Category Archives for Uncategorized
The Man Who Would Be King
Colin Firth is pitch-perfect as a painfully unconfident English royal in The King’s Speech. As the film’s co-producer Emile Sherman put it at last night’s New York premiere: “Who else can you imagine playing this role?” After some seriously heavy lifting as a leading man for Tom Ford in A Single Man, and now, for director Tom Hooper, Firth may have finally clawed his way out of the box he’s long occupied as everyone’s favorite Mr. Darcy.
The film co-stars Geoffrey Rush as the stuttering Duke of York’s eccentric speech therapist and Helena Bonham Carter—who arrived at the Ziegfeld Theatre with Valentino Garavani amid a storm of camera flashes—as his loyal wife. After the screening, guests including Rachel Roy, Moby, and Famke Janssen gathered at Forty Four at Royalton for an after-party sponsored by the ubiquitous DeLeón. (Some will remember blearily that the tequila company supported all those concerts at Don Hill’s during fashion week.) Marchesa’s Georgina Chapman accompanied Harvey Weinstein, who seems to have the perfect film on his hands for a winter Oscars campaign. What else is new?
On the carpet, Firth explained his attraction to the role. “It always appeals to me when you find virtues in a person that are not celebrated or easily recognized,” he said. “Our fantasies are for superheroes who can lift up buildings and save the world, but to me, it’s far more heroic to see a man for whom doing something as everyday as completing a sentence becomes something like an athletic feat.” Somewhat modestly, Bonham Carter downplayed her role in the struggle: “It’s always fun being the queen,” she said.
—Darrell Hartman Continue reading
Wonder Women
“This is proof that all you have to know is ‘Hot Cross Buns’ and you can still make it to Carnegie Hall,” Julia Roberts joked during her acceptance speech at the 20th annual Glamour Women of the Year Awards last night. With Roberts and Fergie, among others, receiving honors, there was so much star wattage in the storied auditorium that no one would have been surprised if the building had started to levitate. Donatella Versace had not one, but two presenters: Hilary Swank and Janet Jackson split duties, with the latter making an emotional speech. “We share a very close bond. We both lost our brothers, our favorite collaborators,” Jackson said. “Last summer, when I attended my brother’s funeral, we were dressed in Versace, which means we were dressed in love.”
But Hollywood and fashion were only part of the “girl power” quotient. “I usually go to the United Nations or panel discussions; this is not a usual thing for me,” Queen Rania of Jordan, who was honored for her education initiatives, told Style.com. “Whenever there’s a crowd of women like these in a room, I find there’s this incredible energy.” Stanley Tucci agreed. “It’s kind of a dream I’ve had to be in a room with so many beautiful women,” the actor said before presenting his Burlesque co-star Cher with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The goddess of pop, who opted for a relatively sedate black-on-black ensemble for the night, went strong on career advice. “I’ve had huge losses and great successes,” she said. “I feel like a bumper car because if I hit a blocked wall, I just go in a different direction. For all you girls out there, don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. ‘No’ is just some bullshit word someone made up.”
—Bee-Shyuan Chang Continue reading
Friday Night Lights
It’s not every Friday night that Bono swings by a New York gallery opening, but Anton Corbijn isn’t your typical artist. The Dutch photographer has made a name for himself over the decades for his work in the music industry, and his new show at Stellan Holm‘s space on Madison Avenue consists of black-and-white portraits of creative types, from Richard Prince and Iggy Pop to Kate Moss and Alexander McQueen. “A lot of relationships that started with reluctance have been very fruitful,” Corbijn explained. U2 was one of them, he added, and a few minutes later, the band’s front man—arriving on the scene with wife, Ali Hewson, and Helena Christensen—was there to offer his own take. “The story of our relationship with Anton is just really so much laughter—but none of it on camera,” Bono said. “He had a very extraordinary eye on the music, and he photographed not the person you were, but the one you might be. In that sense, he had a lot of faith in us. I’m not sure we ever became as interesting as our pictures.”
