Vogue’s Gallery
I make my debut in the Letters to the Editor column of the Washington Post Opinion Pages tomorrow with a comment on its Style section profile by its talented fashion scribe Rachel Tashjian last week of Andrew Bolton and Thom Browne, respectively the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and the designer […]
A Shaded View of Me
I first wrote about Diane Pernet when she was a New York designer in the mid-1980s. Now, she’s a fashion critic, entrepreneur, film festival founder, critic and blogger. Wearing that last hat at A Shaded View Of Fashion, she’s just posted a lengthy interview with me, looking both backward (I recall some of my favorite […]
New Doc Pokes Fashion’s Blind Eye, Pt. 2
The trailer for Scouting For Girls, premiering on Sky in the UK on June 24, with international release to follow, has just been released. The three-part documentary includes, for the first time anywhere, audio excerpts from my interviews for Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, with the late John Casablancas and Jean-Luc Brunel, and […]
R.I.P. Ashton Hawkins
Ashton Hawkins, the beloved, long-time executive vice president and in-house lawyer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died Sunday at 84 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. Obituaries for Hawkins have been mostly adoring, dwelling on his work as an art lawyer, behind the scenes operator and arm-twister, and as it chief wealth-whisperer to […]
How Did We Get Here? The Rise and Fall of the Met’s Costume Ball
This exclusive excerpt adapted from the 2009 book, Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, tells the story of the museum’s annual costume party. The 2021 edition of the event will be held tomorrow night. The Party of the Year, as it was originaly known, was […]
Rogues’ Gallery Redux
Today’s New York Times reflects the current fashion for questioning the composition of the boards of cultural institutions. Ten years ago, Rogues’ Gallery did the same, using the sometimes sordid stories of the founders and boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a window on the ways cultural philanthropy is used by the wealthy […]
Toxic Trustees: Named and Shamed
New York Magazine’s Whitney Mallett and Katy Schneider have created a guide to the latest gallery of rogues to join the boards of the city’s leading cultural philanthropies. Rogues’ Gallery gets a shout-out–alongside Metropolitan Museum board members like Henry Kissinger and David Koch.
Rogues’ Gallery: A Decade of Delinquency
Rogues’ Gallery was published ten years ago today and remains both banned in the bookstore of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its focus, and pointedly relevant, as last month’s death of longtime museum trustee Jayne Wrightsman, and this week’s frenzy over the Costume Institute’s annual gala, aka the Party of the Year, demonstrate. I think […]
Self-invention to the Max: Jayne Wrightsman, 99
Tomorrow’s New York Post features an obit/excerpt from Rogues’ Gallery on the extraordinary Jayne Wrightsman, who died this week. It’s really about more than one museum.
Jayne Wrightsman, RIP
One of my best and most knowing sources from Rogues’ Gallery, my book on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tells me that Jayne Wrightsman, arguably the last living society lioness, has died after a long decline at age 99. She was born Jane Larkin in Flint, Michigan, in 1920. The daughter of an architect who […]