Older chicks are so hot

For Mature Audiences -- by MARY TANNEN

Brace yourself. Very soon in beauty and fashion ads you will be seeing faces of women who are actually in their 40's - or even older. If you look closely, you may even see a wrinkle or a line or two. Granted, these are not ordinary faces: Kim Basinger in the new campaign for Miu Miu; Sharon Stone, the image for Dior Beauty. These are extraordinary, storied, famous, perhaps even infamous, faces. Faces with staying power.

M.A.C. cosmetics spearheaded the trend three years ago with its Beauty Icon campaign, inviting women of a certain style - and a certain age - to collaborate on a limited-edition makeup collection. This year's M.A.C. Beauty Icon is Catherine Deneuve. Because fashion has a time-warping ability that would baffle even a string theorist, Deneuve has over her 62 years developed the look that is of the moment - classic and impeccable, especially when fronting for independent behavior. Deneuve has herself managed to flout a few conventions in the course of her legendary life while never losing her cool. (The M.A.C. team reports that she had definite opinions when working with it and was so charming and knowledgeable that she usually got her way.)

The 47-year-old film star Sharon Stone is another strong-minded woman who has been making up the rules as she goes along. Now her face will appear in international print ads introducing Capture Totale, a new cream from Christian Dior that promises to do it all: smooth, revitalize, tone and clarify the mature complexion. Although this is the first time a Dior ad for wrinkle cream has featured a model who is of an age at which she might actually use the stuff, according to Pamela Baxter, president and C.E.O. of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Dior's parent company, there was "no discussion of age" when Stone's name came up as a possible face. Instead, the comment was: "Oh, she's so sexy, so hot. Do you think we could get her?" And in fact, she adds, "we pursued her for quite a while." Baxter, an attractive brunette who herself looks far younger than her 56 years, says, "I'm hoping Dior will be the first of the companies that realize women over 40 are not over the hill."

As it happens, Miuccia Prada has been having similar thoughts, having signed the 52-year-old actress Kim Basinger to star in Miu Miu's print campaign. Sprawling across a bed of satin velour, fondling purses and flaunting shoes, the actress could be a high-priced hooker with an accessory fetish and an ambiguous relationship with the 19-year-old actress Camilla Belle, who sometimes appears with her. Prada, who took over her family company in the late 1970's and turned it into a fashion leader, then established a younger, second line called Miu Miu after her own nickname, is just a few years older than her chosen model. "I never thought of Kim Basinger in terms of age," she says. "For me she embodies woman with her subtleties and intricacies. She's sensual and intellectually engaging, elegant with a very strong personal style."

Nice as it would be to believe that older women in high places (and a few enlightened men) are at last recognizing the allure of the post-Edenic Eve, that is, a woman with experience who knows what she wants and how to get it, some hard economics may also be wooing the cosmetic and fashion industries away from their long love affair with youth. M.A.C., whose edgy self-image seems made for the young, admits that almost a quarter of its customers are over 40. Dior reports that 65 percent of women using antiaging skin care are over 40 and that antiaging accounts for half of the company's total treatment business. What is more, expenditures of that mature age group are growing at 20 percent a year. A spokesman for Miu Miu says only that the appeal of the label is "psychographic, not demographic."

The elephant in the room is the free-spending, self-inventing boomer generation, those born between 1946 and 1964. They are all over 40. Half of them have passed the 50 mark, and unlike previous generations of over-50's, they are still shopping. Indeed, people who are 50 to 60 control $1 trillion of spending power per year. Not surprisingly, the me generation likes to look at faces that look like them. Lori Bitter of J. Walter Thompson Worldwide's Mature Market Group explains, "They want role models of their own generation." Bitter predicts that "there's going to be more emphasis, not less" on this trend and points to the success of "Desperate Housewives," the television show featuring sexy, machinating and gorgeous over-40's.

In spite of what the boomer ladies like to think, they are not the first women of a certain age to preserve their juices. There are plenty of desperate housewives in the stories of Updike and Cheever. Mrs. Robinson was positively predatory, and whatever you may say about the Medea of Euripedes, she was not lacking in passion. Women acquire depth and complexity with age. They can be perplexing and - when cornered - even dangerous. Some cultures burn them at the stake, clap them into chadors, ship them off to nunneries. But right here and right now, these dames have their manicured hands on the purse strings, and never have they looked so desirable.