Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i Town & Country

CREATIVE ARISTOCRACY ’23 Introducing the Kings and Queens of Culture Now A SNOB’S GUIDE TO… Provence, Hawaii, London & Chicago College Admissions CHAOS How to Keep Calm and Common App On Our Coats, OURSELVES Uptown Swindler SYNDROME A True—and All Too Common—Tale of Art and Betrayal Let’s All Just Move in With RALPH Hair by Danielle Priano for SexyHair. Makeup by Hung Vanngo at the Wall Group. Nails by Kayo Higuchi for Chanel Beauty. Production by Area1202. Shot on location at the Plaza Hotel in NYC…

WHERE ARE WE GOING? The 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s birth has been celebrated all year at museums around the world. (Did you see his cypresses at the Met? His suburban landscapes at Chicago’s Art Institute?) This month a new show at the Musée d’Orsay brings together more than 50 works the artist completed during the last two months of his life, which he spent in a village outside Paris. OPENS OCTOBER 3, MUSEE-ORSAY.FR WHAT ARE WE WEARING? When Blancpain introduced the Ladybird in the 1950s, it was a feat of innovation, made for women and—this is important—by a woman. It’s still as technologically impressive as it is unapologetically feminine. See: the curves of those Roman numerals, available now in colors like lilac and turquoise, and all those diamonds…

William Li has unfinished business. “All I wanted to be when I was in college was an art dealer,” the T&C contributing editor says. “But that world was so rarefied when I graduated, there was no clear way to enter.” Li found success in different arenas: He worked in magazine publishing, leaving his mark on titles including the New Yorker. He followed that with eight years at Ralph Lauren, four of them as the global brand president of Ralph Lauren Home. In 2019 he returned to media, co-hosting and producing Lucky Chow, the Emmy-nominated PBS series about Asian food and culture. All of these careers have been fulfilling, but Li never lost his passion for art. This year he did something about it. In February Li launched Armature Projects, an…

1955 The theater known as the De Lys is bought as a gift for Lucille Lortel. Her first show: a still-legendary Threepenny Opera. 1961 Threepenny closes, making room for Noël Coward and Norman Mailer works and performers like Bernadette Peters. 1978 A hot streak begins with Buried Child by Sam Shepard (right) and Cloud Nine. In 1981 the theater is renamed the Lortel. 2008 A new generation arrives. Neil LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty debuts, and soon the theater sees stars like Oscar Isaac. 2023 After a yearlong, $3.5 million renovation, a new Lortel hosts a season including a starry revival of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.…

SIMPLY TACORI In the early 2000s the jeweler debuted a modern (yet still brilliant) antidote to the era’s over-the-top styles. SIMPLY TACORI ROUND SOLITAIRE ENGAGEMENT RING ($3,690 NOT INCLUDING CENTER DIAMOND), TACORI.COM DANTELA New technology made possible designs like this one, with its complex, lace-inspired openwork. TACORI DANTELA ENGAGEMENT RING ($4,890 NOT INCLUDING CENTER DIAMOND) AND BAND ($3,990), TACORI.COM FOUNDER’S CRESCENT The Crescent was deconstructed and reborn as a minimalist heirloom. TACORI FOUNDER’S COLLECTION ENGAGEMENT RING ($3,390 NOT INCLUDING CENTER DIAMOND) AND BAND ($3,190), TACORI.COM…

COUNCIL FOR NATIVE HAWAIIAN ADVANCEMENT Its Kako’o Maui Fund has found corporate and philanthropic donors to match donations up to $3 million. HAWAII COMMUNITY FOUNDATION Its Maui Strong Fund is in constant contact with people on the ground to meet evolving needs. AINA MOMONA In addition to collecting for the Maui Strong Fund (above), it has a fund dedicated to firefighters affected by the Maui blazes and another raising money to distribute aid directly to affected families. BABY2BABY Experts in helping children in peril get crucial supplies, this organization launched a million-dollar fundraiser in the aftermath of the fires to deliver diapers, formula, baby food, and other hygiene products to Maui.…

