Photo: Ari Seth Cohen

On a spring afternoon in New York City, Ari Seth Cohen spots a chicly cropped head of silvery hair bobbing along the sidewalk up ahead. "She'd be perfect!" he exclaims. The mystery woman disappears around a corner, but Cohen isn't discouraged: He's prepared to spend hours scouring Manhattan for stylish gray coifs, bold accessories, and other hallmarks of daring senior fashion. His blog, Advanced Style, features subjects like 79-year-old Lynn Dell, the fur-and-feathers-loving owner of Off Broadway boutique, and 92-year-old Ilona Royce Smithkin, a cabaret performer with fake eyelashes; both embody a bygone glamour and indomitable joie de vivre. "My project isn't only about being beautiful or fashionable," Cohen explains. "It's about spirit."

Cohen, 30, has been captivated by older women for as long as he can remember—especially his late grandmother, Bluma, with whom he'd spend hours watching old movies and poring over faded scrapbooks. "I was struck by how elegantly everyone was dressed," he recalls of Bluma's Depression-era snapshots. "The women didn't have money, but they had amazing clothes." Not long after his grandmother died, in 2007, Cohen moved from his hometown of San Diego to New York; Bluma, a graduate of Columbia University, had told him all creative people should live there. He landed a job supervising a bookstore. And in his free time, he took long walks around neighborhoods like the stately Upper East Side, marveling at the "independent, well-dressed older people" he encountered and snapping pictures. While dozens of so-called street-style blogs were chronicling the cutting-edge sartorial statements of the city's youth, Cohen couldn't help noticing that septuagenarians were strangely invisible on the Internet. Hoping to change that, he launched his own blog in August 2008. "I wanted to create something positive and inspiring," he says, "and to show younger women that they don't have to be afraid of getting older."

In 2010 Cohen quit his job to focus on the blog full-time. These days Advanced Style attracts up to 50,000 page views daily. Earlier this year, he published a coffee-table book of favorite images; next up is a documentary about the women to whom he's dedicated his life. "We go to movies together, we talk about plays, we go to concerts. We're collaborators, in a way," he says. "Some of them refer to me as sort of a grandson."

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