In the 1980s, a group of classmates turned up in our school playground who immediately stood out – and, of course, wanted to stand out. Their style was unmistakable: polo shirts and deck shoes, carrot-cut jeans and cashmere jumpers. The brands were Lacoste, Aigner, Esprit, Benetton and Timberland. At the weekend, they’d head off to Sylt or Norderney – to play golf, go sailing or surf. Whilst the lads smelled of Lagerfeld or Fahrenheit, the girls wore Cristalle by Chanel or Vu by Ted Lapidus. The ‘Poppers’ made no secret of their enthusiasm for status symbols and expensive brands. On the contrary: visibility was part of the concept back then. They were a force to be reckoned with. And they polarised opinion. You either rejected them or wanted to be part of the crowd. Their credo: success, prosperity, career and social advancement.

Today, forty years on, I sometimes wonder whether I’ll come across the same people again. Anyone passing by the Milchbar or the Weiße Düne on a sunny day on Norderney may occasionally experience a sort of déjà vu. They sit there at all hours of the day: gentlemen with silver-streaked hair in pink polo shirts, their cashmere jumpers casually draped over their shoulders. Accompanying them are sporty yet elegant women of a similar age, dressed in white, cream or butter-yellow. In their hands, an Aperol Spritz or an ice-cold rosé. In the past, this scene struck me as a coincidence. Or a fashion trend. Now, I’m no longer so sure. Too perfectly coordinated. Too predictable. And too uniform. The longer I think about it, the more this group strikes me as the continuation of a story that began decades earlier in German school playgrounds. Whether back then between classrooms and bike racks or today in a beach chair overlooking the North Sea – in both cases, it’s about visibility. But the message has changed. Back then, the ‘Poppers’ were all about climbing the social ladder; the ‘Silver Liners’ on Norderney have made it.

For a long time, our society assigned people over the age of sixty primarily one role: ‘old’. Whilst youth cultures were analysed, marketed and stylised, older people disappeared into a grey catch-all category known as ‘pensioners’. Colourless, unremarkable, uninteresting. Not trendsetters, not desirable, of little cultural relevance. That has changed fundamentally. The world of advertising and marketing has now coined a whole range of terms for this generation: Best Agers, Golden Agers, Active Seniors, Ageless Consumers and the Silver Generation. What is striking here is not so much what these terms say, but what they avoid: the word ‘old’. And this is precisely where a remarkable shift lies. People over sixty are suddenly no longer regarded as a marginalised group in society, but as a target group with purchasing power, high visibility and social relevance. They travel, consume, redecorate their homes, buy fashion, visit restaurants and take an interest in high-quality luxury goods. Above all, however, they embody something that seems luxurious in an increasingly hectic society: they have time and money.

The Silver Liners offer us a vision of what a fulfilling life might look like. Their distinguishing features are no accident and function just like the codes of any other peer group. The Silver Liners embody an ideal that others look to for guidance. No man puts on a pink polo shirt in the morning and thinks to himself: ‘Today I’m going to reflect on the semiotic significance of pastel shades in post-industrial capitalism’. People don’t adopt colours. They adopt ways of life. They look to people they’d like to be like. People who have clearly achieved something that seems desirable. In the past, these might have been successful entrepreneurs, politicians or TV presenters. Today, they are people who embody something else: time, serenity and the freedom to spend a Tuesday morning on a terrace without feeling that they ought to be doing something more productive.

However, it would be a mistake to equate the ‘Silver Liners’ with old age in general. As visible as this group is, it bears little resemblance to the reality of life for many people of their generation. The terrace of the Weiße Düne on Norderney tells not only a story about old age. It also tells a story of prosperity, stable working lives and financial security. Those sitting there often have something that is by no means a given: time, money and freedom from ill health. Above all, however, it is a snapshot in time. The generation that is today marketed to and courted as ‘Best Agers’ or ‘Silver Liners’ was often still able to benefit from conditions that, for many who came after them, have long since ceased to be a matter of course. For unemployment, precarious employment conditions, interrupted working lives and falling pension expectations are likely to widen rather than narrow the disparities in old age in the future.

But perhaps that is precisely where their cultural significance lies. The ‘silver liners’ do not need to be representative to have an impact. They are figures of longing and give us an idea of what our lives might look like in old age. We tend to adopt cultural codes. Not because we particularly love the colour pink or find pink cashmere jumpers attractive. But because such codes carry a promise within them: leisure, prosperity, serenity and the idea of a successful life. What we adopt, therefore, is rarely the things themselves, but rather the meaning we ascribe to them.

Yet even the impact of such symbols has its limits. A pink cashmere jumper and a perfume costing three hundred euros do not change our lives. They do not turn a small pension into a respectable fortune, nor do they transform an ordinary everyday life into a life of luxury. But they do influence our self-perception, our sense of well-being and the feeling of being on the sunny side of life – even if only for a brief moment. And that is something, after all.