Film review: Janice Breen Burns.
A double pass to Advanced Style, opening in limited release this Thursday, October 2, will be posted to the first name and address received at info@voxfrock.com.au
www.advancedstyle.com.au #advancedstyle
In the opening moments of Advanced Style, porcelain beauty Dita Von Teese, aged 42, articulates what I refuse to think about in my own middle years. “I see my future in them,” she says of the small, creaking flock of elderly fashion flamingos being herded about New York by blogger Ari Seth Cohen. Suddenly, so do I. For the rest of the film I’m oscillating: glum, joyful, glum, joyful, glum…
Advanced Style is the film, of the book, of the blog, that whipped up such fascination a couple of years ago because – and, let’s rattle a few arthritic old truthbones here – women “of a certain age” are supposed to GO AWAY, vanish into life’s misty moors for the sin of being no longer sexually attractive. They’re NOT supposed to swan about, frocked to the nines, posing for pictures, laughing and blowing kisses – at 95 for chrissakes! – drawing attention to themselves and reminding us all that youth is a such tragic, fleeting thing.
Iris Apfel, 93, the original “Rare Bird of Fashion” who started it all. Photo: Dazed and Confused.
Fading beauty, old age, are tricky enough truths to compute at any age, so we simply don’t question when most women (and men) do apparently disappear, as prescribed by popular culture, into big coats and orthopedic shoes when their twighlight time looms. Pfft, gone. Nothing to see here; society appears to assure us. And, a little part of us says; thank God.
Until one Ari Seth Cohen’s love and respect for his boisterous old grandmothers set a cultural tsunami in motion. Advanced Style started as his bloggy ode to women who refuse to disappear. His core flock of original Advanced Style New Yorkers number about half a dozen; women aged from 60s to 90s. They’re brash, exultant, proud, loud, bloody irritating at times, their fashion choices a mash of gobsmackingly fabulous to downright appalling.
Tziporah Salamon, 64, a favorite of New York photographer Bill Cunningham and one of Advanced Style’s most spectacular stylists.
They almost invariably dress in ostentatious combinations of vintage fashion (teen blog sensation Tavi Gevinson once suggested they dress “obnoxiously”, but I’m sure it was a slip of the syntax), composed with every clanking accoutrement they can lay their hands on: big hats, banks of bangles, fat rock necklaces, heels a teen would totter in, and earrings swung down to their shoulders. They love blasts of colour, most of them, from electric orange and plum pudding purples, except for one Joyce Carpati, 83, cartoonishly, Chanel-esquely elegant (and dignified until cranked into a tacky dance and ditty in a television appearance) in black.
Karen Walker’s campaign, 2013, featuring Joyce Carpati, 83.
Beware the “Aren’t they fabulous?!” hysteria blown up in the wake of the Advanced Style phenomenon. The women are real, their lives far from any beatup stories of sweetness and twighlight. It would simply be wrong not to dwell at least a while on old bones and hospital operations, dead husbands and the fastidious care some must take to simply not fall down, lest they not get up. This is done toward the end of the film so that it assumes a rhythm of winding down to the, now well known, death of Zelda Kaplan, 95, soon after an outing on the front row of New York Fashion Week. Her contemporaries are philosophical, accustomed, and one, typically pragmatic: “What a way to die, eh?”
What a way indeed. My rating? Two sherries (and a Horlicks).
Fashionable world traveller Zelda Kaplan, 95, died after her appearance on the front row of a show during New York Fashion Week.
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
Main photo, top: Ilona Royce Smithkin, 93, makes her own, fingerlong false eyelashes from her own hair.
