This article is part of the Future of Appearance, a collection of articles that investigates what we will look like in 20 years.
As science and technology advance, the prospect of living to 100 — and far beyond — is no longer an exception to the rule but an expectation. Living longer is quickly becoming a proposition that will reshape how we live, work, spend and age.
In 2020, the United Nations (UN) calculated that there were 573,473 centenarians living globally (0.0068 per cent of the 7.87 billion global population), noting that the 100-year-old consumer was becoming increasingly common. By 2050, that number is predicted to surpass 3.2 million, and by the end of the century, nearly 18 million people (0.033 per cent of the 9.8 billion global population) are expected to reach 100 or above, according to the UN’s latest population projections. Longer life spans, driven by falling mortality rates and breakthrough innovations in healthcare and biotech, are ushering in an age of longevity, disrupting traditional life stages and calling for radical reinvention across almost every sector of society.
Longer lives will require long-term strategies from brands, employers, economies and environments. As outlined in strategic foresight agency The Future Laboratory’s ‘Longevity Lifestyle’ report, today’s older generations are not just living longer — they’re living better: healthier, more active, and more culturally and economically influential than ever. In turn, systems must adapt in real time. Retail spaces must cater to more personalised, experience-driven engagement, financial infrastructures must shift as older populations control more capital, work will be redefined as careers stretch across extended lifespans, and environmental models must adjust to accommodate longer consumption cycles.
Below, Vogue Business explores how the longevity era will reshape the future of retail, work, wealth and the environment, plus what it will take for institutions, industries and individuals to keep up.
Retail
The retail landscape will face a critical restructure. As the shift towards hyper-personalised products accelerates, traditional beauty shelves are poised to become obsolete. “Rather than functioning as static spaces stocked with pre-made, mass-produced goods, shelves will become symbolic and interactive,” says Wayne Liu, chief growth officer and Americas president of Perfect Corp, an artificial intelligence software company. “[Retail] spaces may feature tablets and interactive interfaces, allowing customers to explore a brand’s science, values and product range, and co-create personalised formulas on the spot,” he predicts.
AI will also play a pivotal role in shaping personalised beauty journeys, adapting in-store environments to match customers’ emotions, routines and needs. Experts say brands can expect to move beyond virtual makeup try-ons and skin analysis tools to smart mirrors capable of analysing micro-expressions and scent to provide real-time feedback. This could be accompanied by AI-generated “beauty passports” synced with browsing history to create fully tailored in-store experiences. “Hyper-expert advisors will also emerge, offering precise insights into skincare and bodycare,” says Queenie Lo, president, of management consultancy Futurebrand Spatial Design.
However, the evolution of retail won’t eliminate hands-on, tactile experiences. Lo predicts two dominant retail models will emerge: one rooted in education, science and technology; the other focused on exploration and sensory engagement. “Product play has always been central to beauty. Retailers will continue to encourage experimentation through playful, immersive experiences,” she explains. In a digitally governed future, Lo believes a subculture of discovery and escapism will be highly sought after. “There will still be a strong appetite for playful spaces where people can disconnect and rediscover themselves.”
Neither path will be without challenges. Retailers embracing AI-driven spaces will need robust ethical frameworks. “To prepare, companies must upgrade their systems and ensure close collaboration between retail leaders, engineers, user experience designers and legal experts,” Liu advises. “Human oversight must remain active to guarantee that automated systems are safe, efficient and scalable.” For those reimagining manufacturing, Liu notes the importance of optimising for robotic productivity or transitioning to on-demand models to meet rapidly shifting consumer demands.
Meanwhile, brands focusing on experiential, playful spaces must stay attuned to cultural trends and consumer sentiment. “The future of retail may involve hyper-localised pop-ups — think lip gloss vending machines in packed clubs or face mask bars at train stations. It’s the pop-up, reformatted,” says Lo. But she warns that retailers must remain agile and adaptable. “Thirty years from now, retail strategy must extend beyond product transactions. Stores will become hubs for trial, learning and exploration, rather than mere points of sale.”
To thrive in this new era, experts agree that both retailers and brands must clearly define their identities and commit fully to the experiences they offer. “Brands need to know who they are to move in sync with consumers — and they must deliver on their promises,” Lo concludes.
Economics
A profound shift is underway in who holds wealth and wields influence. “We’re heading into a moment where many older consumers — particularly those with higher incomes — are living longer and in better health. They’re more active and financially empowered for longer than previous generations, and that naturally extends their economic influence,” says Alex Hawkins, The Future Laboratory’s director of strategic foresight. And it’s challenging the assumption that youth always drives culture. “Older age groups are shaping tastes, values and spending patterns — and that has implications for which consumers sit at the centre of tomorrow’s luxury conversation,” he adds.
This shift also raises thornier questions around access and elitism. As wealthier, older demographics are likely to be the first adopters of expensive longevity treatments, they will live longer, enabling them to accrue even vaster amounts of wealth and far outpacing younger generations. It may result in a new luxury paradigm: will the aspirational customer, once the engine of the luxury market, be edged out in favour of the high-net-worth elite? Not necessarily, but the power dynamics are evolving. “Luxury brands will need to design with greater nuance. The older high-earning consumer is no longer a footnote, but younger audiences still bring cultural clout. Both will continue to have value.”
