Rachel Tashjian
“It’s almost impossible to have any style at all without the right dogs,” Isaac Mizrahi once said, gabbing to a friend about a visit with the singer Eartha Kitt in the 1995 documentary Unzipped.
The singer growled like a wildcat, demonstrating how she would move in one of Mizrahi’s designs, as her two black poodles pranced around the room. She would be fabulous without the dogs, of course, but their canine presence, groomed to perfection and doting and begging and performing at her feet, propelled her persona into something even more extravagant.
Pet owners and their transformative friends from across the animal kingdom are the subject of photographer Ari Seth Cohen’s new book, Advanced Pets. And we’re not just talking about the right dogs: there are cats, a turtle, a pig, a goat and more.
The portraits show how communing with another species can, indeed, advance a person’s sartorial agenda.
Recently, Cohen, several of his subjects and a handful of their chic beasts gathered in New York to celebrate the book, while dressing to impress.
The pig, alas, was left at home, but many other critters made appearances, some dressed in adorable ensembles.
Cohen came to fame as a chronicler of style icons above the usual age of fashion fixation.
In fashion, where youth trumps all, that could mean anyone above 25, but Cohen has a particular interest in subjects in their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond, whom he first captured on his blog, Advanced Style, and later in a 2012 book and 2014 documentary, both called Advanced Style.
Some of the figures captured in his new book dress or accessorise their domesticated divas. But for others, their friend’s natural fur or feathers are celebratory enough.
Through the images ‒ of rainbow-hued Emily and her tawny cat, or the decadently dressed Sandra embracing her cow ‒ one appreciates anew why pets, with their capacity to provide both comfort and aesthetic pleasure, are at the foot or in the arms of so many eccentrics.
Just as some people avoid wearing bright colours while others feel that cladding themselves daily in hot pink is essential to their survival, some believe life, and looking good living it, isn’t possible without a critter.
