Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i Town & Country

1988 LEONARD AND EVELYN LAUDER “There are some men that gravitate toward those they can impress, take care of, be the big shot,” says New York Times reporter Katherine Rosman. “I think Leonard Lauder, however, gravitated toward formidable women.” That much was evident in T&C’s September 1988 issue, in which we photographed the cosmetics scion at home with his wife Evelyn, a VP in the family business and an esteemed activist for breast cancer research. The couple were married for 52 years, until her death in 2011. Four years later Leonard found love again with photographer Judy Glickman (Rosman got the story for the Times), and they were together until his death, in June, at the age of 92. And though Lauder was one of the most successful and philanthropic…

WHERE ARE WE GOING? While we love a classic doomed romance, the Metropolitan Opera is opening the season with something new: Bartlett Sher’s adaptation of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon’s novel set during World War II about two Jewish cousins who create a comic book based on an anti-fascist superhero. Maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin will lead arias—and electro. SEPTEMBER 21, METOPERA.ORG WHAT ARE WE WEARING? A wild imagination is great, but it means nothing without a strong foundation. That’s the idea behind Rolex’s Land-Dweller, a fresh iteration of the Oyster Perpetual with fine-tuned parts and a suite of new patents, like the calibre 7135, which measures time to one tenth of a second and resists strong magnetic fields. When the sky’s the limit, these are important things…

Over one week this spring, Alexandra Eala became a superstar. She defeated former Grand Slam champions Iga Swiatek, Jelena Ostapenko, and Madison Keys to make it to the semifinals of the Miami Open and made her debut in the top 100. Her rise felt meteoric, but for Eala, now 20, it was the product of a lifetime of work. “The results that I’ve been getting,”she says, “have been cooking for years.” Eala grew up in Quezon City, a suburb of Manila, in the Philippines; her grandfather encouraged Eala and her brother to play tennis to secure scholarships at American colleges. Every day after school they would train at the local country club, where the courts were first come, first served, so her grandfather would arrive hours before school let out…

The sweet, soft, double-ply cashmere security blanket of quiet luxury that has swaddled fashion for the past few seasons is gone. Maybe it’s been shadow-banned. Perhaps it was mauled to tatters by the mad dogs of unstable markets. Whatever the case, soothing beige understatement has been replaced by something more brazen and complicated. The fall 2025 collections are defined by imaginative incoherence, wild mood swings, and extreme archetypes—to a degree that demands diagnosis. What is behind this acute case of fashion schizophrenia? The personalities are polar and multiple: British bohemian It girls at Chloé. Big, rich Texans at Schiaparelli. Colorfully committed members of the Audubon Society at Thom Browne. Belly dancers displaced from the set of Dune at Alaïa. Sensual vampires at Tom Ford. Fittingly, this season the Prada woman…

One hundred ten pieces, one 30-carat black opal, one 31-carat emerald, and seven years. When you’re taking in all the shine and sparkle of the singular pieces of the new Louis Vuitton Virtuosity High Jewelry collection, numbers may seem beside the point. Beauty is the main objective here, non? But often, at this level of jewelry design, the crucial details are in the digits. “In this collection,” a Vuitton gemologist tells T&C, “there is a necklace I am particularly proud of. It took us more than seven years to gather all the diamonds with the perfect combination of colors and sizes. It is the Eternal Sun necklace, which features a string of 27 yellow diamonds—extremely rare. They are a true miracle of nature. Today many gemological questions exist on this…

Earlier this summer, beautiful people gathered at Bergdorf Goodman one evening to learn how to become even more beautiful. The party, hosted by Nicky Hilton Rothschild, was for her celebrity dermatologist, Macrene Alexiades, and her skincare line, Macrene Actives—specifically its newest and most cult-obsession-eliciting product, the High Performance Eye Mask ($115 FOR 6 PAIRS, BERGDORF.COM). “Did I believe in the usefulness of undereye patches before this? Not really,” Alexiades admits. “Did I think I could make a product that was better than my eye cream? Certainly not. But these so outperformed my expectations.” Though she spends most days seeing patients, Alexiades considers herself an inventor and scientist first, so she considers it a triumph to create something that works as well as or better than what she can offer in…

PETIT PALAIS, PARIS:”WORTH: INVENTING HAUTE COUTURE” VICTORIA & ALBERT, LONDON: “MARIE ANTOINETTE STYLE”…

VIRGO AUGUST 24–SEPTEMBER 23 With Saturn moving backward and reentering the sign of Pisces on the 1st, you’ll need to revisit issues in close relationships and further explore plans and solutions. Be ready to adjust your perspective, be present, and really listen. Financial fine-tuning is also a theme right now, and the new Moon of the 21st stirs up issues around lifestyle changes. DOLCE & GABBANA ($8,745), DOLCEGABBANA.COM LIBRA SEPTEMBER 24–OCTOBER 23 September starts out on a strong note, because aggressive Mars in your sign is whipping up your fighting spirit. Jupiter at the top of your solar chart brings more success to your plans, but you’ll run into resistance by midmonth. Be prepared to do some thoughtful strategizing, and beat the odds by maintaining your celebrated poise. SEAMAN SCHEPPS,…