MY CABIN The entry-level but cleverly designed Veranda Suite lacks nothing: outdoor deck, sitting area, walk-in closet, shower and tub, two full-length mirrors, heated gear locker, large flatscreen. A perfect cocoon. THE SWAG Complimentary Helly Hansen polar jacket and liner (you can swap sizes onboard if you need to). DAI LY EVENING RECAP A great way to ease into evening, prep for tomorrow, and learn about: Arctic geology, flora and fauna; Viking history; polar exploration; the role of Greenland during WWII; and more. Drink service provided. MEAL TIMES A la carte at every meal (and self-service except at dinner), plus opportunities to dine with crew and lecturers (who are also available to answer questions throughout the voyage). “CLEANNESS” OF THE SHIP Ask for a briefing from straight-talking environmental officer Phil…

A Adam Sheffer wanted his money. It was May 8, 2023, and Sheffer, a veteran art dealer and former executive at Pace Gallery and Lisson Gallery, stood face to face with Lisa Schiff, an art advisor and founder of SFA Advisory, who over the past two decades has acted as an art market fortune teller for the rich, famous, and powerful. Schiff could seemingly do it all: unearth the next hot painter, find highly coveted classics, negotiate sales at breakneck speed, and defy conventional wisdom by acting as a genuine mentor rather than a stuffy art snob. Sheffer had been a client and close friend of Schiff’s for years. She was a conduit through which he bought and sold fine art. Sheffer’s most recent sale was an Adrian Ghenie painting.…

I was high above the Peloponnese, staring at a diamond bib with a 43-carat Australian opal, a 20-carat Paraíba tourmaline, and 91 carats of tanzanite, and all I could think of was Socrates. We were, admittedly, at the presentation of Francesca Amfitheatrof’s Louis Vuitton High Jewelry collection at Amanzoe, a hotel complex on the east coast of the Greek peninsula, and the room was lit to resemble a cave (different Greek philosopher, I am aware, but let’s free-associate). It suggested to me a Socratic-like method, which I could use to understand the immensity of the aquamarines and yellow sapphires and rubellites and emeralds I was surrounded by and connect them to the talk of tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions and colossal waves that filled the room. “Beautiful things,” Socrates concluded,…

“If Athens shall appear great to you,” Pericles famously said, “consider then that her glories were purchased by valiant men.” The great Greek orator may very well have been referring to himself—he did, after all, preside over the city’s Golden Age, a splendid era that gave us Socrates and Plato, the Parthenon and the plays of Sophocles. He would also have been impressed by the patriotic deeds of Antonis Benakis. Born in 1873 to wealthy Greek expats, Benakis spent his formative years in Alexandria, Egypt, before the family resettled in Athens—in a neoclassical marble mansion facing the National Garden. There he laid the groundwork for what would become a sprawling art collection charting Greece’s entire history, from classical antiquity and Alexander the Great to the Byzantine Empire and Ottoman rule,…

CAPOTE’S SWANS “All literature is gossip,” Truman Capote told a magazine in response to the fury unleashed after the 1975 publication, in Esquire, of an excerpt (“La Côte Basque, 1965”) from the roman à clef he would never finish, Answered Prayers. His swans disagreed. For more than a decade, the empresses of New York’s haut monde, led by the T&C fixtures on this page (clockwise from top left, C.Z. Guest, Slim Keith, Lee Radziwill, and Babe Paley, all photographed for this magazine), had welcomed Capote into their rarefied circles and swaddled him in the warm glow of their wealth and beauty, pedigree and charm. They had unwittingly armed him, too, with their dirtiest secrets, which he would expose in the fateful story that would spell his swift social demise. The…

“I ’m not a guru,” Cleo Wade says. Her 780,000 Instagram followers—and celebrity fans like Gwyneth Paltrow and Meghan Markle—might disagree. For the better part of the last decade Wade has refashioned poetry into a modern art form, harnessing the power and reach of social media to deliver her handwritten manifestos and poignant free verse. “I was always drawn to poetry, because it felt like a place where you could tell a story without rules,” she says. “And it has always provided this space where I didn’t feel alone during really lonely periods.” In her new book, Remember Love, out this month, Wade reflects on our current times, offering a gentle guide to life in such topics as perfection and letting go, heartbreak and loss. “I don’t have the answers,”…

