My grandmother, Alma, of Washington, D.C., and Boca Raton, Fla., believes that it is choice that has prevented me from becoming a supermodel. Ditto neurosurgeon. Ditto musical prodigy, prima ballerina, best-selling author. And it’s really important to her that I have everything: good haircuts, good shoes, enough calcium in my diet.
What she’d really like Read More
If 10021 were an autonomous nation, then the retirement of the 78-year-old designer Bill Blass last year would be nothing short of a state of emergency.
More than the court designer to a certain set of Park Avenue ladies, Bill Blass was the token gentleman of the gang: Nina Griscom, Anne Bass, Nan Kempner, Judy Read More
After decades of pristine respectability, Christie’s and Sotheby’s are as disgraced as dowagers in a paddy
wagon. Investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for a commission-fixing conspiracy, Christie’s has turned state’s
evidence, The top management at Sotheby’s has resigned. And the owner of Phillips, the third-largest house, is
sniffing around Sotheby’s. Is there no reserve Read More
It can happen any season. Somebody-then everybody-decides there’s a young star designer out there. A single fashion show becomes the Show. It’s held downtown, somewhere gritty and inconvenient. And, odds are, half of the people in the seats have never heard of the prodigy before. They’re there because of who else is there.
Right in Read More
Girdles, back when women wore them at breakfast, to the market, to bridge, were suits of armor. Imposing, certainly, and demanding. Pour yourself in and cinch it. A promise not to jiggle or shake. A promise to aspire to feminine shapes, to adjust the ratio of your belly to your hip, to believe in one Read More
Most people think it all started with Madonna. It was subtle: She’d take the stage at an awards show, and before the clapping even died down you could hear it: “Thank kyeew . Thank kyeeew .” Suddenly she wasn’t some naughty Catholic girl from the Motor City. She sounded sort of … continental. All proper, Read More
On the fourth floor of an office building on Fifth Avenue, 50 New Yorkers were preparing to depart for a three-month boot camp in Stockholm, Sweden-land of Ikea, Nokia and Volvo. The traveling troops-the newest employees of Hennes and Mauritz, Sweden’s version of the sprawling, low-priced, high-style chain stores-were watching a training video. On it, Read More
Thomas Meehan, Writer
Thomas Meehan wrote the book for the musical Annie and won a Tony for it. Since 1977, Annie has earned him around $200,000 a year. Now, at 68, he and his friend Mel Brooks are finishing up a musical version of the latter’s classic movie, The Producers .
“I think Read More
Foxy Brown, the fashionable, tart-tongued rap diva, couldn’t walk. She’d bought a pair of $750 snakeskin Manolo Blahnik stilettos with straps that slithered all the way up her calves, making her look like a marriage between a Roman philosopher and Linda Lovelace. “The sexiest, fiercest thing around,” she said. But her heels were wobbling and Read More
A week after Calvin Klein announced that he had hired Lazard
Frères & Company to help him consider the sale of his company, Bernard
Arnault, the man deemed the most likely buyer, was in Manhattan to conduct a
little business of his own.
Mr. Arnault, the chairman of luxury giant LVMH-Moët Hennessy
Louis Vuitton, Read More
