Young, thin models tend to dominate the catwalks and fashion shoots, but a group of stylish pensioners is giving them a run for their money and appearing in glossy ads for eyewear and designer clothes.
At 93, Ilona Royce Smithkin didn’t expect to become a style photographer’s muse, even less a model for a global fashion house.
When a young photographer started a blog in 2008 called Advanced Style in homage to the stylish senior citizens of New York, he heard on the grapevine about a boldly-dressed artist in her late 80s with flame-red hair and sky-high eyelashes of the same hue. Ari Seth Cohen, now 31, was immediately intrigued and began searching.
“I knew I just had to meet her,” he laughs. “She sounded just like the pictures of expressive, colourful older women I used to draw as a child.”
Over the next 18 months he kept an eye out in the streets and shops of Manhattan’s West Village. “Then one day I saw this woman in a bright chartreuse tracksuit and wonderful red hair flying in the wind, walking across the street and I knew it was her.”
Five years after their first meeting Read More…
“I don’t want to look done or freaky and artificial like everybody else. I just want to look like myself, only better.” So goes the fear voiced by new patients, says New York City plastic surgeon Dr. Haideh Hirmand. The “everybody else”? Those expressionless, Kewpie-doll carbon copies, all cherubic cheeks and fish pouts.
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