IN THEORY & PRACTICE TIP 1: LEARN THE LANGUAGE Wearing currency as jewelry dates back to antiquity. In the 1960s Bulgari made it haute with the Monete, casting ancient Roman coins in diamonds and gold. TIP 2: IDENTIFY YOUR IDOLS Renaissance beauty Simonetta Vespucci accessorized well for her Botticelli portrait (right). Other savvy money managers: Diana Ross, Grace Kelly, and Giovanna Engelbert. TIP 3: EXERCISE GRAND GESTURES It’s true of all jewelry investments, but especially when it comes to numismatic ones: Provenance matters. Don’t worry. We’ve done the work for you. NEW THINGS IN OLD PLACES How do you honor your Italian roots? Move into a neoclassical palazzo on Milan’s most famous shopping street, as Ippolita Rostagno has done for her jewelry brand’s first European store.…

Golfers tend to cherish the traditions of their sport, its centuries of history, its indomitable champions. The British Open, the oldest of the game’s four major championships, is revered around the globe in part because the format of 72-hole tournaments has never varied. You can tell at a glance whether Brian Harman, who won the claret jug this past July, played Royal Liverpool better or worse than Harold Hilton in 1897, Bobby Jones in 1930, Tiger Woods in 2006, or Rory McIlroy in 2014. This parade exemplifies golf’s traditionalism, which to the dismay of many has lately been shaken to the core—a persistently breaking sports story that has much to do with business, social norms, politics, morality, and money, money, money. In 1968 a group of touring professionals created the…

Wannabe influencers crowding the lavender fields of the Abbaye de Sénanque. Snaking traffic on the Basse Corniche. The absence of personal space at Club 55. No reservations at La Vague d’Or for six months. Ah, summer in Provence. These are a few of the inevitable realities that come with a holiday in France’s most popular region during its most popular season. There are merits, too: the weather, swimming in the warm Mediterranean, rosé toute la journée. But pick the right time in September or October (or even May or early June), and you’ll get all that, plus a taste of the authentic Provence, the one that Peter Mayle fell in love with in the 1980s, the one that convinced Gerald and Sara Murphy to move to the Riviera in the…

My first sighting of Greenland was from the window of a charter plane flying last June from Reykjavik, Iceland, to Kangerlussuaq, 30 miles inside the Arctic Circle. As we neared Greenland’s eastern coast, the navy blue of the North Atlantic gave way to a white-on-blue, ice-strewn chaos—Jackson Pollock on a planetary scale. A dark band of jagged coastal mountains followed, and then a monolithic whiteness: We were over the Greenlandic ice sheet, with its massive glaciers, an uninhabitable remnant of Earth’s last ice age 100,000 years ago. The ice sheet still accounts for four-fifths of Greenland’s territory; it’s as deep as two miles, and it weighs an unfathomable 3 quadrillion tons (which creates an “isostatic depression” in Earth’s crust). The ice sheet and its glaciers are now famously and alarmingly…

How do you define the enduring appeal of some of the most storied women of the 20th century? Ryan Murphy has a thought. “They were like the original Real Housewives,” he says, not without a hint of admiration. “That’s something now that people are obsessed with.” In fact, he’s banking on it. This winter the limited series he produced, Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, will premiere on FX, bringing to the small screen what may still be the most chattered about society scandal of all time. It dramatizes what happened when Truman Capote, having spent years as an intimate of Park Avenue lionesses, wove their deepest, most mortifying secrets into “La Côte Basque, 1965,” a thinly veiled piece of fiction published in Esquire. For those of us who revel in…

In late June, when the Supreme Court banned the use of racial preference in college admissions, Anna Lisa Raya was driving in her car after dropping off her middle school son at camp. Raya is a first-generation Latina who grew up in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles and attended Columbia University, and her four years on an Ivy League campus came flooding back to her as she listened to the news on NPR. At Columbia, she recalled, “I felt like an alien. I was sitting there with all these prep school kids and legacy kids and people who knew their whole lives that this was going to be their path,” she says. “There are so many of us who don’t come from that, yet we still need to…

