Mary J. Blige hosted her first benefit for the charity she cofounded, Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now (FFAWN), at Barbetta in midtown Manhattan and raised $65,000 to assist abused women with education, career development, and personal growth. One hundred people came for an extraordinary summer supper, including crespelle alla savoiarda (which reminded me of manicotti), beef braised in red wine, and broiled Atlantic salmon with herb sauce and cucumbers (Steve Stoute, the other cofounder, wore a Polo Purple Label jacket the same color as the fish). Blige, wearing a brown Gucci dress and a pile of Lorraine Schwartz bracelets, gave a moving speech about how she grew up in “negativity in Yonkers.” She never finished high school and escaped the pain of her upbringing with drink and drugs, which she often references in her music. “But, women, don’t worry, none of it is your fault.”

Stoute had asked me to come to present the winners of the silent auction (Ciara won a set of monogrammed Gucci luggage; sunglasses autographed by Lenny Kravitz went for $2,000). Two days before the event, I was watching television when an AT&T commercial popped up on my screen featuring Mary J. in a one-woman fashion parade. It took me back to the first AT&T national television campaign of 1968, featuring Naomi Sims in a pink lace dress by Bill Blass. 

“Not since the late Naomi Sims, who passed away last weekend, has fashion had such an elegant image of style,” I said into the hand-held mike. It was my tribute not only to Mary J. but to the pioneering Sims, who died of cancer at 61 on August 1. Sims broke the color barrier for all models. I would go as far as to say, without her paving the road, journalists like myself and models would not have been possible.   Continue reading ›

The rain was torrential as I stepped to the curb at Sunshine Cinema for Focus Features’s debut screening of Taking Woodstock, Ang Lee’s virtuoso film on what was perhaps the last great moment, or metaphor for freedom, in our country’s history. The movie was already two minutes into the narrative when I arrived, so I couldn’t find a seat—and I wasn’t about to sit on the floor. The organizers must have interpreted my body language as an early departure, stalked me, and ended up escorting me to an overflow theater, where I was able to view the movie by myself from beginning to end.  

Played by Imelda Staunton, one of the finest English actresses alive, Sonia is in the first great screen moment, as she and her husband, and their son, Elliot (Demetri Martin), try to extend the mortgage on their shabby Catskills motel, El Monaco. As the cook, concierge, and manager, Staunton instructs Elliot to put dirty sheets right back on the bed after smelling them to check if previous occupants had sex. The movie is about how Elliot inadvertently spins into motion the setting of Woodstock’s location..  

Lee’s direction of the grand landscape of mud and people is magnificently handled, particularly in a scene where Elliot, who has dropped a blue tab of something, steps out of a minivan and sees the crowd of more than half a million as one dark, velvety tsunami, or an extraordinary human quilt. There is also a great scene where a cop sent by the governor of New York, who had declared Woodstock a disaster area, states with pride that he has come up to beat up a couple of hippies but ends up giving Elliot a lift, helmet now adorned with a fresh daisy, to the field where the stage is set. Lee’s camera sweeps us through antiwar protesters, organic-food tents, stands of lemonade or corn on the cob, as well as people stuck in a three-day gridlock, seated on hoods, giving the peace sign. (The epic volume of extras making the pilgrimage must have been a stimulus shot to the industry.) What could have been a yawn is like a moving diorama.   

I wish that had happened to me when I went to the three-day Atlanta Pop Festival in 1970, when Jimi Hendrix played in some field. I went alone on a bus from North Carolina to Georgia, hardly spoke to anyone, and slept under the stars for three nights in the same clothes I traveled in. I couldn’t find my best friends, two glamorous girls who had encouraged me to go. No cell phones back then, so I just sat or walked around (I was too afraid to get stoned or drop a tab!) in a black monkish robe, a large floppy-brim fedora, and black high-top boots like my grandfather wore. I hitchhiked all the way home, during which the first true act of racism hit me literally on the bum. Along I-95 North, a state trooper saw I was walking alone, came up to me, and put his boot in my gluteus maximus in broad daylight. I share this with you readers for the first time in my life. I didn’t tell anyone in my family; I was ashamed.  Already my grandmother was beside herself as I disappeared for three days and didn’t telephone home. (In the film, people line up to use pay phones, virtually an obsolete thing these days.) I finally got a ride in a van with a lot of young, hip white college students. I was dropped off three miles from home near midnight, and had to walk a country road in pitch-darkness. It was to me, my Edvard Munch moment—you know, the famous painting The Scream.  I prayed to get home in one piece. I was young. Continue reading ›

