Advanced Style: A Celebration of Stylish Seniors

For some women, the journey into their twilight years is one that calls for extravagant and colourful attire.

Advanced Style is a new documentary film that cheerfully chronicles seven stylish older women, ranging in ages from their 60s to 90s, living in New York and eschewing traditional ideas of fashion, beauty and growing old gracefully.

From filmmaker Lina Plioplyte, the movie is based on the blog and book of the same name by photographer Ari Seth Cohen. His street style photographs of seniors with the most original sense of style – sometimes defying description and most assuredly not in step with conventional fashion trends – has been hailed by Vogue, The New York Times and The New Yorker.

The film explores not only these women’s personal style but gives an insight to their vitality and longevity.

Each of the women has a unique personality and a creative sense of style. From the 93-year-old Royce Smithkin – artist and cabaret singer – who cuts her flaming red hair to make her own false eyelashes to Lynn Dell Cohen, the 80-year-old who runs a fashion boutique on the Upper West Side and dispenses the most blunt but hilarious fashion advice to her customers.

If anything, at just 72 minutes, you yearn to learn more of these seven utterly fascinating women who greet each day like it’s an epic costumed adventure.

As one of them declares in the film, “I’m dressed for the theatre of my life.”

Opens Dec 19^th in Toronto at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema and in Vancouver at Vancity.

Dec 26^th in Edmonton at the Metro Cinema.