Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i Town & Country

1992 IMAN IN SOUTH AFRICA For Iman, the experience of meeting the Ndebele women of South Africa, immortalized in T&C’s January 1992 issue by Namibian photographer Margaret Courtney-Clarke, is still fresh nearly three decades later. “I’ve always loved this story, because the takeaway isn’t glamour but joy,” says the supermodel, who got a firsthand look at Ndebele house painting, a style of art practiced predominantly by women. “My happiness came from helping shine a light on the artistic brilliance of these women.” The artists, in turn, drew inspiration from her clothes in their work. “I was never more delighted to fulfill the role of mannequin,” she says.…

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Jeffrey Tousey, the thirtysomething founder of social media agency Beekman Social, and his partner, developer Billy Gilbane III, looked out the windows of their country home among the Finger Lakes in upstate New York and saw snow coming down. It was May. The couple knew they didn’t want to spend another winter—or even a spring—up north. Having both taken their work fully remote, they sought a warmer clime, but somewhere in the same time zone and with direct flights to New York. They decided to house-hunt in Palm Beach “We’d scroll through Zillow every night, and there wasn’t a lot of inventory,” Tousey recalls. They settled on a 1950s bungalow in Palm Beach that they’re now renovating while they rent from a family friend nearby.…

The United States vs. Billie Holiday is the movie Lee Daniels has been waiting to make since he was 13 years old. “I was in Philadelphia and had gone to a theater that my grandfather was managing,” says Daniels, the Oscar-nominated director of Precious. “I saw Lady Sings the Blues and was totally blown away.” The 1972 film, which starred Diana Ross as Holiday, showed Daniels something he had never seen before at the movies. “It was the ultimate Black experience,” he says. “It was the first time I saw me and my family and our world up onscreen—and I wanted to do that.” Daniels’s film, which premieres February 26 on Hulu, is a fulfillment of that wish. The movie, written by Suzan-Lori Parks and starring singer Andra Day, in…

Sometime last summer, at the height of the shlub-from-home era, the It bag seemed to be taking its final bow. Reports of its death had been greatly exaggerated before, but with nowhere to go apart from the occasional trip to the grocery store, this time felt different. As conventional wisdom had it, fanny packs were in, purses, at long last, out. Well, the schadenfreude was short-lived. The status handbag was just taking a break from the spotlight, like a movie star who has grown tired of the attention. Its Garbo-like retirement ended in November, when Christie’s sold a rare Himalaya Kelly for $437,000. It was the highest price paid for a bag at auction, ever. And less than a month later, Christie’s offered up the collection of Susan Casden, the…

When stylist and costume designer Shiona Turini was pulling pieces for the upcoming season of HBO’s Insecure, she went straight to e-retailer Farfetch instead of a ritzy atelier in Paris or a showroom in Milan. “I am committed to supporting Black designers,” she says, and some of the looks she was after, such as a blazer from Nigerian designer Kenneth Ize and a blouse and pants by Grace Wales Bonner, were available only on the platform. Likewise, the OG influencer Tina Craig shops on the virtual emporium when she has exhausted all other options. “If I can’t find it anywhere,” she says, “I’ll look on Farfetch.” Luxury fashion has long been sold online, but Farfetch, the sprawling bazaar founded in 2007 by the Portuguese billionaire José Neves, is its own…

Iused to be a person who got things done quickly. I thought that being first meant being the best, that the quicker I got something done, the better. And so, right after I graduated from college, I made a list of things I needed to accomplish by the age of 30, including: have a job at the top of a magazine masthead, write a book, get married, maybe have a child. I had little real concept of what it would take to get any of those things or, really, why I should want them, but I felt instinctively that I needed to hurry up and get there, or else I would be somehow “behind.” Will it surprise you to learn that by 30 I had done exactly zero of these…

Great anchovies require enormous patience, and their current popularity has been a long time coming. For millennia, the little fish have been gleefully devoured around the world. The ancient Greeks prized them so highly they came up with dozens of words to describe where anchovies were caught, how they were cured, and whether the fish were salted with or without scales. The Romans turned the sleek little fish into garum, using the sauce so liberally in their cooking that it became a kind of currency, as prized, and expensive, as perfume. The appetite for anchovy sauce is so universal that a different version is used in almost every Asian country. The oldest Chinese version was called ke-chiap, and when the British discovered it they went wild. They took it home,…

The last beautiful thing I bought, pre-pandemic, was a black double-breasted Stella McCartney tuxedo jacket with sharp lapels and a decadent silken fringe that dangles, almost shimmering, from the bottom edge. It’s the kind of thing you can toss on with a pair of slim cigarette pants and Manolo Blahnik BB 105s and hit the cocktail circuit, or mix with a top and the right jeans for a dinner party, or throw over the shoulders of a floor-sweeping gown and slink out to a blacktie. It’s one of those forever pieces that is so smart and versatile, so beautifully made and timeless, that it’s a true wardrobe workhorse, well worth what was, if memory serves, a rather steep price. When I brush past it accidentally in my closet these days—on…

