As everyone scrambles to find new job, the classic interview suit might be making a comeback. [NY Times]  

Jon Hamm appears very un-Don Draper-like in the new Gap ads, smiling and being hugged by his girlfriend Jennifer Westfeldt. [Racked]

Donna Karan on why she would like to dress the Obamas: “It’s not about her clothes, it’s really about who she is, and her passion for children, culture and wellness. I’m hoping to get to work with them — it would be my dream. They are so committed to ideals that are much in alignment with mine.” [WWD] 

Naomi Campbell has recorded a duet in Hindi with a Bollywood star named Akshay Kumar for a new animated feature called  Jumbo and will appear in the video to go with it. [Vogue UK] 

A reminder: Rai Kawakubo's Comme des Garcons collection for H&M arrives in stores Thursday, November 13. Prepare to lose a limb. [Vogue UK] 

Actress Kate Winslet is angry at photographer Steven Meisel for talking her into posing nude on a piece of what she thought was fake fur in Vanity Fair. According to the magazine's spokesperson, the fur was real. [NY Daily News]  

The fashion website StyleCaster.com doesn't launch until January. But this week they will debut a series of short films featuring models, designers, and it girls like Catherine Fulmer, Jessica Joffe, Molly Watts, Abigail Lorick, and Gillian Hearst-Shaw. [FWD] 

Beyonce arrived for her shoot with Bruce Webber for V magazine in an Obama t-shirt and with the president-elect's name manicured on her fingernails. [WWD] 

Did she ever hurl a phone at me? A hanger? She may have done, but given the vast difference in our respective heights, it probably sailed right over my head. The occasional hissy fit? Not on the occasions when Herb Ritts or Steven Meisel shot her for Barneys’ advertising. But if I had her legs—and I speak as somebody whose legs are pretty darned attractive—I would pull a diva fit every now and then. People expect it. People enjoy it.

Last Wednesday night, I watched Miss Thing vamping through the doors of Downtown Cipriani, fresh from a day of sluicing and scrubbing turlets. Even Danny DeVito and Rachel Zoe shut their gobs as La Campbell—white fur cape, huge shades—scythed her way through the sidewalk smokers to her waiting S.U.V., every inch the movie star, albeit sans movie. Vive La Campbell! Being that glamorous is a burdensome and time-consuming job: Thank God there is somebody prepared to do it. She should be applauded and thanked for adding sizzle and style to our humdrum lives.

While Naomi was doing her last day of community-sanitation work, I was up at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, Mass., and similarly occupied.

Let me clarify: When the john in our suite started spontaneously gurgling and overflowing, I surprised my husband with my knowledge of plumbing. I sloshed through two inches of water, removed the back of the toilet, grabbed the ball-cock and saved the day.

Recalcitrant toilets aside, my Jonny and I had a lovely weekend at the legendary spa. Canyon Ranch remains a great winter getaway, not just for New Age truth- and wellness-seekers, but also for deeply cynical truth-avoiders like myself and my Jonny.

The yoga classes are fabulous; all the teachers sound like Laurie Anderson. I kept expecting them to break into “O Superman …. ” My fave? The daily 5 o’clock meditation. Forget about the spiritual aspect of it, meditation is the new un-BlackBerry, the only remaining opportunity in our culture to do absolutely nothing.

Though the simple, portion-controlled Canyon Ranch food is delicious, the real plus is the mise-en-scène. Mealtimes are like being part of a massive feminist-art installation. While chomping at the Bellefontaine Mansion dining room, and reading about how Judy Chicago’s famous Dinner Party now has a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum, all I could think was: “I do not need to go and see it, for I have lived it.”

Canyon Ranch is estrogen village. It’s all chicks, all the time.

If you’re a bloke and suspect that you might be a misogynist but aren’t quite sure, a stay at Canyon Ranch would provide the perfect litmus test. It’s all about a middle-aged woman.

Conversely, if you’re a guy with a fetish for middle-aged women, you would find Canyon Ranch the ultimate turn-on. There they are, frequently attractive and often in fine fettle, hordes and hordes of them.

I am in the latter camp. I love middle-aged women, especially middle-aged Jewish women. They are chatty and amusing, and they support retail, which in turn supports me and allows me to take trips to Canyon Ranch. (Make your rezzie today: call 800-742-9000.)

