Where Fashion Meets The Nursing Home

Respect Your Elders. Now take that basic commandment and kick it up a notch. Apply that amped up concept to a fashion blog, pepper it with Jew and you have Advanced Style, Ari Seth Cohen’s style site that takes your basic street style blog and exclusively shoots the elder set. Cohen describes himself as a writer/photographer who "roams the streets looking for New York’s most stylish and creative older folks." He then offers some wise words, "respect your elders and let these ladies and gents teach you a thing or two about living life to the fullest." After surely spending much time on Manhattan’s Lower East and Upper West Sides, Ari Seth Cohen has managed to provide his readers with some pretty stylish, often Jewish elder folk who he hopes will inspire young, urban hoodlums. Through almost each subject, Cohen pinpoints and explains what about them he finds most inspiring which usually involves his evoking childhood memories of his grandparents and their generation. Setting aside the nature of a young man who spends more of his time in old women’s living rooms than in bars with twenty-somethings, Cohen uses his adorable blog to make us appreciate the little things in life: dressing up, books, going to the movies and understated elegance to name a few. Furthermore, his appreciation for an age group that is so rarely revered by fashion folk is refreshing in the climate of today’s blogosphere filled with the young, the new, the current and the pin-thin. Images of older women in their jewels bought so long ago that us youngins would jump to call them "vintage" as well as men far too dapper to even know what beer pong is fill the pages of Advanced Style, at times making way for a more groundbreaking senior citizen. Case in point: Ruth, a.k.a. DJ Mamy Rock, a 69 year old DJ living in England who discovered the art of DJ’ing at her grandson’s birthday party at a London nightclub. She now throws words like "track" and "spinning" around and relishes in the fact that she’d rather "sign a contract with a record company than sign up for a nursing home." Through his affinity for those well beyond his years, it seems that Ari Seth Cohen has accomplished what his site claims has been his goal all along – to prove that its not only men that better looking as they get older. From costume wearing nap-takers to 60-somethings that know their accessories, Cohen has certainly given his readers "proof from the wise and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age."