Town & Country September 2024

2012 THE END OF THE AFFAIR (OR IS IT?) It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? Check under the table. That’s where we found them in our March 2012 issue, when we asked Jade Hobson, fashion editor extraordinaire, to imagine how the end of a fabulous, very T&C dinner party would look. Because sometimes the best part of the evening is those final moments, when the Dom Pérignon buzz has fully kicked in, the good tea (as in gossip) starts to spill, and the kids, who never actually went to bed, sneak out to eavesdrop—and steal a bite of dessert. It’s most fun when only the people you really like have stuck around, but of course there are always a few who can’t take a hint—that’s what…

When I was in college in Poughkeepsie, desperate for any drop of Manhattan I could find, I would go to the bookstore and buy three magazines: W (back when it was a broadsheet), T&C, and Paper. In those pages I found my New York. Three decades later, in my office at Hearst Tower, I got an email from our friend Mickey Boardman, Paper’s director of special projects. “Stellene,” he wrote, “our editor in chief Justin Moran has an idea for a collaboration.” “This,” I said to Erik Maza, T&C’s executive style director, “could be interesting.” And after months of Zooms, and then quiet, and then feverish casting sessions, and a stroke of genius by photographer Hunter Abrams, and the village formed by our incredible teams, we have on page 106…

WHERE ARE WE GOING? Modern dance owes a lot to Alvin Ailey, who revolutionized the art form with his vision, translating the African-American experience into masterpieces (see: Revelations) and, with his Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, opening the door for future generations of Black talent. NYC’s Whitney Museum is celebrating his legacy with the exhibition “Edges of Ailey.” Expect to be moved. SEPTEMBER 25, WHITNEY.ORG WHAT ARE WE WEARING? Harry Winston was a maverick of movement too, except it was diamonds he made dance. He would start with the best stones—his eye for rarity was legendary—and then go all out. Maximalism is still the MO today, as is brilliantly clear in the pendant above, which can be worn as a watch or brooch and is covered in 199 diamonds and…

For years Costalegre, Mexico, flew under the radar. This stretch of the Pacific Coast, home to a few cliffop homes with breathtaking vistas, avoided the over-development that has plagued other picturesque parts of the country. The empty beaches and thousands of acres of protected land were a reminder of what paradise could look like. But nothing so marvelous stays secret for long. There are plans to widen the road from Puerto Vallarta, and a new international airport up the coast will have its first flights later this year. Construction is in full swing, mean-while, on a new 3,000-acre development, Xala, backed in part by Richard Gere and the state pension fund of Jalisco, with plans for 125G luxury homes set among mango groves. “It’s the Tuscan feel. Instead of grapes,…

Dinner conversations could get awkward this fall. Seven questions to save the day, and dessert. There may be no more unlikely location for the gateway to hell than West 72nd Street and Central Park West. But in the new movie Apartment 7A, the Dakota—the building that has anchored that corner since before there was an Upper West Side—once again takes a star turn as the epicenter of evil. Apartment 7A, streaming this month on a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby, in which the Dakota also played a pivotal role. The film follows an ambitious young dancer, played she moves into what’s known in the film as the Bramford and discovers that her neighbors are out to take more from her than just a cup of sugar. It’s the latest big screen…

The life of Pamela Harriman was huge, even for her biographer. “At certain points,” says Sonia Purnell, the author of the new book Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue, “I thought, What have I taken on here?” Harriman blazed a singular path across politics and power. She was born the daughter of an English baron, became an indispensable advisor to Winston Churchill during World War II after marrying his son Randolph, romanced Gianni Agnelli, Edward R. Murrow, Stavros Niarchos, and Elie de Rothschild, married Broadway producer Leland Hayward and statesman Averell Harriman, became a social force in London, New York, Washington, and Paris, and eventually ascended to become the doyenne of the Democratic Party and President Clinton’s ambassador to France. (She died in 1997 after suffering…