“Is that supposed to be pretty?” “That” was a coat. My coat. The questioner: Dennis Freedman, master of deadpan delivery and, at the time, creative director of W magazine, where we both worked. The coat, which is still in my repertoire more than 20 years later: a floor-sweeping, spliced-together leather shearling with a tribal warrior vibe, aggressive yet oddly elegant in the de-and re-constructed manner of the genre’s genius, Martin Margiela. No, Dennis, it’s not supposed to be pretty. It’s supposed to be noticed. Oh, the wonders of a great coat. Outerwear does more than keep you warm. It announces the wearer—it says something about who you are, particularly in cold, walkable climates. (Hence the oft-quoted line, “In New York, your coat is your car.”) A fabulous coat can captivate.…

LIBRA SEPTEMBER 24–OCTOBER 23 Be ready to change your mind and then change it again this month. Various situations will turn out not to be what they seem, and your own perspective will also be shifting. The good news is that you’ll be able to get a better grip on finances, and even if close connections feel as if they’re on uneven ground, they’ll be entering a far happier stage by the 22nd. SYLVA & CIE ($15,625), MARISSACOLLECTIONS.COM SCORPIO OCTOBER 24–NOVEMBER 22 Issues that have been in the air will begin to clear away as October unfolds, but with the Sun in a hidden part of your solar chart until the 23rd, don’t try to rush the pace. New plans will come to fruition in ways that inspire you to…

LA RESIDENCIA, A BELMOND HOTEL Discreetly tucked among the honey-colored stone houses of Deià, an artsy village long favored by creative aristos (most famously the author and poet Robert Graves, who fell in love with the place in 1929 and never looked back), this glamorous property has seen its own share of A-listers seeking refuge, from Princess Diana to Michelle Obama. It’s not hard to see why, what with all the intimate corners framed by olive groves and lemon trees, and views of the village below and the Serra de Tramuntana mountains beyond. The service, as you would expect, is excellent, as is the food. You can trust the hotel chefs to craft a menu of local dishes that may include prawns from Sóller, lamb from Tramuntana, and, a must…

1 DON’T BE A DRAG At what point does a destination wedding become an inconvenience? Your friends may love you, but they have their limits. “One size doesn’t fit all,” says Jung Lee, the NYC event planner and founder of Fête, though she admits she has never had a client plan more than four days. “Hosts should be aware that travel is taxing enough.” 2 ACCOMMODATE ACCORDINGLY If a couple aren’t paying for guests entirely, they should make it up another way, whether by covering meals or subsidizing hotel costs. “This isn’t a restaurant where everyone goes dutch,” Lee says. “You can have the most luxe wedding, but asking your guests to pay too much can taint the good.” 3 HOLIDAY WEEKEND? MAYBE NOT Want to use a long weekend?…

I was an intern at Ralph Lauren Home in my junior year of college. My first day there coincided with the opening of the Ralph Lauren offices at 650 Madison Avenue. My very generous boss invited me to join the festivities. Did it all begin for me that day? In a way it did. I remember standing on the landing looking down at the mahogany, tartan, and burnished leather, the heaping bowls of M&Ms on those perfectly tableaued tables, and thinking I liked where this was headed. Thirty years later I was back in the reading room at 650 to see early galleys of Ralph Lauren: A Way of Living (Rizzoli), a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Ralph Lauren Home and, really, of the universe Mr. Lauren has created.…

What does it take to conquer K2, the second-tallest mountain in the world (after Everest)? According to Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli, the first climbers to achieve the feat, in 1954, one needs a dash of determination and a hardy Moncler down jacket. Little did they know their sartorial decision would reach far beyond the outdoors. In the 1980s Italian journalist Grazia Coccia documented the jacket among Milan’s fashion-forward crowd. It is even more daring today: Valentino reimagined Moncler’s jacket as a gown, and Mercedes-Benz turned it into their signature G-Class SUV. The Moncler brand has been synonymous with high peaks for 70 years, a fact of which its new Karakorum capsule collection is a friendly reminder. Three new models give a lesson in Moncler History 101: The original 1954…

