By Drew Grant 1/24/12 9:22am

self improvement

The final look

Menace to Society: Wannabe It Girl Gets a Style Makeover

I’ve always been a great lover of fashion. I own a range of ball gowns and multicolor high tops, which can be pressed into duty as day or evening wear. I have at least four pairs of jeans, a few from recognized labels. (Well, someone would probably recognize them.) I even went to Bloomingdale’s last year after watching that Oprah episode and found out my bra size. It turned out I was wearing 36B when I was actually…larger than that. Double-letter larger.

I don’t even own a mirror; that’s how confident I am of my look.

Admittedly, my sense of style is somewhat singular. I’m creative, funky. I pair pieces that the “fashion world,” as it’s called, would label a “Don’t”—but then I’ll wear them for weeks at a time. Who says a $200 black cocktail dress can’t be worn with a lumpy blue grandma sweater, some purple Uggs, and a cape? Who says that maroon doesn’t go with red? People with mirrors, I bet.

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By The Editors 11/16/11 9:48am

Opening Shot

Evelyn Lauder.

Guiltiest Pleasures

The sad passing of Evelyn Lauder this week has us wearing our pink ribbons proudly (and also buying up half of Estée Lauder’s cosmetic counter at Bloomingdale’s). The cancer survivor, advocate and entrepreneur was one hell of a lady. You’d have to be to have Estée Lauder as a mother-in-law (we imagine her as the perfume magnate version of Anna Wintour’s surrogate in The Devil Wears Prada). But even a real Mommy Dearest couldn’t hold a candle this week to Patti Labelle. Read More

By Drew Grant 11/14/11 5:04pm

Obituaries

Evelyn Lauder and Elizabeth Hurley (Getty Images)

Evelyn Lauder, Remembered Through Vignettes

What words came to mind for the people who wrote Evelyn Lauder‘s obituary this weekend? Cancer advocate? Certainly…the woman pioneered the pink ribbon movement, and though she passed away nongenetic ovarian cancer at 75, her life after being diagnosed in 1989 was dedicated to living with– not dying from– the disease.

Survivor? That too: not just of cancer, but of Nazi-occupied Austria, which she fled from as a small child.

Fashion icon and perfume entrepreneur? Without a doubt. Though her mother-in-law Estee who may have founded the company and ran it with an iron nose, Ms. Lauder brought her own touch to the Estee Lauder brand; turning the small company into one of the most successful cosmetic companies in the world.

There are a lot of other words that fit Ms. Lauder as well: Benefactor, nurse, wife, mother, patron, New Yorker. ( The last in the truest sense of the word…an immigrant from “somewhere else” who consumed the city instead of letting it consume her.) To try eulogize Ms. Lauder would be like picking adjectives out of a hat made from cut-up stories of Princess Di, Mother Teresa, and Coco Chanel. So instead, we honor her memory by bowing to the best stories told from the people who knew her. Read More

By Michael Miller 11/03/09 11:25pm

Fear of Fiori? Vera Wang Toe-Taps Town Editor’s Capri-soiree

The island of Capri—which takes up only 4 square miles of the planet—has given us the Capri pants, the Capresi salad, the rocky passageways of Faraglione, the Villa Malaparte, Somerset Maugham’s The Lotus Eater and now Town and Country editor Pamela Fiori’s book In the Spirit of Capri, filled with history and images of Capri Read More

By Irina Aleksander 10/13/09 11:23pm

The Last Lady Philanthropist

It was Monday, Oct. 12, 8:30 a.m., and on the set of CBS’s Early Show in midtown, the socialite eminence Evelyn Lauder and the actress Elizabeth Hurley were sitting in the green room, getting their hair sprayed, their lips painted and their faces dabbed with foundation.

They were there to talk about the Breast Read More

By Irina Aleksander 6/10/08 5:23pm

Lauders Throw Engagement Party for Hilfigers

Last night Evelyn and Leonard Lauder hosted an engagement party for Tommy Hilfiger and fiancée Dee Ocleppo at the Neue Gallery on 86th and Fifth Avenue.

New York Social Diary reports that the evening was attended by Condé Nast’s part owner Donald Newhouse and wife Susan, Oprah gal pal Gayle King, Cinema Read More

By Sheelah Kolhatkar and George Gurley 5/03/04 12:00am

A New York Girl Who Did Good

“She made the world a prettier place,” Roberta Myers, editor in chief of Elle magazine, said on Monday night, April 26. She spoke of Estée Lauder, empress of the eponymous cosmetics empire, who had passed away on Saturday evening at her home on the Upper East Side. Nonetheless, a herd of black dresses and fuchsia Read More