uptown shabby

josh-hivescrop

Greenpoint Luxe: Brooklyn Scruff Invades Bergdorfs

The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel is currently cultivating a new kind of honey for its kitchens and bars. The hotel, where President Obama stays when he is in town, is used to painstaking attention to detail and extravagance, which makes its approach to the honey all the more intriguing.

Rather than relying on what could be called the Masa Imperative of luxury, after the top-dollar sushi joint that ships in fish from the Sea of Japan and the Bay of Spain with the urgency and costliness of helicoptered transplant organs (indeed, some of the fish are carried in organ containers), the Waldorf has gone in a direction more evocative of the Brooklyn Flea Market: its honey comes from beehives it is now keeping on a 20th-floor outdoor patio.

The initiative, brainchild of executive chef David Garcelon, relies on the expertise of the city’s premier beekeeper, Andrew Coté, who sells his own neighborhood-specific honeys at the Union Square farmer’s market. Read More

Fashion

Marc Jacobs, not moving to Dior (Getty Images)

Marc Jacobs Won’t Leave Louis Vuitton For Dior Because He’s Not Just Not That Into Couture

After the departure of Christian Dior’s  antisemitic creative director John Galliano earlier this year, rumors were a’swirlin that designer Marc Jacobs would leave his brand name at Louis Vuitton to go take the position at the equally high-end fashion house. But he didn’t! Why not?

Well, as he told Vogue this month, the reason he didn’t leave Louis was because he’s just not that into couture design. Read More

Warhol, Porn and Vuitton

The most interesting thing about Takashi Murakami, whose paintings, sculptures and merchandise are the subject of “© Murakami” at the Brooklyn Museum, is that he’s above shame. To know shame is to realize there are standards of behavior that, when bent or broken, cause remorse or, at least, self-awareness of having done wrong. Shame is Read More