By Kim Velsey 8/01/12 9:05am

Manhattan Transfers

10 Photos

Gramercy Waves Goodbye to Coco Rocha

Fabulous! Supermodel Coca Rocha Finally Sells Her Gramercy Park Pad

Although we all know that models look better in everything than we ever could hope to, most of us still chose to indulge in the pleasant fantasy that buying the garments they wear will, at least, convey a measure of the glamor that they possess on camera.

Alas, it appears that such delusional optimism does not extend to supermodels’ apartments. At least, Coca Rocha had one hell of a time offloading her two-bedroom Gramercy condo at 121 East 23rd Street, which finally sold for $1.51 million, according to city records. Read More

By Elise Knutsen 4/18/12 5:00pm

Shindigger

Elizabeth Olsen, home gourmand

A Prayer for Champagne in Spring: The Relais & Chateaux Dîner des Grands Chefs

While it’s not particularly our forte, The Observer fasted on Monday. Mostly fasted, rather. It was a religious holiday of sorts, indeed more of a pilgrimage, for which we practiced the ancient art of self-denial. Relais & Chateaux’s Dîner des Grands Chefs was our evening’s sacrosanct destination, and we intended to arrive with a pilgrim-pure palate.

As we approached Gotham Hall’s regal colonnade, we were beginning to feel slightly faint. Swaying ever so slightly in our heels, we dashed upstairs, past the congested red carpet, for some sustenance, which, before we could object, came in the form of a flute of 1999 Cuvée Louise Pommery Champagne. We weren’t alone in our pre-sunset indulgence: after a lap around the room, we noticed 25 empty bottles of bubbly neatly (and proudly) displayed at the bar. But a few minutes later, the tally was trente-cinq. At that point, we stopped counting. Read More

By Kat Stoeffel 2/22/12 10:29am

off the record

GLAMOUR

Glamour’s Fashion Week Makeover Montage

At first we thought it was an elaborate social experiment. A few days before New York Fashion Week, Condé Nast’s populist women’s magazine, Glamour, announced it had teamed up with hipster depot Opening Ceremony to bring readers an exclusive and stylish offer: a cat sweater—that is, a sweater embroidered with face of a cat—available in black and white, which would retail online for an affordable $99.

Was the joke that the Opening Ceremony imprimatur and Glamour’s platform could convince fashion lemmings like us that cat sweaters are cool? Come next Fashion Week, would we be reading a Glamour tell-all about how it gamed the fashion marketing machine to trick us into spending $99 on a garment most often found in a Midwestern Salvation Army?

Not likely.

It turns out the cat sweater was just one of a slew of unconventional but earnest marketing experiments Condé Nast’s stumbling cash cow debuted at Fashion Week—foremost its redesign. Read More

By Meredith Bryan 5/26/09 10:43pm

Here Come the Braids!

“I’ve been sporting braids for years now,” said Allison Pottasch, 20, who—stopped in Union Square on Monday, May 25—was wearing a loose-fitting purple shirt, jean shorts and a silver nose ring, her thick brown hair parted down the center and arranged neatly into two of spring 2009’s ubiquitous Heidi-esque braids (the Swiss orphan, not the Read More