Town & Country December/January 2017

1976 SECOND LOOK Four years after she announced she was becoming a woman, the noted writer Jan Morris went to the Paris shows to interview Yves Saint Laurent. She found a fashion business that, much like today’s, was in the midst of transition, and a designer who was grappling with how to honor the past but create for the present. Morris also discovered a society adjusting to changing mores and notions of feminine identity—a tale as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.…

Did Election 2016 kill good taste? As I write this—after leaked tapes and e-mails, “locker room talk,” and that second debate—I’m inclined to say that civility and decorum may well have died a slow, 18-month death during the presidential campaign. But this issue of Town & Country arrives in your hands alongside Decision 2016. What better moment, as we move into the country’s next chapter, to stage a revival of good taste, and what grander occasion than the inaugural ball to do so? For that mission we enlisted David Monn—a man who knows White House protocol (he decorated the State Department for Christmas in 2009 and the following year was invited to design the lunch, dinner, and afterparty for a Mexico state visit) and about whose good taste volumes can…

DAVID NETTO Having a firm grasp of social do’s and don’ts is the first step in knowing when you can break the rules, Netto explains in “THE 7-DAY ETIQUETTE REBELLION” (page 146). The interior designer and author of the recently published François Catroux says he received an early education in manners from his mother, who often finished advice to him with, “And don’t shoot off your mouth!” Another influence: “George Hamilton. He made everyone feel special and loved.” ERIC KONIGSBERG In “PIRATE OF THE CARIBBEAN” (page 202), Konigsberg describes the high-stakes world of politics on the island of St. Bart’s. “As it goes for a lot of resort communities, once the secret gets out, more people start coming, and then the risk is that it becomes something other than what…

SEASON’S GREETINGS The best holiday traditions can be repeated year after year and never fail to fill us with a sense of wonder. The Rockettes have been a New York City fixture since 1932, when they first appeared at Radio City Music Hall, and being granted a spot in the line of high-kicking hoofers remains a dream for the very best dancers to this day. This season the world famous troupe welcomes four new members, Alicia Newcom, Aly McKenzie, Nina Linhart, and Jordan Betscher, all of whom are acutely aware that they’re taking on a job with eight decades of sequined history. (Christmas Spectacular runs from November through early January.) For Linhart the role was hers only after three years of auditions, and for Betscher landing a spot in the…

Emeralds, those most alluring of green gems, are often judged by four simple yet defining characteristics: color, clarity, cut, and (naturally) carats. Add conscience to that list. That’s the goal, at least, behind a new collection of high jewelry by Chopard made entirely with ethically produced emeralds from Gemfields mines in Zambia and created in collaboration with Julianne Moore. The Oscarwinning actress debuted the pieces at the Cannes Film Festival in May (“the most exciting carpet in the world,” she says). It’s not the first time the company has taken a stance on the issue of where the materials come from for its extravagant pieces, some of which fetch prices in the millions. The journey to fair trade emeralds actually started on another red carpet (at the Oscars) four years…

He really did say greed is good—and was applauded at a Berkeley business school graduation in 1986. The line would be immortalized in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street by Gordon Gekko, the perfect hero/villain for the Decade of Greed. And while that’s every decade on Wall Street, in the 1980s the unapologetic pursuit of money became a sacrament. At the apex of his renown, before his spectacular fall, Ivan Boesky parlayed a 10-year run of bafflingly prescient stock picks (using his wife Seema’s money) into finance superstardom, with laudatory magazine profiles, a book deal, and lecture invitations from the best business schools. Boesky sat at the epicenter of the hostile takeover/leveraged buyout/junk bond bonanza. As an arbitrager, or “arb,” his job was to buy stocks of undervalued companies likely to become…