Though chockablock with Barneys gals, the best thing about Canyon Ranch is that it has never fallen into the trap of becoming trendy. From the beige-y Italianate room décor to the wombyn’s art and crafts that adorn the public spaces, there is, thank God, nothing hip about it. Naomi would find it trés naff. While the rest of the world has gone to hell in a style-obsessed hand basket, Canyon Ranch has remained appealingly earnest and fabulously frowzy, the perfect antidote to the bitchy screech of N.Y.C.

The motto of Canyon Ranch is “The Power of Possibility.” This should probably be changed to “The Power of Platitudes.” From the affirmations painted on the walls (“Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have”) to the proverb-printed tea bags (“Wisdom sleeps in youthful moments”), everything is embellished with a message of wellness and healing. And all the guests—we contemporary urbanites are clearly starved for grandmotherly proverbs and axioms—were scribbling them down and savoring each one, including moi.

Here’s a good one I saved for Naomi: “Happiness is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”

Wombyn power!

There's a good reason, however, that the superego is at the wheel: Last week's edition also betrayed a creepily underdeveloped id.

In a fashion spread titled "Après Swim," New York presented the "latest swimwear inspired by the sultry feel of the seventies." The swimsuits, the magazine explained, "hark back to those long Montauk summers when Cheryl Tiegs and Peter Beard ruled the waves."

But the shoot harked back more like nine years, not 30. Instead of evoking the sunny adult sexuality of Ms. Tiegs, shot by Mr. Beard, the photos echoed the creepy mid-90's basement images of teenagers shot by Steven Meisel for Calvin Klein.

Things opened legally, if seamily, with a 20-year-old woman in a Tomas Maier swimsuit. In front of her, on a bed, lay a young man of unspecified age wearing "towel, Vintage."

Not all the models who followed were over the age of consent, though. A later shot presented a 15-year-old girl in a tiny black bikini, her developing body stretched out in an easy chair-and one arm slung behind her head, pinup-wise.

Any resemblance to underripe cheesecake was strictly accidental, the magazine insisted. "Come on," New York spokesperson Serena Torrey wrote in an e-mail, "this was hardly an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. These were tasteful, arty fashion pictures."

Another of the shots featured a half-dozen boys, ranging in age from the mid-teens on down, sprawled around a living room playing cards. The scene suggested a late-stage game of strip poker: The two oldest-looking boys wore a shirt and a pair of chinos, respectively; the younger four sported $877 worth of bottom-hugging short-short swim trunks among them and nothing else, save one wide-brimmed hat ($58).

The display of hairless skin so readily recalled Mr. Meisel's old headline-grabbing work for Mr. Klein that its skeeziness registered as meta-skeeziness. Like Halle Berry flashing her boobs in Swordfish -or like New York magazine putting a buck-naked model on the home-delivery cover of its summer edition-it was too pleased with being provocative to provoke anything.

Did the spread draw any reader response at all? "[N]one whatsoever," Ms. Torrey wrote.

Joyce Rutter Kaye, editor in chief of Print magazine, could have told New York magazine that porn-inspired imagery is old hat. The pornographic aesthetic, Ms. Kaye said, "has seeped rapidly into mainstream culture without people questioning the impact that this has on society."

So for its July/August edition, Ms. Kaye's magazine-a 42,000-circulation bimonthly aimed at the design profession-came out with its own "Sex Issue." The title, in bulbous and veiny pink letters, was concealed by a brown-paper belly band labeled "Graphic Content."

Get it? "Graphic Content"?

Alas, Ms. Kaye said, the readership didn't necessarily appreciate the joke. Within a week of the magazine's arrival in mailboxes, she said, her office had gotten dozens of phone calls and 60 letters-"extraordinary for a magazine our size." Usually, Ms. Kaye added, an issue of Print draws 8 to ten letters over a span of two or three months.

Unlike most scandal-managing editors, Ms. Kaye would not claim the reader feedback had been mixed. It was, she said, overwhelmingly negative.

"It's been a bit disheartening," she said.

Many outraged subscribers, Ms. Kaye reported, have told her they threw the magazine away unread. "If they're not going to consider the reporting or read it at all, I can't respond to that," Ms. Kaye said. "It becomes a moot point."

If the images seem smutty, well, they're other people's images. That's what Ms. Kaye is trying to get across. The issue recaps images that put the tit in titillation: fashion shoots by Guy Bourdin of topless, battered-looking models; Steven Meisel's Opium ad of a nude Sophie Dahl on her back, fondling her own pale and upthrust left breast.