One morning last week, at 2:00 a.m., through a space between the screen and the bedroom-window frame, a bat swooped into this grand shambles of a house upstate. I felt like I was going into cardiac arrest. I grabbed a Chinese whisk brush (picked up for $25 at a market in Beijing) and rushed out the door and down the stairs, screeching and swatting the flapping creature as it swirled above my head. I opened the Dutch front door, hoping it would fly out, but next thing I knew, it had landed on my dining-room table. By the way, I have never had a meal at that table. When I saw it lying flat, I convinced myself (or more likely, I went into denial) that it was a mammoth black velvety moth in the shape of a stealth bomber, laid my brush on top of it, and heart racing, fled back upstairs to catch my breath. Two hours later, I opened my bedroom door, and it had managed to fly its way back upstairs and into my bedroom, with its pale-gray walls and sky-blue ceiling! I imagined rabies, vampires—why is this happening to me? I went downstairs and never went back to bed.

Fast-forward to midnight. I hadn’t been upstairs since the incident and assumed the Stealth Bomber had found its way out. But no. I spied it asleep on the top landing, luxuriating on my Elsie de Wolfe–inspired Starck faux-leopard-carpeted stairs. I got a lovely white shopping bag once filled with raspberry and chocolate macaroons from Benoit, a French bistro that was formerly Le Côte Basque. Gingerly and with great resolve, I placed the bag over it and decided, like Scarlett O’Hara, “Tomorrow is another day.”

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I am mad for fringe, simply wild about it! Ever since I found a full-on Wild Wild West fringed cowboy shirt and trousers behind the sofa, waiting to be put under the Christmas tree, when I was around twelve, I have been hooked. I have three fringed leather coats from Prada’s fall/winter 2007 collection. Originally they were shown for women, but I asked Miuccia Prada to design them for me—one in navy, one in bark, and one in ebony lined with white duchesse satin for evening. Vogue’s Tonne Goodman captured the classical twist of a fringe coat in her portfolio in March that year. Somewhere in a red trunk I had custom-made in Paris sleeps a suede cowboy jacket whose sleeves sport fringe to the ground, designed for me in the nineties by Chrome Hearts.

Zac Posen’s fall/winter collection has fabulous fringed dinner dresses. I asked Anna Cleveland—who brought high-spirited hijinks to his resort show—to try one, roll back the carpet in his studio, and do a Charleston step or two. “Fringe is for flirting without words,” he says. “It exaggerates every movement!” You can also find fringe on shoes, as in Christian Louboutin’s sexy peep-toe Deva booties or Manolo Blahnik’s Sendra sandals for fall. Oscar de la Renta’s resort collection featured a greige macramé-fringe bolero on Georgie Badiel; it had diamanté rondels in between the beads, worn over an embroidered silk organza dress. It called to my mind the great white fringe on a black robe de style by Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1939 Paris.

Full of swing and dash, fringe adds zest to day or night looks. Gabrielle Chanel knew that—just look at the ombré fringe dress and boa she designed in 1926—a watershed year in her career, as it was the same year she introduced the little black dress as a uniform for the modern woman. Fringe can also be sophisticated. In her memoir, D.V. (Knopf)—still read and studied by young fashionistas—Diana Vreeland wrote about her debutante dress in 1923, decorated with those stringy strands: “I doubt that my mother thought my dress was particularly suitable, but there was nothing she could do about it. It was copied from Poiret—white satin with a fringed skirt to give it un peu de mouvement and a pearl-and-diamond stomacher to hold the fringe back before it sprang. It looked like the South Sea Islands—like a hula skirt.”