The real opportunity, then, lies in dismantling binary thinking altogether. “We’re moving into a future where traditional lifestyles are blurring. The idea that older means one thing, and younger means another, doesn’t hold the same weight anymore,” says Hawkins, who has dubbed this phenomenon the “flat-age mindset”. Here, luxury becomes less about appealing to a particular age group and more about aligning with values, priorities and aesthetics that transcend generational divides while still targeting the wealthiest.
Work
The traditional work timeline consists of education until your early 20s, work until your mid 60s, and then retirement. A longer lifespan challenges this, with the reality being that very few have the financial means to be in retirement for 40 years. While governments are likely to keep pushing pension ages up, workplace experts predict that longevity will mean we distribute leisure across our lives more evenly. Rather than saving all your money and leisure time for retirement, people are more likely to work and earn longer, but take career breaks more frequently — for travel or spending time with family, for instance. Career pivots will become more common as more adopt the ‘portfolio career’ model, whereby career paths comprise a variety of roles at various organisations. To mitigate the risk of a fleeting workforce, experts say the most innovative organisations will move beyond perceiving a job as a predetermined box and towards crafting projects and tasks around the unique skills of each employee — almost as if workers are consultants within their own teams. This would allow companies to continue engaging talent along their careers.
The biggest challenge with an ageing workforce is the risk of division between generations. Older generations are likely to hold positions of power for longer, which could create hierarchies and top-heavy structures. This could lead to growing resentment from younger generations who are unable to move up the ladder. There’s also the barriers caused by ageism.
“There’s a huge amount of frustration on both ends of the workforce. You’ve got people in their 60s who expected to be mentors, to be respected for their experience — and now nobody’s listening because everyone’s on their phone or remote. And then you’ve got younger employees who don’t want to be managed, they want to be coached. They are desperate for mentorship and education but don’t know how to get it,” workplace culture expert and soft skills coach Grace McCarrick told Vogue Business. The solution is to create opportunities for intergenerational knowledge-sharing, such as mentorship and reverse mentorship programmes, particularly as many people will look to upskill more frequently throughout their lengthier careers. “If you create ongoing learning and formal mentorship programmes that utilise the older and the younger end, you create a really low-cost, circuitous way to solve both of those problems,” McCarrick said.
Environment
Calculating the environmental impact of people living longer is no easy feat. Far beyond the confines of beauty and fashion, it taps into prickly, high-level debates about ageing populations, planetary boundaries and unfettered economic growth.
Perhaps the best ‘back of the envelope’ method is IPAT (I = P x A x T), a formula developed by Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren in 1972 to show how human activity impacts the environment. In it, impact is driven by three main factors: population growth, affluence and technology. “When we think about longevity, the population will increase and the people who can afford these treatments will generally be the most affluent,” explains Kate Fletcher, professor of sustainability, design and fashion systems at Manchester Metropolitan University. “Even if we just wanted our environmental impact to stay the same, we would have to reduce the impact of a growing population that is consuming more and that would likely be through technological advances. But technology can’t endlessly reduce the environmental impact of all those other components.”
The environmental impacts associated with longevity are potentially seismic, especially when you consider that we are already pushing far beyond planetary boundaries and using more resources than the planet can sustain. Every extra day people live is another opportunity to consume, says Fletcher. But every transaction comes at a cost. “The best predictions we have suggest that we will be living in a world of unpredictable climate, which is not more pleasant, but more dangerous. Crops will fail, food will become more expensive, people will start to go hungry. There will be more migration and climate refugees. Pressure on the land will increase, fresh water will become a challenge, no doubt conflicts will unfold over resources, and we will have fewer ecological systems to temper these changes. We might be living longer, but we will be living far less comfortably. It’s a very sobering prospect.”
The solution is refreshingly simple, continues Fletcher: just consume less. Exactly how much less isn’t an exact science. Estimates for how much we need to reduce our environmental impact vary from 75 per cent to 95 per cent. And of course, these ‘budgets’ will vary depending on the country and class you belong to. It’s very possible, for example, that only the poorest 20 per cent of people in the UK will have a carbon budget allocated for new clothes in the near future. The starting point, she adds, is recognising the deeper dissatisfaction that the pursuit of longevity speaks to — the idea that we need to change who we are and how we live. “The kickback is sufficiency and mindfulness. It’s about recognising how much is enough, and stepping back from the brink of planetary boundaries to live well with less.”
*Note on our images:
We created all lead images in this series using OpenAI GPT-4o’s image generation tool. To do that, we leveraged the ongoing partnership between Condé Nast and OpenAI and generated images that best reflect the expert insights and predictions about appearance found in this collection of articles.
We are aware of the debate surrounding the ethics of artificial intelligence in image-making, and we share concerns regarding creative ownership as well as that of our own image. In this series, we are talking about a world that doesn’t yet exist, and as AI is in so many ways the tool of the future, we felt it was appropriate to experiment with it in this way.
We guided the visuals entirely through written prompts. No external images or copyrighted materials were uploaded or referenced — every image was created from scratch based on our team’s original concepts.
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