"No previous society has possessed the technological means or the social and moral willingness to broadcast and explore its sexual desires on this scale and to this extent," Rick Poynor wrote in the lead essay, "Designing Pornotopia."

And design professionals, Ms. Kaye said, "don't acknowledge their impact and responsibility" in the spread of sexual imagery.

What does sex look like through the lens of the design industry? Not especially raw. There's a self-referential collage of other publications' sex issues: The Advocate , ARTnews , Legal Affairs , Bust , Boston Magazine . The ubiquitous Ted Allen, of Esquire and Queer Eye , offers his critique of Playboy 's latest redesign, noting that "the type was actually more powerful in the 1970's."

In other typeface news, there's a short front-of-the-book review of smutty fonts ("Koksure is a dull sans serif formed of penises"). Other articles survey HIV-prevention campaigns and the history of sex-manual illustrations.

The most appalling glimpse of pink in the whole thing comes from a parody of pornography, a glistening composite of nonspecific private-looking parts.

Still, the issue was spicier than Print 's usual fare. What had been on the cover of the previous issue?

"I'm drawing a complete blank right now," Ms. Kaye confessed. Her memory stirred: For its European Design Annual, the magazine had run an illustration of a heart-the organ, not the valentine-with arteries representing participating countries. "The cover was pretty low-key," she said.

Readers expect trade magazines to be anodyne, Ms. Kaye said. That may have been the real broken taboo this time around; the reader response, she said, "shows sort of a misunderstanding of what journalism is about."

The sex edition, she said, is "waking them up to the function of a trade magazine, and I think that's really important."

So some of the readers have woken up grumpy. Most of those, Ms. Kaye said, live between the coasts.

"We're not hearing from people in major metropolitan areas," she said.

Big-city readers, wearied by the sassy likes of New York magazine, no longer react to the escalating skin. "Where do you go?" Ms. Kaye asked. "Do you actually show people in the act? That's really all that's left."

Where do you go, indeed? Confidential to Adam Moss: try penetration, or try Peoria!

Fourteen months of negotiations, one tentative agreement and a two-day byline strike couldn't make Dow Jones and Company and its union, IAPE 1096, come together on a new contract. Neither could two rounds of mediation.

So mediator Martin Scheinman, halfway through his third go-round with the battling parties on June 28, gave up on soliciting more counter-proposals and counter-counter-proposals. Instead, Mr. Scheinman called both sides in and suggested his own series of compromises: split the difference on wage increases and pad it with lump-sum bonuses. Modify the health-care plan. And shorten the whole contract.

That last step, which moves the contract-renewal date from May 1 to Feb. 1, was crucial. Dow Jones had insisted on a company-wide pay freeze for 2003. Under the old contract calendar, that freeze would have made IAPE members' 2.5 percent pay raises retroactive only to May 1, 2004. The compromise gives union members three more months back pay.

Not all members are happy with the deal, however. Dow Jones has a specified minimum-pay scale for entry-level workers; every year for their first few years, employees automatically move up the scale, with scheduled pay raises that can exceed 10 percent.

After all previous contract disputes, the company gave scale workers full credit for their service time. But under the current offer, in the name of the pay freeze, scale raises only go back to February 2004-effectively cutting workers out of nine months' seniority.

"It's a bad deal for them," said Theo Francis, a Wall Street Journal reporter and a New York location director for IAPE. "It is not what I wanted to see. I can't make it sound like that part of it is a good deal."

New "Vote No" signs have already appeared around the World Financial Center, where signs last year successfully urged members to reject union leadership's last tentative deal with management. If Dow Jones' second-quarter financial report, which comes out this Thursday, shows swelling coffers, resentment over the cutbacks could grow even more entrenched.

IAPE organizer Tim Martell said that reaction to the contract offer so far has been thoroughly mixed: In a series of three meetings he had with groups of workers, he said, one group was pleased with the deal, one group was "very upset" and the third was undecided.

"We're going to have to really begin selling this," Mr. Martell said. "The strongest selling point is that this is the best negotiated deal we can get at this time."

mid-70's, Anna Sui and Steven Meisel would encamp with a suitcase of

vintage clothes to Playland in Times Square. "We used to dress up all

the time," Ms. Sui remembered on March 3 as she looked into the

fevered eyes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's kaleidoscopically romantic

Venus Verticordia at the Dahesh Museum on Fifth Avenue.

