Partying in Advanced Style
Watch: Advanced Style party featuring Ari Seth Cohen, Tavi Gevinson and 100 year old Ruth Coburn.
Last year Oyster became aware of blog phenomenon Advanced Style started by twenty-eight year old geriatric style enthusiast, Ari Seth Cohen. During New York Fashion week last September, Cohen co-hosted a party at the Ace Hotel to celebrate the style of older women. Usually you envisage fashion week parties to be teeming with twenty-year-old models revelling in their youth, beauty and fortune, but not surprisingly the Advanced Style party was about as far from this as you can get. Cohen recently posted Lina Plioplyte's video of the party to his blog, commenting "What better way to celebrate life than an amazing party dedicated to marvellous women with great style and a tremendous zest for life? Fashion is only one ingredient in the remarkable lives of these inspiring ladies. Their spirit and vitality is the real key to living a truly stylish life."
Prodigal blogger and current editor of Rookie magazine, Tavi Gevinson, was the other co-host. Known for taking style inspiration from grandmas, Tavi offered her opinion on the ageing ladies, "I think our culture fetishises youth in this really kind of scary way and I totally love the spirit of all of these women to just dress as obnoxiously and be as present as can be and love fashion." The video 8 some of Ari's favourites from his senior set of friends including Iris Apfel who is experiencing the pinnacle of her career during her twilight years, one-hundred year old Ruth Coburn who does pilates daily and Ilona Smithkin who performed a rendition of 'Que Sera' at the fashion week party. Apparently the key to advanced style is to "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative," and the advanced style set seem to be more preoccupied with smiling and laughing than posing and pouting.
Cohen said "During fashion week when everything is sort of focused on youth we wanted to celebrate style icons who have been dressing for years." Check out the party video below along with a few of our Advanced Style favourites:
'Advance Style New York Fashion Week Party: A cross-generational celebration of style, wisdom, classic elegance and flamboyance'
'Iris Apfel on Style'
Watch out Sartorialist and Facehunter, Advanced Style will be releasing a book in April 2012:
via Advanced Style
Sophie Bosch