We’d all like to make it through the year’s most important books—so we can casually recommend them to friends or bring them up over dinner with bespectacled intellectual types. Alas, you may need a cheat sheet. Here are T&C’s picks for the fall’s best, and the lines that kick them off. PRIDE AND PLEASURE Amanda Vaill Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 21 One of our great biographers takes the Schuyler sisters out of Hamilton’s supporting cast and puts them front and center. “Shortly before eight o’clock on the morning of July 11, under a clear sky with a light breeze ruffling the surface of the water, four oarsmen rowed a boat across the Hudson River from Weehawken, in New Jersey, to the village of Greenwich.” WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER…

IN THEORY & PRACTICE TIP 1: LEARN THE LANGUAGE Egyptians first spread the word that peridot wards off evil. Greeks and Romans believed it too, as did medieval kings, who adorned shrines and regalia with these stones. TIP 2: IDENTIFY YOUR IDOLS The Habsburgs may have been the only royals to commission a peridot parure. Later, part of the set resurfaced on Joan Rivers at the 2004 Golden Globes. TIP 3: EXERCISE GRAND GESTURES The pharaohs figured out long ago that peridots glow quite well at night (especially when set in gold). If you can wear jewels to the beach, why not also take them to bed?…

Manhattan- and Aspen-based dermatologist Rita V. Linkner is as admired for her own flawless skin as for her skill in replicating it in her patients. Here she answers a pressing summer question: What can we do to reverse sun damage that gets through even ample SPF? Sunscreen is paramount, but a full prevention and repair strategy includes topical antioxidants, DNA repair enzymes, and in-office treatments, like lasers. Antioxidants like vitamin C help neutralize sun damage by donating electrons to neutralize free radical damage. DNA repair enzymes (like photolyase or T4 endonuclease) are good ingredients to add to your routine if you have precancerous or cancerous lesions. DNA repair enzymes minimize UV-induced mutations and have been shown to prevent the recurrence of actinic keratoses, the precursors to squamous cell cancers. Lasers…

Between the $56 million Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez and the exhibition opening in September at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum on the style influence of Marie Antoinette, extravagance is in season. Sánchez wears pseudo-18th-century corsets whenever, and they appeared so often with panniered skirts on the spring couture runways—at Dior, Schiaparelli, Valentino, and Gaultier—that it looked like 2025 going on 1780. Begone, quiet luxury! You got so boring. When Mar-a-Lago and the Met Gala glare brighter than Versailles and the Gilded Age, when maximalism rules again, it’s time to ponder Marie Antoinette, the first Queen of Excess. Marie Antoinette died of too much clothing. Somehow she did not notice the social and economic forces that brought the French monarchy to the verge of collapse. She blithely…

Shayna Loren, an advertising student at Boston University, decided to skip her Tuesday morning Pilates class. It was late April and, having partied with her friends the previous day to celebrate the Boston Marathon, Loren woke up a little hungover. She threw on sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers and made it to campus just in time for her first class of the day: Media Strategy. From there she scurried to From Concept to Cart, a Shark Tank–style course that focuses on bringing a new product to market (her group decided on a pill pouch that could be attached to a water bottle). And then, Public Speaking, where Loren had to give a presentation about what she hoped her future career might be, and why it was a…

It’s 10:30 a.m. and Dr. Sean Alemi is about halfway through a seven-hour surgery in a private operating room on the Upper East Side, just off Fifth Avenue. Kendrick Lamar is playing in the background as he slides his scalpel down the left perimeter of the patient’s face, having just finished meticulously stitching up the right side. He’s accompanied in the room by another facial plastic surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a nurse, and an assistant, plus monitoring machinery and trays of gleaming tools. The patient, whose before shots are pasted on the wall over Alemi’s shoulder, is 49, attractive, and suffers from the same condition that afficts nearly everyone 40 and up in this age of social media and Kardashians: a face that looks good, great even, but also looks—despite all…

JOE ALLEN Table or at the bar? Either works. BAR CENTRALE The guac. The dumplings. The fish tacos. Yes, that is who you think it is. ORSO “My idea of a perfect night,” Nora Ephron wrote, “is a good play and dinner at Orso.” We agree. Add the pizza, the chicken, and the tartufo. THE LAMBS CLUB Chicken paillard, Caesar salad, martini. Done. BUCHETTE DEL VINO Late but starving = emergency. Solution: a sandwich here. LODI The mortadella bouquet. The caponata. The tuna tartare. It’s in Rockefeller Center, so you can walk it off on the way to the theater. BKK Spicy Thai chicken sandwich. And your own little secret place.…

“I want to make theater that matters,” says Lear deBessonet, “work that invites a wide audience to experience the richest possibilities of what live theater can be.” It’s no wonder, then, that deBessonet picked Ragtime, the 1996 musical about the pursuit of the American Dream—and the harsh realization of American reality—by a group of early-20th-century characters, for her first production as Lincoln Center Theater’s new Kewsong Lee Artistic Director. “Ragtime,” she says, “felt like the perfect way to begin my tenure.” That may be partly because she knows it works. Previously staged as a gala presentation at New York City Center, this Ragtime revival, directed by deBessonet, features Joshua Henry as Coalhouse Walker Jr., a Harlem musician; Caissie Levy as Mother, a New Rochelle matriarch; and Brandon Uranowitz as Tateh, a…