"It was our favorite thing to do. it was sort of how Steven started

taking photographs," she said. The fashion designer and the

photographer would style themselves and their friends in elaborate

ensembles, then pose in the photo booths. On other occasions, they would

dress up at Ms. Sui's apartment, where Mr. Meisel had more time to

take pictures.

Those were the good old days before Ms. Sui and Mr. Meisel became busy

fashion tycoons. Later this month, Anna Sui will launch her first cosmetics

and fragrance lines at Saks Fifth Avenue, and then at Nordstrom, Sephora,

her shops here and in Los Angeles and Harvey Nichols in London, as well as

other stores throughout Europe. The products made their debut in Japan in

September and were, Ms. Sui happily reported, the No. 1-selling new item at

Isetan, the Tokyo department store.

The fashion designer stopped in front of Albert Joseph Moore's

intensely orange Midsummer , a painting of two maidens fanning a

third woman. "The Victorians loved to dress up and have themselves

painted in ancient situations," said Ms. Sui. "What I like about

these paintings is their quality of transporting their subjects to a time

more romantic and promising. People accuse me of that," Ms. Sui

said.

Her most recent collection, shown in New York on Feb. 17, celebrated the

folk singers of the 1960's. Models such as Naomi Campbell and Kirsty

Hume, as well as a few guys wearing Anna Sui men's wear, rocked down

the runway while Murray Lerner's film Festival , about the

Newport Folk Festival, played on a large-screen backdrop. Tweed dresses,

black-and-white wool outfits with lace, slip and smock dresses, ponchos and

ribbon-laced suedes, among other items, drew raves.

"I'm always trying to evoke an emotion," Ms. Sui

explained. "I wish people had that innocence now and sense of hope

that something new was going to happen. People are so jaded. We need to

have that kind of optimism. But I'm not creating something to wear in

1963. Maybe my shows confuse people. Take away the styling tricks and you

see I'm creating something for today's life style out of fabrics

developed today from the newest technologies."

Anna Sui wore fashionable black. Black boots, a black-and-white

embroidered pashmina shawl she'd fashioned into a skirt, a cashmere

twinset from Loro Piano, and a techno-fabric peacoat designed by Martine

Sitbon, a friend. "Some of my best friends are designers," she

said, dropping the names of Marc Jacobs, Vivienne Tam and Ms. Sitbon.

After the Dahesh Museum, Anna Sui's next stop was Gucci at 685

Fifth Avenue to collect the latest pair of black slingback pumps decorated

with peacock feathers (about $380). "Hope I wear them. I have so many

shoes," said Ms. Sui, shaking her head.

She was born in Dearborn Heights, Mich., the middle child of Chinese

immigrants. Her father is a structural engineer, her mother a homemaker who

studied painting in Paris. She has two brothers. Her family regularly

attends her fashion shows. As a child, her passion for fashion was first

observed when she would cross-dress favorite toy soldiers in tissue-paper

frocks to attend her version of the Academy Awards. As a teenager, she made

her own clothes and began her elaborate fashion archive with favorite pages

and ads from old Vogue s and Harper's Bazaar s. She still

has them.

Ms. Sui left Parsons after two years to work as a stylist for Steven

Meisel and designed for a series of Seventh Avenue fashion companies. She

started her own business in 1980. In 1994, when international interest in

New York fashion began to bloom, Ms. Sui organized her first runway show.

She opened a boutique at 113 Greene Street the following year. The

1990's were her decade.

"I was never about the status stuff in the 1980's or how much

you could put on your back," she said. "I've really come to

believe that you can dream anything and achieve it."

Mission accomplished at Gucci, Ms. Sui waded upstream on Fifth Avenue.

"This business and now the cosmetics line and fragrance is what

I've dreamed about since I was 4." Her goals for the new business

venture? "I have a certain fashion sense and spirit which I project.

Maybe not everyone can relate to it in the clothing, but they can capture

it in lipstick, a powder, the fragrance." Ms. Sui said she also hoped

adding a fragrance and cosmetic line to her brand would help generate

bigger business in stores in the American heartland. "I'm very

well represented in New York and California, but not so well in middle

America."

Ms. Sui's next stop was F.A.O. Schwarz at 767 Fifth Avenue to buy a

present for one of her nieces. En route, she paused in front of the windows

at Tiffany & Company. Taxis and buses screamed and hollered. The artist

Brice Marden, collar raised against the wind, crossed 57th Street.