The lines on our faces have been frozen, the dark spots faded, the flaky cells blasted away, the collagen revived with retinol. Our faces, it’s safe to say, are in a good place. But what of our knees? We are, it seems, collectively turning our eyes downward and realizing…one of these things is not like the other. Dermatologists and surgeons are noting a tremendous upswing in requests for anti-aging interventions below the jaw, from erasing forearm freckles to de-wrinkling crepe-textured ankles to re-plumping thin-skinned hands. “It’s not as if we have new technology or treatments to address these issues,” says Dr. Robert Anolik, who practices at the Laser & Skin Surgery Center of New York, “but people are more aware of what can be done to improve skin on the…

To describe Farrow & Ball as a paint manufacturer is to call Hermès a maker of handbags. With the subtle touch of a luxury label, the British company has recast a common household item as a status symbol; its products’ names are whispered with almost religious reverence. Mole’s Breath. Purbeck Stone. De Nimes. I’ve used them all, but the last is a personal favorite, a Regency blue so called for Nîmes, France, the city where denim was invented. Color, as the F&B faithful know, is the house signature, so it made sense when creative director Charlotte Crosby reached out to fashion designer Christopher John Rogers for the line’s second guest collaboration. Rogers, an exuberant, unapologetic colorist, worked with the Dorset-based brand for a year and a half to develop a…

I started visiting Chicago regularly after college, when my closest friends moved there. We went to the old Bistro 110 and felt very proud when we graduated to drinks at the Violet Hour and the Aviary, and then dinner at the Publican and Girl & the Goat (still favorites). There are things on this list I’ve loved for 30 years. Others became musts more recently. I also get a little help from my highly opinionated friends and family. Let’s call them the HOFs. 1. Check into the recently refreshed and perfectly located Park Hyatt Chicago. Ask for a lakeside room (on an upper floor). The Lake Michigan and Park Suites feel as if you are actually on the water. 2. “Walker Bros. for breakfast!” HOF and Chicago native Brooke Garber…

GREENLANDIC ICE SHEET The renowned melting mother lode, formed of snow compacted over more than 100,000 years. (Antarctica’s is bigger but melting more slowly and with less effect on sea levels.) An early European explorer called it the “mysterious desert.” Unless you’re a polar pro or scientist, you will not be going on it, but even from the coast you feel it. ICEBERGS Fantastically shaped hunks broken off from glaciers as they slide out from the central ice sheet into the ocean. The older and harder they are, the bluer they look. Beware: A 5-meter-tall iceberg goes down another 45 meters below the surface. SEA ICE Frozen seawater, it’s softer, flatter, and murkier than icebergs. Its annual melting has no effect on sea levels. BERGY BITS Icebergs smaller than a…

How do you succeed as a young creative person today? How do you make it? What does it even mean to make it now? The old models, pathways, and rules—some not even that old—have been scrambled and upended in the past few years, as the traditional gatekeepers and arbiters are replaced by the herky-jerky algorithmic democracy of social media. In place of the lowbrow-highbrow divide, we spend much of our lives immersed in one of several competing popular cultures—Oppenheimer vs. Barbie?—that demand that you pick sides to participate. The question is no longer so much whether you should sell out, but how to sell at all, and to whom. For much of 2023 Hollywood has been on strike because of the fear that the suits, who always found the creatives…

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“We always knew we’d be married here,” Henri Neuendorf says of the striking pink modernist Mallorca estate where he exchanged vows with Molly Krause over a sunny weekend this past summer. In 1986 his parents Hans and Caroline commissioned architects John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin to create a vacation retreat for the family. (Hans, a German art dealer, once exclusively represented David Hockney, Cy Twombly, and Lucio Fontana; he is also the founder of Artnet.) The wall of one room is still etched with the heights of the Neuendorf children. “I’ve been going there every summer since I was born. I grew up moving around a lot, and this house is a consistent home for me,” Henri says. It was more than childhood nostalgia that made this house the perfect…