André Leon Talley

Following Ashford & Simpson’s All White Party the night before, Dr. Maya Angelou received 200 guests at her compound in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for a noon Sunday brunch on July 5. “It was blue; then she decided it had to be yellow,” said Valerie Simpson as we rang the doorbell to the house, painted in the bright “buttah”-yellow hue one could only associate with Colefax & Fowler’s marvelous salon for Sibyl Colefax. Dr. Angelou was outside in her screened porch resembling an enlarged gazebo, towering above an enormous swimming pool that she had covered over to create a floor for the party. We admired her incredible sculpture garden. “I have had the same gardener,” she told us, “for the past 28 years.”
The event was catered by Simply Elegant, who prepared dishes like Southern ham and baked chicken from the Pulitzer Prize–nominated poet’s own recipes. At the end of the afternoon, everyone listened to Dr. Angelou, seated at her writing table in her family room, as she shared her thoughts on the importance of sharing this kind of reunion, a celebration of “Who we are.” She encouraged future generations to continue the Ashford & Simpson All White Party in other cities, like St. Louis, Chicago, and Los Angeles. (For nearly two decades, the producer couple held a party at their Connecticut estate where guests wore white, representing purity of spirit, all weekend. The event was about coming together, no matter one’s ethnicity or persuasion.) Afterward, guests—who came as far away as California and England—were shuttle-bused to Graylyn Estates, the manor turned luxury hotel once owned by R. J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray. (She was feted by Oprah Winfrey here when she turned 75.) Harlem-based choreographer George Faison, one of the original Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater soloists and the first African-American to win a Tony for choreography, for his work on The Wiz, led a mini cultural tour of African-American song and dance. Wearing all-white Polo by Ralph Lauren, he created a danse sauvage à la Josephine Baker, kicked his way through thirties chorus lines, and moved through Ella Fitzgerald and Diana Ross and the Supremes. Freddie Jackson performed an artful homage to Jennifer Holliday, the original Effie White. Joining Faison was Laura Smalls, wearing a brocade dress of her own design and shawl that looked like it was spun from the finest European lace. “I found it at Zara in Germany!” said Smalls, whose husband, Willis, invited me to their summerhouse on Martha’s Vineyard in August. Just around the time the Obamas are due to arrive!

Before leaving town, we paid a final visit to Dr. Angelou, the lifetime Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University, to thank her for hosting such a spectacular brunch. We found her, pencils and yellow legal pad in hand, drafting the poem that would be read by Queen Latifah at Michael Jackson’s memorial in L.A. last week. When recent UNC–Chapel Hill graduate Chase Hampton Beck asked if he could take a photograph with the former poet laureate, she obliged him but not without first dispensing this advice: “Stand straight, and never bow to anyone but God!” 

My favorite lines from “We Had Him,” by Maya Angelou:
“He came to us from the Creator trailing creativity in abundance. . . . We had him whether we know who he was or did not know, he was ours and we were his. . . . His hat, aslant over his brow, and he took a pose on his toes for all of us. . . . Today in Tokyo, beneath the Eiffel Tower, in Ghana’s Black Star Square. . . . We are missing Michael.”

—André Leon Talley

Auction house and appraisers since 1962, Doyle New York (once an antiques gallery) is a great resource for vintage high fashion in these recessionary times. Yes, you heard me—there are deals to be had here. 

If you are lucky enough to follow its auction calendar, you might come across incredible couture like Chanel dresses from 1930 or a floor-length mint-green ostrich Balenciaga opera coat, once owned by a chic Parisian Marquesa. Prices for original French couture clothes from bygone eras start at bargain-basement and go up (up meaning $42,000 for an ombré blue silk fringe Chanel dress and boa from 1926, sold to an important collection.) 

The house also auctions objects for the home. The summer Doyle at Home sales are one of the best ways to stock up on very good quality furniture and decoration, paintings, and carpets for a song. You can bid via telephone or online. At a sale in June, I found Baccarat hurricane lamps for $250 each; and two giant Empire-style mahogany mirrors that cost $550. Notice I said Empire-style. Original Empire would run into the thousands of dollars. 

“Our focus is to bring big estate properties to the client,” said senior vice president Louis Webre, who, like yours truly, remembers the estate sale of Bette Davis in April 1990 (my first experience with Doyle). There in the corner of the galleries was the detritus of the screen legend’s life, assembled from her last apartment in Los Angeles. Webre and I recalled the matched set of well-worn American Tourister luggage— four bags with with the monogram BD—that came in a lot with assorted garment bags; the whole lot was sold for $850. What really stood out were eleven small Patrick Kelly dresses. When Davis had grown thin from a long battle with cancer, the African-American designer, who shook up Paris ready-to-wear in the eighties with his giant-scale buttons on jersey dresses, dressed her for appearances on late-night television. “Those were teeny-weeny dresses, size 0,” Webre remembered as he looked up the fashion inventory from that sale, which included Ungaro, Valentino, YSL, and, of course, Hollywood designer Nolan Miller. A box of her soft eyelashes fetched $2,000, but the highest price of $21,000 went to a drawing, signed by costume designer Edith Head, depicting Bette Davis in the fur-trimmed satin dress she  wore when she uttered her famous “Fasten your seatbelts” line in All About Eve.