A few blocks downtown, a clutch of Hollywood heavy hitters gathered in a similar spirit of generosity at the Carlton hotel’s new restaurant, Millesime, to raise funds for Artists for Peace and Justice. Director Paul Haggis has brought some big names down to Haiti lately, including Ben Stiller and Demi Moore, and he’s elicited some significant contributions to his charity’s school construction effort there. During her visit last spring, Susan Sarandon ended up sacrificing a little extra. “I fell and had an operation on my foot, so the whole summer I was on crutches. But it was absolutely worth it,” she declared. Over at the bar, Russell Crowe was looking deadly serious, and Adrien Brody was deep in conversation with Philip Seymour Hoffman mere steps away. On his way up to dinner, Suno’s Max Osterweis gave his date, Anouck Lepère, a briefing on the colonial history of Hispaniola. That makes him perhaps the only designer who’s ever name-dropped Toussaint-Louverture.
—Darrell Hartman Continue reading
Turn Back Time
—S.S. Fair Continue reading
Spring Beauty Trifecta
—Celia Ellenberg Continue reading
From One Icon to Another
Some mothers wear mom jeans. Not Gloria Vanderbilt, who launched one of the first-ever designer denim lines. “When you’re a kid, you kind of wish your mom would blend in with everybody else,” her son Anderson Cooper remembered last night at the party Ralph Lauren hosted for Wendy Goodman’s new book The World of Gloria Vanderbilt. “On report card day, she would come in, and one time she wore a purple beaver-skin coat by Zandra Rhodes. I used to try to sneak her into school without anybody seeing. Of course, now I appreciate her for all her stylishness.”
The silver-haired TV anchor, who penned the tome’s foreword, was joined by the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, Uma Thurman, Gloria Steinem, and Camilla Belle at Lauren’s new flagship on Madison Avenue (in a nice bit of synergy, the mansion the store now occupies once belonged to Consuelo Vanderbilt, Gloria’s second cousin). In between air kisses, Goodman reflected, “Gloria’s story sort of encapsulates everything. I love historical research and there’s this amazing American social history there.” Among other lush spreads, the book features never-before-released images of Vanderbilt shot by the late Richard Avedon.
“The photograph that inspired Wendy to write the book, Dick had sent it to me a week before he died,” Vanderbilt noted of a particularly memorable Avedon image. “I had never even seen it before. It was so strange; it was like he knew.” As for her famous eye, it seems even practice won’t do. Said Vanderbilt, “It’s instinctive.”
—Bee-Shyuan Chang Continue reading
The $100,000 Rotunda
There are honors, acknowledgements, laurels, kudos—and then there are awards. Every two years, the Hugo Boss Prize provides very much the latter to a lucky contemporary artist, this year’s jackpot being $100,000 and a summer 2011 show at the Guggenheim.
“It’s the CFDAs of art,” offered designer Michelle Ochs, one of many revelers packed into the museum’s flower-bedecked rotunda last night. “We’re not familiar with any of these artists,” added her partner, Carly Cushnie. “But speaking as a young designer, all the help you can get is amazing.” The party paused only briefly for the announcement of this year’s winner, the German found-photo and installation artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. (The other nominees were Cao Fei, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Roman Ondák, Walid Raad, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.)
The four-hour festivities drew a youthful crowd that doesn’t necessarily make a habit of coming up to 89th Street—Cushnie and Ochs, for one, reckoned they hadn’t been to the Guggenheim since the museum’s Zaha Hadid show in 2006, and circulating amid the crush were the likes of Olympia Scarry, Trish Goff, and Anouck Lepère. In a cushioned lounge in the back, Adrien Brody lingered with Dylan McDermott and Alan Cumming, who said he’d been rooting for Cao Fei. “Her work is so colorful, and I love it when people take pictures of real people in poor situations and make them magical,” he said. Cumming had paired a Hugo Boss jacket with some major-statement leather pants by Kenneth Cole, but mentioned he wouldn’t be riding home on a Harley in the foreseeable future. “Only in my fantasies,” he said.