"This is how I do things in love!" a young woman sobbed into her

cellular. Ms. Sui ducked when a tourist, with a Metropolitan Museum of Art

poster stuck like an arrow in his backpack, suddenly turned and walked

backward so as not to miss a single sight.

In between runway shows and product launches, Ms. Sui is moving from her

apartment in Chelsea to new digs she is decorating in Greenwich Village.

She has been reading as much as she can about the late decorator Rose

Cumming for inspiration. Cumming favored huge hats and fancied shades of

mauve. For entertainment, Ms. Sui said she might watch a video of The

Looking Glass War , which stars one of her favorite new obsessions from

the 1960's, the actor Christopher Jones. She surveyed the

anything-goes fashion scene on 57th Street.

"What excites me about fashion today is the fact that there are

choices," said Ms. Sui. "You don't have to dress in any

cookie-cutter way. The biggest change in fashion this decade is comfort. I

don't think we'll ever return to the formality of the

past."

She paused and questioned her last statement. "I have mixed

feelings about that," said Ms. Sui. "The greatest thing about

fashion is that it changes all the time. And the saddest thing about it is

it changes all the time."

Billy's List: Quiz time!

1. Who is Joe Satake?

a. The Elizabeth Arden makeup artist who's doing Monica

Lewinsky's television appearances, including the Barbara Walters

interview.

b. An avenging sommelier and fictional hero of a popular Japanese cartoon.

c. The former associate of Peter Marino hired to decorate Ira

Rennert's pile in Sagaponack, L.I.

2. Which recent Milan collection was Suzy Menkes describing in the

International Herald Tribune on March 3 when she wrote, "It

also showcased some of the most hideous and deforming footwear in the long

annals of female suffering"?

a. Gucci.

b. Versace.

c. Prada.

3. Ruffo Research is:

a. Candace Bushnell's new book, an updated version of the popular

1960's novel The Harrad Experiment .

b. the design team of Veronique Branquinho and Raf Simmons.

c. the trendy Upper East Side medical clinic dispensing various growth and

rejuvenating hormones, charging $50,000 for initial consultation and with a

six-month waiting list.

Answers: (1) b; (2); c; (3) b.

Having met by pure coinkydink (that's Miss Porter's speak for coincidence) this dawn on the American Airlines flight from Kennedy International Airport to Sint Maarten, Ian offered me a ride in his chartered prop from Sint Maarten to St. Barts. He's in the front row near the pilot. I'm in the back. We're coming in for a landing soon. I look up from the January Town & Country , where I am just reading that "landing in St. Barts airport is, for most travelers, the worst part of the trip." Holy Rashomon . They aren't kiddin'.

You see, despite myself, I've never been to St. Barts. This is my first trip. It was the habit of Mr. Stine to drag us to Telluride for the holidays. The only compensation? Wearing white fox in whiteouts. But we don't have Mr. Stine anymore, do we? To recap. Having resolved last New Year's to master minimalism, did so. Got rid of all trappings, including Park Avenue and Mr. Stine, chief executive-not-so-extraordinaire. Living at the Carlyle now and divorcing accordingly. Let all executives quake in their Loeb shoes in anticipation of my settlement. The spouse has risen! Landed! Whatever. (Make note: Send Lorna Wendt Hermès-whatever from Hermès boutique in St. Barts.) What does he need all that money for anyway?!

To land, the prop plane drops. No slow descent, dear diary. My stomach's in my Kelly bag. Because of tricky island winds, the plane swoops over a mountain and drops illogically onto the runway plowed into volcanic rock and I'm, like, dying. But we don't die. We deplane: Ian and Rita Schrager, their daughter, the housekeeper, and my dear friends Mr. Salt and Mr. Pepper, fictitious names for real characters, with whom I am taking a house this week.

The good news: The St. Barts airport is a tropical shopping center with an airstrip. J'adore that. But it's hot. Hate that. Mr. Salt and Mr. Pepper go off to secure the car and meet the man from the real estate office who'll lead us to the house. The Schragers' housekeeper is detained because-who knew?-some nationalities need a visa. Kelly Klein lands in a private plane. One of her traveling companions, an Australian polo player from Palm Beach, is detained, too. It's very chic to be detained at the St. Barts airport.

A host of ghostly suntanned rich men with lighted cigars and cellular phones-and the bleached blonds (boys, girls) who love them-slosh about wondering if their special express packages have arrived. It's a holiday. What's so important in all those air-delivered packages? I remember from the Telluride trips: les médicines . Overnight mail is how rock stars and whomever receive their drugs worldwide when they travel. Oh, please. Who else would tell you these things?