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First-time novelist Hyatt Bass was late for her own book-launch party. It didn’t really matter, though, because the party was being held at her mother’s Fifth Avenue apartment with Central Park views and art-filled, Mark Hampton–designed interiors.

Bass was my first intern when I worked at HG ages ago, where she sat in a corner of my office. At the end of the summer, we had lunch with her mother, Anne, at La Grenouille, and that’s when we really became friends. She wrote this in my copy of her book, The Embers (Henry Holt): “It all began with you, and our summer at House & Garden!! My first ‘job’ ever. Thank you so much for always being super supportive. Hope you love the book.” This is what mentoring is all about. When I admired her perfect-for-a-book-party gauzy, embroidered dress over black leggings, she teased, “I remember when you didn’t like Marni a long time ago!” Of her vintage piece, she said, “I never update my wardrobe, there’s no time.”

Among the guests were her mother’s friends Nancy Richardson and Louise Grunwald, who came with Gary Tinterow, who curated the marvelous Francis Bacon exhibit at the Met. I myself took my current intern, Alexa Rice. “This is the kind of apartment I want to live in when I become president of a big company,” she said as our hostess, in navy Prada, opened a copy of Les Plaisirs de L’Isle Enchantée, a rare book of engravings of summer outdoor parties and fireworks. There are all sorts of treasures in this residence. Francine du Plessix Gray joined Alexa and me in admiring two giant Rothkos, paintings by Agnes Martin, and the Balthus hanging over the fireplace. A bronze statue of a ballerina by Degas is in the foyer. 

Having known Hyatt since she was a teenager, I was delighted to see her now—a wife, mother of two sons (Jasper and Hayden), and accomplished author—and her sister, Samantha, who breezed in wearing a T-shirt and beige Levi’s (cell phone tucked into a back pocket), no makeup, and hair in her usual pre-Raphaelite ringlets, toting her son, Seren, who happened to be celebrating his third birthday.  

“I didn’t want to leave him,” said Samantha. “I usually take him with me everywhere anyway.” At the end of the party, where there were yummy—and I mean yummy—canapés (Cheddar-cheese toast points, caviar on shredded potatoes, asparagus tips wrapped in prosciutto, plus elderberry water for a bit of organic zest), Anne called for silence and asked us to sing “Happy Birthday” to Seren, happily banging on the keyboard of the Steinway baby grand in the corner. As the cake came out, I asked her if I could please show Alexa her bedroom, with its four-poster bed swagged in gray silk and a Degas painting of dancers on the mantelpiece.  

—André Leon Talley

Where were you when you heard the news that Michael Jackson had died? I was on my way downtown to Diane Von Furstenberg’s to hear Nancy Pelosi, who had come in just for the afternoon to say a few words at a political benefit (see Speaker in the House). Then I was off to the Upper East Side for a summer party at Ralph Rucci’s before going to Sugar Bar across town. Valerie Simpson, wearing Versace and fierce beige Manolo mules, began the night with special words about how Jackson lifted people all over the entire world with his music.
 
“I am thinking about his mother,” said Simpson, who owns the supper club with her husband, Nick Ashford. “No mother loves seeing a child leave. And let’s send our thoughts and prayers out to all those sisters and brothers tonight.”

What was supposed to be a typical open mic night became a worship and communion service, with artists and the house band performing nothing but Michael Jackson music starting off with the host Andre Smith. At one point, Valerie Simpson asked me to give my thoughts on the impact of his contribution to style.

In the early nineties, when Jackson was wearing military officers’ jackets with braid and gilt buttons, I spotted a great jacket hanging in the window of Welsh and Jefferies on Savile Row in London. Lured inside by it, I asked about the jacket, green, cut like a Spencer, with padded lining and silver braid. The tailors told me it was a regimental dress jacket worn by Englishmen for formal or ceremonial occasions. And then they hooked me: “Michael Jackson saw the jacket in the window like you and came in and asked if he could order one. We told him yes,but he couldn’t wear it with the royal plumes insignia—that would be inappropriate.” I ordered two: one in navy and with silver braid, the other in red with black velvet and gold braid. And that’s how Jackson influenced my military phase of dinner dressing. Continue reading ›