—Darrell Hartman Continue reading
The $100,000 Rotunda
There are honors, acknowledgements, laurels, kudos—and then there are awards. Every two years, the Hugo Boss Prize provides very much the latter to a lucky contemporary artist, this year’s jackpot being $100,000 and a summer 2011 show at the Guggenheim.
“It’s the CFDAs of art,” offered designer Michelle Ochs, one of many revelers packed into the museum’s flower-bedecked rotunda last night. “We’re not familiar with any of these artists,” added her partner, Carly Cushnie. “But speaking as a young designer, all the help you can get is amazing.” The party paused only briefly for the announcement of this year’s winner, the German found-photo and installation artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. (The other nominees were Cao Fei, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Roman Ondák, Walid Raad, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.)
The four-hour festivities drew a youthful crowd that doesn’t necessarily make a habit of coming up to 89th Street—Cushnie and Ochs, for one, reckoned they hadn’t been to the Guggenheim since the museum’s Zaha Hadid show in 2006, and circulating amid the crush were the likes of Olympia Scarry, Trish Goff, and Anouck Lepère. In a cushioned lounge in the back, Adrien Brody lingered with Dylan McDermott and Alan Cumming, who said he’d been rooting for Cao Fei. “Her work is so colorful, and I love it when people take pictures of real people in poor situations and make them magical,” he said. Cumming had paired a Hugo Boss jacket with some major-statement leather pants by Kenneth Cole, but mentioned he wouldn’t be riding home on a Harley in the foreseeable future. “Only in my fantasies,” he said.
—Darrell Hartman Continue reading
A Wink and a Smile
As Richard Buckley points out in his foreword to Taschen’s new tome celebrating 30 years of i-D, the magazine has launched a hundred careers. It was where photographers Nick Knight, Mario Testino, Juergen Teller, Craig McDean, Ellen von Unwerth, and Wolfgang Tillmans published their early work, where Madonna, Björk, and Naomi got their first covers. There they all were, winking on the wall at last night’s book launch party—it’s a signature quirk that every i-D cover star has had one eye closed, a visual correlative of the magazine’s name, geddit? (Turn the logo on its side if you’re still having trouble.) Even as guests partied, Josh Olins was downstairs adding to the gallery, shooting Kristen McMenamy for an upcoming cover.
Eleven-time cover girl Kate Moss didn’t show up, but Buckley’s partner, Tom Ford, came with Elizabeth Saltzman Walker (when Ford fronted an issue with his fox terrier John, even the dog was having a good old wink). And he was just one of a crowd of 450 fashion heavyweights and nightlife legends, an impressive cross section of the characters who helped make i-D the definitive style primer of the past three decades. “The bible,” Dries Van Noten proclaimed unequivocally. “You looked at The Face, but you read i-D.”
The party was a hoot as hordes of London’s bright youngish things—Alice Dellal, Richard Nicoll, Jonathan Saunders, Erin O’Connor, Lara Bohinc, Hannah Marshall—surrendered to Champagne and vodka. But the moments a completist like this reporter relished were these: nightlife royalty Princess Julia skating round in search of Steve Strange (now there’s a Blitz minute for you), or genius illustrator François Berthoud picking the cover of issue no. 8, featuring club queen Scarlett, as his favorite, just as the woman herself appeared in front of the poster. Then, she was the intimidatingly chic teen who ran the door at the Cha-Cha and the Camden Palace, the girl who took the fledgling Leigh Bowery under her wing and taught him everything she knew about self-invention. Now, she’s a social worker with an impressive waist-length mane of white hair and a disinclination to mythologize. “We didn’t think about it,” she said with the fierce here-and-now pragmatism of all true originals. “It was our life.”
Words that would ring true to i-D‘s perennially humble founder, Terry Jones. The turnout was the truest testament to his achievement. For three decades, wife Tricia and he have presided over a whole style subculture, Ma and Pa to brilliant misfits. Terry’s favorite cover? Issue no. 2, September 1980. “Because it meant I didn’t stop at no. 1.” Curiously, it’s the only back issue he himself can’t find. So now you know just what to give Terry Jones for Christmas.
—Tim Blanks Continue reading