Can't get a straight answer from the clerk at duty-free shop if the Fracas perfume is the old strain or the new.

Meanwhile, the child psychiatrist Dr. David Shaffer, married to Anna Wintour, furrows past in a four-wheel something. They've taken a house again. The art director Raul Martinez is shopping for his household, which includes photographer Steven Meisel. Will we see Steven Meisel in a bathing suit? Here's Alan Grubman and Tony Shafrazi. I'm in Chanel flats, clutching a too-purple TSE cashmere turtleneck and still waiting for Mr. Salt and Mr. Pepper when (1) Veronica Webb and Russell Simmons drive by and (2) Stephanie Seymour and Peter Brant drive by and (3) I get it: St. Barts will be like walking naked through Balthazar.

Midnight: Desperately need sleep. Can't. Terrorized by lizard climbing on the cathedral ceiling. The hours pass. The lizard crawls. Try to relax. Tell myself small lizard is harmless. Listen to assortment of meditative tapes- The Artist's Way, The Language of Letting Go -but bubkes. (That's Yiddish for a lot of nothing; I used to be Jewish, then I got a Christmas tree.) Finally, the solution: See lizard; think handbag.

Sleep comes. Dream about why Jackie wore pink.

Dec. 28: J'adore the view! Awake to find lizard skedaddled. Draw blinds. See sea. The villa with the bedrooms is separated from the main house by a lovely pool and terrace. The house is built on a mountainside over the sea. The deep blue sea! Like so many sapphires toiling for a young girl's future, I'm thinking. The question is: to sunbathe or not? What is the likelihood skin doctor Pat Wexler is lurking in these parts?

Applied one-piece black Norma Kamali bathing suit and Ferragamo pareo, old straw Adolfo sun hat, new Chanel sandals in the style of Adidas slip-ons, and Clarins S.P.F. 15, with S.P.F. 30 on certain surgical scars here and there and, always, just between us.

To the kitchen. The servant problem. " Bonjour, madame !" I sing in the direction of Attila la Bonne, the maid. "Do you know the way to Hermès?" Grumble, grumble. Doesn't know.

Lunch poolside with Mr. Salt and Mr. Pepper. Drive in something called a Mini-Moke, a rattling golf cart, over treacherous mountain roads to safety of Hermès in the village of Gustavia. Town like something out of the Wild West but with parrots in the trees, big boats in said sapphire sea. Cartier cowboys. Banana tans. Everything toujours expensive. A copy of yesterday's New York Times for $6; smallish hotel rooms at the trendy Taiwana Hotel about $2,000 a night. We see (think naked at Balthazar): Crown Prince Pavlos and Princess Marie Chantal of Greece, Adam and Samantha Kluge Cahan, Alexandre von Fürstenberg, Sandy Gallin, Larry Gagosian, Donald Batchelor, Deborah Norville, Karl Wellner, Harvey Weinstein, and, last but not least, Sean (Puffy) Combs, whose entourage of affluent African-American compatriots, seen in sultry, sophisticated splendor all over the surf and turf here, has so rattled the confidence of certain rich white men in same said surf and turf, they have taken to calling the music man: Puffy Cohen. It makes then feel better.

Whatever. Was attracted to beige cotton jacket with Medusa buttons cut in the Levi Strauss style at Versace boutique. A bargain at $400. While trying on jacket, little hummingbird flew into shop. "It's Gianni," I whistled. Shopkeepers not amused. Grab broom. But, catch me, I'm felled at Hermès. Swooned through door but was kept out of main merchandise room by a blood-red rope put up so a high-roller named Marty Richards, of the Broadway show-biz Richardses, could shop! Phyllis Stine, shopper scorned! Before committing violent act, was heavily sedated.

Dec. 31: Come to from heavy sedation. Saw the new year in on the Virginian , the yacht formerly owned by John Kluge, chartered for a Caribbean cruise by Peter Morton. Understood this is the height of jet-set splendor. Fireworks. More yachts in harbor than seagulls. Kissed Mr. Pepper at midnight, Rose Tarlow and Richard Meier, too. Even Jasper Conran. Couldn't reach Mr. Salt.

Went to bed relatively early. Lizard on ceiling again. Thought handbag, but-first New Year's resolution probably impossible to keep-tried not to think Hermès.