“Nancy Pelosi is a very wonderful, douce speaker,” said Georgetown University political economy major Julian Gross, 21, at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee benefit. Diane von Furstenberg, threw the event in her Schiaparelli-pink office above her flagship store, whose floor-to-ceiling windows afforded a view of the High Line. The designer introduced the Speaker of the House, wearing anthracite Armani jacket and trousers.  “In 2004, I became a citizen of the United States,” von Furstenberg said. “And in 2007, Nancy Pelosi, my friend, became the first Madam Speaker of the House of Representatives.” The room was crowded with fans of Pelosi, who, as von Furstenberg noted, has a gorgeous husband, five beautiful children, and eight grandchildren. “She has it all, and I am proud to say she is my friend.”

Madam Speaker, was equally effusive in her praise about the creative atmosphere of DVF’s inner sanctum, and how walking the High Line—a pet cause of her hostess—was something she looked forward to. The SRO crowd, also heard her opinion of President Barack Obama: “It’s great to work with a president who is a great thinker, has a brilliant mind, and an eloquent gift in connecting to the American people.”   

Pelosi had skipped the Congressional picnic to come up for the afternoon, but was headed straight back to Washington to tackle the energy bill. “This building is geo-thermal, totally,” said von Furstenberg.   

“Great,” Pelosi replied. “That will give me something to talk about when I get back to Congress.”

Candy Pratts Price was there, as was Tina Brown, in a beautiful pink shirtwaist dress. We huddled in a corner, and I applauded her Daily Beast post about the Sanfords’ separate press announcements on the South Carolina governor’s Argentina field trip. Gross gave Alexa Rice, a 20-year-old Vogue intern, advice on living in Paris when she studies art history at the Sorbonne this fall. Rice, whose mother, Linda Johnson Rice, is a great friend of Desirée Rogers, wore a Lanvin T-shirt, gold Proenza Schouler pajama pants, Erickson Beamon jewelry, Jimmy Choo wedges, and a VBH patent clutch, all bought at Ikram in her native Chicago. Rachel Roy was looking lean in a fitted sheath with navy-and-black-flecked tweed jacket and glossy red Manolo Blahnik sandals. 

At 7:35, Pelosi and her staff were out the door on their way to Penn Station to catch the Acela for a 10 a.m. meeting the next day. They just missed Charlie Rose, the very last to arrive at 8:00. By then everyone was sitting around Diane von Furstenberg’s brass-branch table watching her friend, Anderson Cooper, report on the tragic death of Michael Jackson, on television.   

—André Leon Talley

Two great memoirs have crossed my desk: Losing Mum and Pup (Twelve), by Christopher Buckley, and A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures, by Quinn Bradlee (Public Affairs). Buckley, the only son of the late Pat Buckley and modern conservatism and National Review magazine founder William F. Buckley, Jr., touched my heart. I, too, was an only son, and I found similarities in his account of the last hours with his father—except that I didn’t sleep on a couch next to my father’s coffin listening to the Whiffenpoofs CD, as Buckley did at the wake.   

When my father died, I had his favorite camera placed inside his silver casket and a bottle of Van Cleef & Arpels cologne tucked in the corner. At the gravesite, the Masonic Order took over the last rites, and as my father was lowered into his grave, I saw that a huge sheet of plastic had been left in the burial vault on top of his coffin. I jumped up and shrieked to the undertaker, “My father isn’t to be treated like he’s a suit at the dry cleaners! Get that plastic sheet out of there.” There ensued an hour-long scene of trying to get the lid of the waterproofed vault sealed correctly. Nothing as noble as Buckley, but his book resonated with me because I knew his mother as one of the great social stars of New York in its halycon days. I loved her sense of patriotism. She would never be caught wearing French couture, dressing only in Halston, Oscar de la Renta, and her favorite designer Bill Blass. I once asked Karl Lagerfeld when he was at Chloé to design special gardening hats for her. That was perhaps the only time anything French was allowed to enter the domain of her closets brimming with American couture. She also refused to fly first class, wobbling on her long, long legs to coach when she went to Switzerland every winter to ski. One of the most haunting accounts is of Pat’s passing, and her son is there, stroking her forehead and saying, “I forgive you.” There must have been a bit of discord at the Buckley mansions or in that stretch Cadillac his parents refused to give up when small sedans started replacing gas-guzzling vehicles in the Reagan eighties.     Continue reading ›