With over 250k followers, Grandparents has become a go-to source of style inspiration that proves fashion has no age limit, even though its subjects are senior citizens.
The account’s founder, Kyle Kivijarvi, first began posting the occasional photo on his personal Instagram in 2015 before officially launching @gramparents the following year.
Since then, his project has been featured in major magazines and even led to collaborations with fashion labels, including the Japanese brand Beams.
Kivijarvi described the aesthetic of Gramparents to The Times as “just regular clothes.” The real focus, he said, is on the idea that there’s more to life than fashion labels.
“It’s not about the big brands. I suppose you might call it anti-trend. Though this in itself has now become a trend among the young,” he added.
Kivijarvi began photographing stylish seniors while working as a menswear buyer at a shop in Brooklyn, New York.
The neighborhood had an older community, and on his daily bike rides to work he would often notice one or two people who stood out, not necessarily because of the clothes they wore, but because of the way they carried themselves and maintained their appearance.
These were people who, as Kivijarvi put it, “were getting priced out of their own neighborhood. They were people who had been there from the beginning and now all these wealthy young techie kids were arriving and they were being pushed out. I don’t think we want to live in a world where that happens. Where everyone dresses and thinks the same. We should be talking to and learning from older people.”
Kivijarvi has a few loose criteria when choosing who makes it onto the page. “What they wear as well as how it’s being worn are a big part of what makes a good image on the page—but I don’t set hard rules, I like to have fun with it,” he told Hypebeast.
There are, however, a couple of things he does keep in mind: “First of all, are they old-looking enough,” he says. “Secondly, does the environment they are in give the viewers a sense of imagination?”
Fashion is often seen as the domain of the young: forward-thinking, experimental, and ever-changing. With the internet rewarding anything unusual or eye-catching, it might seem surprising that an Instagram account focused on seniors became so popular.
But that’s precisely why it resonated. Speaking to GQ, Kivijarvi described Gramparents as “a breath of fresh air” on social media, standing apart from the countless young people doing wild, experimental things in fashion and art at the time. That sense of timelessness still holds true today.
