Photography courtesy of Sara Ventura/NOWNESS.com
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Oldsters at the New Museum converged in technicolour flocks while young things, no longer bright by comparison, looked greenly on. For once on a champagne-soaked night in New York City, the “it” girls weren’t girls at all. They were women with lives as rich as their Chanel bags, faces to live up to their fascinators. They were maybe even, unironically, “ladies.”
It was the launch party for Ari Seth Cohen’s new coffee table book, Advanced Style, published by Powerhouse and based on the popular blog of the same name—and accompanied by a several-minute video that premiered on Nowness.com in March. Guests were happy to watch it again: with advice like “young women, you’re going to be an old woman someday, so don’t worry about it!” and “someone doesn’t like what I’m wearing? I don’t give a shit!” it’s probably the feel-best fashion film any of us has seen. Iris Apfel‘s in it, and so is Tavi, for whom rad granny style is a major inspiration.
“These women are some of my best friends,” said Cohen, who wore a Floridian pink suit he’d bought for $80 in Chinatown. “They’ve definitely influenced my own style—they’re so liberated!” Ilona Royce Smithkin, an ebullient half-pint of a woman with Tang-dyed hair and mink eyelashes to match, tugged impatiently on his sleeve. He had another book to sign. “We don’t have all night,” sighed an elegant woman in mounds of paste jewellery and piles of clashing silk. “We might not even have another five minutes!” replied her friend, and they cackled together. They did not seem to care when the party ended, so long as they were the stars of it.
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