Mature women excluded from high street fashion

A new poll of the UK high street shows 61 percent of mature women feel they are forgotten in the fashion stakes, despite it being the fastest grown sector.

The YouGuv poll of 2,000 women saw only 20 percent feel confident in the high street fashion offer.

A further 57 percent of women do not feel their age group is well represented on television or magazines (58 percent), while 76 percent do not think they are well represented in advertising - with those figures increasing with age, the report said.

Women over 50 spend more than 2.5 billion pounds per season on fashion, according to figures from Kantar Worldpanel, with 90 percent of UK retailers seeing most growth from the 50-plus sector.

Angela Spindler, chief executive of JD Williams parent company N Brown Group, said: "There are more women in the 50-plus bracket than ever before and it's abundantly clear that they have felt let down by the fashion industry.

"Recent years have seen this population of women emerge as the most powerful consumer group and the fastest growing fashion sector.”