In a normal year, college visits have their own distinctive choreography, from the awkward wait prior to the group information session to the backward walk of the trivia-spouting tour guide. Then there is High Point University, in High Point, North Carolina, which does an altogether different dance. You do not show up on campus so much as arrive. The security guard at the double archway main entrance has been expecting you and checks you off a list. Each parking spot has its own LED sign, and yours has your child’s name and hometown. Out behind the admissions office check-in desk is a swimming pool, the first of five in the open air. Next, the tour, during which uniformed students drive you around in oversize covered golf carts that save you…

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It can be difficult, amid the headlines of LVMH’s $16 billion acquisition of it, to remember that Tiffany & Co. started as a small family company—one with treasure hunting in its DNA. Charles Lewis Tiffany saw opportunities in new lands, opening a Paris store in 1868, snagging the biggest yellow diamond in the world from South Africa in 1877, and buying out the auction of the French crown jewels for his provenance-obsessed American heiress clients the same year. And he could spot great talent. Long before the company became known for collaborations with Elsa Peretti and Paloma Picasso and Jean Schlumberger, the founder enlisted a co-conspirator in rare stones, a man named George Kunz. Kunz, like a dapper Indiana Jones, scoured the world for rare and intriguing gems and championed…

When Norma Kamali opened her Wellness Café in Manhattan in 2001 with a menu of fresh green juices and clean skincare, she pre-Gooped Gwyneth by nearly a decade. Now, in addition to being one of the most enduring fashion designers on the planet—Kamali’s greatest hits include the red swimsuit from that Farrah Fawcett poster and the iconic sleeping bag coat that kept doormen toasty at Studio 54 (and warmed countless alfresco diners this winter)—she has taken her rightful place as self-care soothsayer. At 75 she radiantly flouts expectations about age, and, lucky for us, her new wellness-minded memoir, I Am Invincible (Abrams), gives insight into how she’s done it. First of all, did you just get engaged? Yes, at 75! Who would have thought? We’re waiting a while for the…

A tour of Rose Wylie’s painting studio is like a visit to an archaeological dig. Wylie runs out of space frequently, so layering her paintings on top of one another is the only way to make room for new ones. “I heap, stack, and pile,” she says one December afternoon. “I have several going at once.” I don’t know firsthand (I only hear about it during a phone call), because no one has entered Wylie’s farmhouse, in the English county of Kent, since lockdown began last March. No one, that is, except her tiger-stripe cat, Pete, and the masked art handlers moving the works she has made during quarantine, many of which have made their way to the David Zwirner gallery for Wylie’s first major New York exhibition, opening March…

It was the party of 2006, a pre-recessionary bacchanal on the lawns of Althorp, the ancestral home and resting place of Princess Diana. It had a Russian theme: Cossack horsemen galloped beyond the ha-ha. A bejeweled camel ambled across the parterre. Kirov-esque ballerinas pirouetted on pedestals upholstered in silk. Guests included Salman Rushdie, who made an unlikely dance partner for Claire Danes. Tracey Emin sipped Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque from a gold-rimmed flute alongside Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother. Joseph Fiennes and Orlando Bloom mingled with a Getty and a Rothschild. They had gathered for Mikhail Gorbachev, the last premier of the Soviet Union, who was in England to launch the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, a cancer charity named for his late wife, who died of leukemia. Fifteen years later, the Althorp gala…

During last year’s campus closures, a few U.S. colleges and universities, among them Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Williams, offered enrollees a tuition discount. Most did not. By late spring student groups around the country began protesting having to pay full price, and some took collective action. Last December, 4,000 students at Columbia sent its president a letter threatening to withhold tuition for the spring semester, as well as all future donations after graduation, unless the university met demands that included reducing tuition by 10 percent and increasing financial aid. Similar initiatives were launched at the University of Chicago and the City University of New York. The protesters raised obvious questions: How can schools charge the same amount for videoconferences as for in-person classes? But they also voiced wider-ranging concerns. Organizers at…

At press time, U.S. citizens are allowed to enter Indonesia with a special e-visa, which Aqua Expeditions facilitates, and a negative PCR test. The ship is operating in the country without restrictions. In addition to the 7-night Raja Ampat sailing, itineraries include: ▸ Bali and Komodo National Park, 7 nights ▸ Ambon and the Spice Islands, 7 nights ▸ Limited multidestination repositioning cruises: Raja Ampat, Komodo National Park, Moyo, Flores, the Forgotten Islands, Ambon and the Spice Islands, 12 nights ▸ Go to: AQUAEXPEDITIONS.COM…

