Why Do We Love Wrinkles on Leather, But Not on Skin?

Vintage in Fashion Is Status. Vintage in Beauty Is Stigma.

Fashion has a strange relationship with time. We glorify it in clothes, despise it in faces. The very signs of age that make a handbag or a dress priceless are the ones we spend fortunes to erase from our own skin.

A worn-in Hermès bag, softened by decades of touch, is no less valuable than the day it left the atelier—often, it’s worth far more. Its wrinkles become proof of authenticity, a record of its survival. We call this patina: the beauty that comes from life lived.

Now compare that to a woman’s face. The same creases, marks of survival, are treated as flaws. Instead of patina, we call them "signs of aging"—and we erase them with Botox, filters, and creams. What makes leather’s wrinkles poetic but skin’s wrinkles tragic?

Psychology offers one answer: objects don’t remind us of our own mortality. A vintage dress is a relic that outlives us, a story we can borrow. Its aging feels romantic, even comforting, because it’s external. But when time etches itself into our own skin, it forces us to confront decline, fragility, and the reality of impermanence. We cherish age when it’s safe, at a distance; we fear it when it stares back at us in the mirror.

The contradiction goes deeper. In fashion, vintage is status. A rare Dior gown or a 1970s Saint Laurent blazer is a badge of culture and taste. Vintage signals rarity, uniqueness, and belonging to a certain echelon of insiders. In beauty, age is stigma. Wrinkles mark you as "past your prime," excluded from the aspirational narrative of youth that the industry relentlessly sells. Where fashion markets heritage, beauty markets renewal. The same years that make a garment iconic make a person invisible.

We embrace vintage clothing because its aging is curated. A dress can be restored, preserved, framed. Our own bodies resist that kind of control. Skin cannot be neatly archived. It carries a living timeline—one we can’t curate as easily as we can a wardrobe. And so, while we buy into "timeless fashion," we spend to fight the timeline of our own reflection.

The paradox isn’t really about clothes or faces—it’s about how we negotiate permanence and loss. Vintage fashion lets us play with history without being burdened by it. Anti-aging beauty, on the other hand, reveals our obsession with outpacing time itself. We want objects to grow old for us, so we don’t have to.

Perhaps the true luxury isn’t owning something vintage or appearing ageless. It’s the radical idea of embracing time in both: allowing our clothes and our skin to tell stories without shame, to treat wrinkles—on leather and on flesh—as marks of life, not loss.