf, fond of her two remaining teeth, and deposited by her family in an institution that turns out to be the hinge of the apocalypse. While civilisation folds outside the gates, Marian and her fellow inmates mind the Holy Grail and inherit the earth, which actually feels inevitable by the time you reach the half way mark of the nook to be honest. She is very funny, completely unbothered, running a world everyone else pretends doesn’t exist and having the time of her life. In Jungian shorthand she is the psychic editor, the one who integrates knowledge after the storm. In Thai cosmology she’s the earth remembering its own patience. And in this age of synthetic abundance, where everything can be copied and almost nothing is kept, she has one job. she tends the archive of what actually happened.
To understand why she’s trending again, look not at mysticism but read the actual design brief. In a market choking on novelty, the Crone offers what we secretly crave, and is completion. Where youth sells potential, she sells precision, and precision is the one thing that cannot be rushed to market.
Wisdom as Aesthetic System
Fashion, once allergic to age, now performs reverence. Walk into any concept store in London, Seoul, or Bangkok and you’ll find her, silver hair, linen, chrome jewellery, and a face that knows something. She’s not shopping. She’s being studied, replicated, and adopted as a personal curriculum. Somewhere between the incense and the architecture books, the essence of the Crone became a brand position. The runways followed, whispers instead of shouts. Black, bone white, and grey replace palettes of ambition.
Example A: The Row’s RTW collections. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen built The Row as the opposite of their childhood fame. No faces, no press, no explanation and the assumption that if you know, you know. Models moved like they’d already arrived, wearing sleeves in cream linen cut to fall from the shoulder with the weight of good fabric. Less has always been more when it comes to announcing you have arrived, but here it’s demonstrated as fact rather than aspiration. Each piece requires the body inside it to have lived long enough to trust silence, to make quiet decisions and stand by them. I am not talking about minimalism as we know it in the quiet luxury, pop culture sense, but the deeper layer of curation as devotional practice. Which is to say, the woman wearing it has nothing left to prove.
Opposite aesthetic, but the same energy. Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons understood this from a different angle. Her Spring/Summer 1997 collection, known as Lumps and Bumps, was armour built from fragility. Padded bulges and asymmetric volumes that refused conventional beauty standards while demanding respect. She did not design clothes for women to disappear into. These were material architectures for women who’d survived trying to fit in and decided to redesign the room instead.
The modern Crone has stepped off the tarot card and into the atelier, her cauldron traded for a garment bag, her prophecy for pattern-making. The archetype has migrated from myth into material practice, and the message is clear. Enlightenment now comes with immaculate lighting.
Look long enough and her influence appears everywhere: podcasts on slow living, essays about timelessness, fashion lines named after silence itself. The Crone has infected the algorithm, ironically, by refusing it. She is the ghost in the machine who takes her time replying to emails.
To move slowly is to be radical. And so the Crone becomes a symbol of refusal, an anti-influencer who would rather read a book.
But aesthetic refusal is one thing. Sacred integration is another.
Thailand has shown me that holiness hides in plain sight. Our spirit houses sit outside luxury shopping malls. Our monks carry smartphones wrapped in saffron whilst giving you blessings. The sacred is not opposed to the modern; it simply changes material. So it makes sense that the Crone, once a forest figure, now appears in design studios. Her altar is now a drafting table, lit by a monitor glow, and the mantra has shifted from chant to citation. We used to ask elders for blessings, now we ask them for brand direction. And still, we aestheticise wisdom but rarely integrate it. We put experience on a pedestal, then forget to build the stairs. Because what culture does with its elders reveals what it values about continuity.
The Market of Wisdom
This rebrand is not confined to one geography. Japan has what you might call its Obāchan (grandmother) influencers: older women in their seventies and eighties becoming fashion icons and public figures, refusing to age quietly. In Lagos, Shade Thomas-Fahm, at 92 (born 1933), remains Nigeria’s fashion matriarch, having shaped generations of designers since opening the country’s first boutique in 1960.
In Bangkok, aunties run the markets with the precision of CEOs. Watch one arrange her stall at 4am, jasmine garlands hung by colour gradient, fabrics folded by weight and sheen. This is not just good commerce, but curation that would make any art director weep.
Wisdom, everywhere, has become a form of design literacy. To age well now means to edit your life like a studio archive. Keep the texture, remove the noise. Some Crones curate galleries. Others curate jasmine at dawn. Both know what deserves to stay.
The Crone’s secret power, though, has never been mysticism. It’s comedy. Who else could survive centuries of misogyny and still laugh? Even Baba Yaga, that bone-gnashing witch, lived in a house on chicken legs, a walking satire of patriarchy.
True Crones are funny because they’ve transcended embarrassment. They’ve witnessed every human delusion and survived being dismissed for decades before anyone thought to call it ‘cancellation.’
Humour, like myth, is pattern recognition with a punchline.
However, capitalism learns quickly. From embodied knowing came the aesthetic of wisdom. Now we have candles named after goddesses. Moisturisers promising ‘sacred glow.’ The archetype entered the supply chain and the Crone became a luxury SKU. Gucci calls it alchemy. Loewe calls it craft. Either way, myth is now monetised. The sacred becomes design, and suddenly even transcendence comes in limited editions.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as cynical, but maybe it’s further proof that the old gods have simply changed departments. If fashion is our new folklore, then every collection is a myth retold in fabric. In fragrances. In leather goods. The question remains: who gets to wear it?
Which is to say the global face of the modern Crone remains overwhelmingly white, wealthy, editorial, while the grandmothers who built our cities stay invisible. They have been world-building since stories were told on kitchen tables. We just never credited them in the show notes.
Editing as Devotion
She is the final cut. Where the Hero expands, she refines. Where the Maiden begins, she completes. To work like a Crone is to make peace with deletion.
In studios, the best creative directors embody her energy daily. Removing, refining, reducing until only the essence remains. Less about cold minimalism, and more about devotional clarity.
In that sense, Margiela’s blank label was never about anonymity, but about humility. A product without a name that still spoke volumes. The Crone would approve.
Folklore, like institutional design, survives because it evolves. In this age of AI and abundance, the Crone becomes the human algorithm, slow, ethical, unwilling to hallucinate. She fact-checks the oracle. She reminds us that data without discernment is just noise.
In Thai, we call our elder women Mae (mum), Baa (auntie), Yai (grandma) out of respect, and I’ve begun to think of every creative practice as a kind of motherhood: birthing, raising, releasing.
The Crone is what comes after motherhood, the stage where you no longer need to nurture everything you’ve made. You simply know what should live on.
Every story ends with her. When the villain finally stops running, when the village stops burning, when the archive closes for the night, she’s there, filing everything under lesson learned. The Crone’s reappearance is a sign that culture, exhausted by its own noise, is finally craving coherence. We’ve chased youth so relentlessly that maturity feels avant-garde again. Her return to culture might be less trend than translation, because in a world drowning in infinite beginnings, she reminds us the beauty of an ending done well.
If the Maiden is curiosity and the Mother is care, the Crone is clarity.
And clarity, in any age, is couture.
About The Gloss
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