It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time pistachios were not with us. They were born in the Middle East thousands of years ago, then traveled to ancient Greece and what would become Spain and Italy. (To this day, some of the best cultivars of the nut reside in Sicily, where you must eat as much pistachio gelato as possible. Casa Tua’s, in Miami and NYC, is glorious too.) The meaty green nuts finally arrived in U.S. in the late 19th century. Although California’s farmers produce more pistachios than any other part of the globe, they didn’t see a commercial crop until 1976. Now pistachios are turning up in everything we eat—seriously, there’s currently an international shortage—and it’s all because of a chocolatier in Dubai called Fix Dessert, which…

We have long fixated on her pearls, but we should have been paying more attention to the lace. In 1588, to celebrate England’s victory over the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth I was depicted in an allegorical painting swaddled in all her regal splendor. She had pearls in her hair, on her dress, and around her neck—but it’s that intricate spray of lace framing the queen’s virginal visage that was the true testament to her power. Making lace, when it began in northern Italy in the late 15th century, was an extraordinarily complicated and time-consuming endeavor; with centuries to go before the invention of machines that could do it, lace was made entirely by hand. “From its earliest days, it was a total status symbol,” says Elena Kanagy-Loux, a founder of the…

If you were a well-heeled traveler in the early 20th century, you might have possessed a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk equipped with compartments designed to prevent fragile fragrance flacons from shattering during sea voyages. Or perhaps a monogrammed leather toiletries case that opened like a jewel box to display powder compacts, tortoiseshell hairbrushes, and jars of face cream. (If you were soprano Marthe Chenal in 1925, your custom vanity case was made of crocodile; it’s now in the Louis Vuitton archive in Paris.) It was an era of elegance, consideration, and precision—one wouldn’t just let one’s luxe beauty accessories roll around in the bottom of a grubby tote. Even Louis Vuitton’s first handbags were created intentionally to give ladies an elegant way to carry their lipsticks. This history was the…

AD 80 Emperor Titus orders gladiator battles to celebrate the opening of Rome’s Colosseum. More recently President Trump announced he would host an Ultimate Fighting Championship at the White House to celebrate the U.S.’s 250th b-day. 1387 The host of a feast in honor of King Richard II serves 16 oxen, 140 pigs, 400 rabbits, 1,200 pigeons, and 11,000 eggs. More recently The proprietor of Dopo La Spiaggia, a restaurant in Sag Harbor, offered a “rocks on the rocks martini,” which comes draped with a 5-carat diamond necklace and costs $8,000. 1480s Lorenzo de’ Medici, banker and patron of the arts, hosts opulent carnivals in Florence at which he performs songs of his own composition. More recently In July, Broadway producer and patron Jordan Roth debuted Radical Acts of Unrelenting…

Just a few years ago, parents might have blanched if their college-attending offspring said they wanted to be influencers, even if their social media aspirations were more conventional (i.e., non-naked). That was before Goldman Sachs predicted that the creator economy (“individual people with their own brands and online audiences”) would reach $480 billion by 2027 and Forbes began publishing a Top 50 Creators list. So, how to get started? PICK YOUR LANE Student influencers who focused on beauty and fashion found early success on campus, as did those who chronicled unusual college experiences (see: Bama Rush). Now NCAA athletes, who won the right to profit from their names, images, and likenesses in 2021, are the fastest-growing category. Role Model: In 2024, Flau’jae Johnson, a basketball player at LSU, made Forbes’s Top…

I’m deep inside the Javits Center, on the far west side of Manhattan, for the first day of Fanatics Fest, a mind-blowing extravaganza that conjoins some of the biggest names in sports, the business of sports, popular music, and the world of social media influencers (IShowSpeed, anyone?) with thousands of, yes, their fanatics, who pay at least $60 per person and then pay even more for autographs and pictures. There is memorabilia up the wazoo, as well as opportunities to bet on sporting events, to buy and sell sports trading cards, to listen to sports media personalities blither, and to just generally soak up the vibe of celebrities and of their adoring fans and well-paid attendants. Equipped with an all-access pass and two genial handlers, I’m led into the bowels…

My friend Elaine Wynn, who died in April, was one of the visionaries behind modern Las Vegas. Alongside her ex-husband, Steve Wynn, she helped transform the Strip from a kitschy concrete and neon canyon into a global capital of luxury, spectacle, and aspiration. Though Elaine’s daring vision and flair for design led to dazzling hotels that felt like fantasy dreamscapes, the genius of the woman who was called the Queen of Las Vegas was rooted in her sense of empathy and humanity. To be at her side on the Strip was an outof-body experience. You felt the respect but also the affection everyone had for her, built up over decades of treating employees like extended family. A walk through a casino was like the tracking shot scene from Hello, Dolly!:…