When New York’s Le Bernardin reopened for indoor dining, all too briefly, this past fall, sommelier Aldo Sohm returned from a monthslong sojourn in Austria and Germany, where he had reacquainted himself with the pleasures of riesling, a white wine made from the eponymous grape. “People are so passionate about it there,” the World’s Best Sommelier of 2008 told me. The same cannot be said of Americans, however, who have been resistant to the charms of rieslings, especially those from Germany. But not long after his return, Sohm hosted a dinner for the Commanderie de Bordeaux. Instead of white Bordeaux—the logical choice for a society dedicated to promoting the wines of that French region—the group chose a German riesling to accompany the first course. Then, the following week, a group…

Whether in Greenwich Village or the Hamptons, Isaac Mizrahi, who used to love going out for breakfast, tends to cook at home these days. But he still takes his two dogs out for walks. “If you have any kind of good-looking dog,” says the designer, who met his husband while walking his late mixed-breed “couture dog” Harry several years ago, “you can’t help but use the dog as a form of display.” Especially right now, when one-percenters are out and about using them as something between status handbags and social lubricants. “Even if you can’t touch other people, you can touch other people’s dogs, and that’s a comfort,” says animal activist Georgina Bloomberg. With owners obsessed with exercise and desperate to get out, the dog show is on as never…

1 The first question a connoisseur will ask when presented with a pearl: “Natural?” Each of these vanishingly rare specimens—a jewelry holy grail—is exactly what its name implies, a pearl that occurs organically within a mollusk without any interference from man. Sand floats into an oyster, and to protect itself the oyster secretes thousands of layers of nacre, which forms a pearl. The pearl Cleopatra downed? Natural. The ones in Elizabeth I’s Armada portrait? Natural. The La Pere-grina pearl, which sold for $11 million in the Elizabeth Taylor auction at Christie’s? Natural. Finding some for yourself? Almost impossible. (But check auctions anyway!) 2 So where do all those pearls—like the ones we saw at the Biden inauguration—come from? From a process invented by Kokichi Mikimoto at the end of the…

In any other situation, Michelle Pfeiffer would have probably tried to ditch me. It’s an early December day, one of the first gray and rainy ones in Los Angeles, Pfeiffer says, and we’re talking over Zoom. She’s wearing a black turtleneck and glasses and sitting in an airy beige and white bedroom at home, explaining how she habitually liberates herself from social interactions—much like the one we’re having. “There’s a line in The Age of Innocence—I’m not sure if it’s actually in the novel or just in the movie—that says, ‘Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it,’” says Pfeiffer, who starred in Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation of the Edith Wharton classic. “I’ve been doing that my entire life.” Take, for…

Queen Elizabeth II was just 21 when she pledged to devote her “whole life” to service. And as she prepares to turn 95 next month, she remains very much at the helm of the British monarchy. Her remarkable reign, already the longest in the country’s history, deserves much attention, but it is easy to forget that her son Prince Charles has simultaneously made it into the record books as the oldest and longest-serving second-in-command. Unlike the position of sovereign, the role of heir is not clearly defined, but Charles has had a staggering 69 years to come to terms with, embrace, and ultimately redefine it, a sometimes stubborn combination of maverick and visionary that’s entirely of his own making. He was officially crowned Prince of Wales (the title given to…

Fifteen years ago, the once powerful book publisher Judith Regan, ruler of her own imprint at Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, embarked on a project of dubious distinction. Somehow she convinced O.J. Simpson to get on board with a mea culpa manqué about the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. It would be called If I Did It, and it had the makings of a blockbuster. Regan had made a name for herself with other explosive confessionals, including works by Howard Stern, Jose Canseco, and Jenna Jameson, but this was of another order. An anointed star in Murdoch’s gallery of rogues, Regan knew this was one editorial coup that ticked all the mogul’s boxes: scandal, controversy, sales, and corporate synergy (the book would be published in conjunction with…

PISCES FEBRUARY 20–MARCH 20 Let yourself get inspired this month; you’re on the brink of a new chapter. Inner guidance and altruistic activities are highlighted as beneficent Jupiter travels through the most private angle of your chart, and your considerable charm is boosted by Venus in your sign until the 21st. Mars in Gemini, on the other hand, tends to divide your attention. DAVID YURMAN, DAVIDYURMAN.COM ARIES MARCH 21–APRIL 20 March is the time to explore your options and reach out far and wide, but private time and strategizing are also required. Behind the scenes stage-setting will create the right backdrop for activities you’re going to launch later in the month. Force yourself to be more diplomatic than you feel. March looks to end on a personally promising note. LARKSPUR…

“Yes, I deserve a spring—I owe nobody nothing,” Virginia Woolf wrote. And this one is particularly welcome. Because to enter a new season there must be extenuating circumstances to push people forward (safe to say we’ve had our share). It’s why the ancients revered the mythical phoenix. And beyond the literal Renaissance, think of the 1960s: Political upheaval influenced a generation of artists, including feminist Niki de Saint Phalle, whose retrospective opens March 11 at MoMA PS1. It’s a reminder that no matter how dark winter might be, it can become the future we’ve been waiting for.…