For the last three years at about this time — which is to say, in the nascent days of the new year, when the calendar lies clear and the sense of possibility is at its apex — Selfridges, the British department store, has dedicated its windows, all 13 of them, to a new class of Bright Young Things: dozens of up-and-coming stars of fashion and art, including names like Simone Rocha, Christopher Shannon and Maarten van der Horst, who it thinks will shape what we wear and how we shop in the year to come.

New year, new generation!

But this year, things look a bit different. On Thursday, the emporium will unveil its first windows of 2015, all dedicated to the work of Bright Old Things (BOTs): 14 men and women of a certain age, who changed careers late in life, moving into the worlds of fashion and art at a time most people start thinking about saying goodbye to fashionable things.

“It’s traditional at this time of year to focus on what’s new and what’s next,” Linda Hewson, Selfridges’ creative director and the woman behind the project, said when I called to discuss the initiative. “We decided to turn that on its head.”

The young are so — well, old hat. Or so it increasingly seems.

Selfridges, after all, is simply the latest member of a movement arguably commenced in 2010 by the photographer Ari Seth Cohen and his “Advanced Style” blog/book/documentary series, which was quickly followed by the 2013 British documentary “Fabulous Fashionistas,” featuring the happening wardrobes of six women with an average age of 80; the elevation of the nonagenarian Iris Apfel to icon status (she was most recently the subject of a documentary by Albert Maysles); and a river of beauty- and fashion-ad campaigns featuring “older” women: Charlotte Rampling (68), Helen Mirren (69), Diane Keaton (69) and (this week) Joan Didion (80).