What started out as a tribute to Ari Seth Cohen’s late grandmother, Advanced Style has become one of the most influential and studied sartorialist blogs in its first seven years online. VAULT spent some time with its founder and his muses.

By Mariam Arcilla SEP 2015

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is usually busy on Saturdays, but today marks a special, silver-haired kind of busy. Prime Time – a new outreach program to engage older visitors with the museum – is launching, and the museum is packed with senior citizens, eager to partake in hands-on activities led by Advanced Style doyennes Debra Rapoport and Lana Turner.

“We’re going to make architectures for the body!” 69-year-old Rapoport jubilantly tells her wearables workshop participants. Since the age of three, the artist has created outlandish accessories repurposed from toilet rolls, banana leaves, plastic mesh, film ribbons and other bits and bobs that would otherwise end up in landfill. As she circles the class to inspect their recycled bracelets and necklaces taking shape, I notice that her own style carries a distinct sound. Plastic bracelets clank up and down her arms, while a necklace rammed together with punctured coffee pods bops about her chest, with scratchy foil clutching the rims. On her head rests a hat fashioned from paper towels, painted and scrunched up in the form of a papal mitre. Perhaps it suits, for she could very well be the priestess of Advanced Style, the celebrated sartorialist blog and now best-selling publication, colouring-activity book and documentary that chronicles the marvellous and peculiar styles of women over the age of 60.

“Debra was one of the first women I photographed for the blog,” Advanced Style founder Ari Seth Cohen later tells me during a video call from Los Angeles. “She is a textiles professor so she uses creativity to ... Subscribe to read this article in full