Fashion & Style | Beyond

Another Fine Romance

The classic honeymoon

It seemed to Franz and Samantha that all their friends went to The St. Regis Maldives Vommuli Resort on honeymoon. Thus, they reasoned, The St. Regis Bora Bora Resort in the French Polynesian Islands would be something different to Instagram home about. They’re not disappointed. From the moment Sam’s Bottega Veneta-shod feet alight from the hotel boat on to the private jetty, the couple are equally charmed and seduced. They’ve decided to do it in style, booking the Royal Overwater Villa with its plunge pool and steps down to the ocean, from which Franz, who needs to recover from his 12-hour-a-day job as an Asian currency trader, launches himself daily on a three-mile swim. Sam really doesn’t mind. She’s already thinking about ordering her first Bora Mary of the day (the St. Regis hotel first created the Bloody Mary, aka the Red Snapper, in 1934, so they know what they’re doing) and wondering which sushi to eat for her lunch on the Taki Terrace. She slips into her flimsiest Marysia bikini and heads for her private cabana at the Oasis pool. “No children allowed”, reads the sign. Just how she likes it, thinks Sam – for the moment.

St. Regis destinations, other than The St. Regis Bora Bora Resort, that Samantha and Franz considered for their honeymoon: The St. Regis Mauritius Resort, The St. Regis Maldives Vommuli Resort

The baby-moon

With the final months of pregnancy approaching, Dylan and Sacha have taken time out to enjoy a pre-baby celebration in Mallorca. For a couple who adore art and worship the tennis racket, the Spanish island is ideal. Their hotel, The St. Regis Mardavall Mallorca Resort, happens to be located near Rafael Nadal’s home town – not that Dylan or Sacha ever spot the handsome Spanish tennis god. But knowing he’s around is enough. Luckily for Dylan, there’s plenty for his pregnant wife to do, including massages at the Arabella spa and viewing the art galleries in Deià. Because, alongside tennis coaching, which the hotel organizes for him, he has rediscovered another passion: cycling. “I’d forgotten how much I love it,” he says, as Sacha eyes his Lycra shorts dubiously. “Enjoy it,” she says, “because once the baby comes, there won’t be time for long bike rides.” Dylan, like all advertising types, can read between the lines. “I won’t be too long,” he says. “Excellent,” says Sacha, with a triumphant smile. “Because I’ve booked a table at Simply Fosh for an early supper, then I thought we could talk nursery colors.” As he pedals away, Dylan sees his life flashing before him.

St. Regis destinations, other than The St. Regis Mardavall Mallorca Resort, that Dylan and Sacha considered for their baby-moon: The St. Regis San Francisco and The St. Regis Bali Resort

The mini-moon

Jed and Susan had been just too busy for a proper honeymoon with all the stress of launching their digital startup. But, six months into their marriage, tempers are frayed. “We’ve just gotta get away,” Jed says to Susan. Well, he doesn’t actually say it. During the day, he and Susan communicate via SMS from consecutive floors of the tiny office building they rent. Susan’s response is as effusive as one might expect from a woman running a website: “OK.” And then, as an afterthought: “X.” San Francisco is the natural choice: confirmed urbanites, they’ve long cast themselves as Silicon Valley-philes, and now they’re going to party like them. Strolling out from The St. Regis San Francisco, they launch themselves into the hip Mission district for tacos at La Taqueria, ogle art at SFMOMA, and in Haight-Ashbury, discover a shop, The Booksmith, that sells ancient artefacts from days gone by: books. “Remember this?” says Jed, picking up a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Susan fishes her iPhone from her Céline Trio bag to Instagram her husband holding the book. “Honey,” Jed says, “Yosemite is only a drive away. Maybe we need to get back to nature?”

St. Regis destinations, other than The St. Regis San Francisco, that Jed and Susan considered for their mini-moon: The St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort, The St. Regis Dubai and The St. Regis Kuala Lumpur

The adventure-moon

Lisa can’t really call herself a Buddhist because, well, she’s not 100 per cent sure about reincarnation and she likes a good rare steak. But ever since she saw the Dalai Lama speak at Radio City Music Hall, she’s felt a deep connection. She and her partner Ronald are what they like to call “Big Travelers”. They’ve done the Rajasthan “triangle”, the cherry blossom in Kyoto and salmon spawning in Alaska. But to reaffirm their vows they really want to do something Spiritual with a big S – and what could be more spiritual than visiting the DL’s hometown of Lhasa? That is, if they venture out of The St. Regis Lhasa Resort, with its Gold Energy Spa Pool, its view of the DL’s former home and its fabulous Si Zi Kang restaurant. Dressed in their travel uniform of Banana Republic khaki combats, crisp white Ralph Lauren shirts and Tod’s loafers, the couple take in the sights – a trip to the Rongbuk Monastery at the foot of Everest and the 1,300-year-old Jokhang Temple – before bartering for Buddha statues, joss sticks and prayer beads in Barkhor Street market nearby. Almost as good for the soul as the full-body massage at the hotel spa. “Now, that,” they murmur, post-massage, as they float dreamily in the Golden Energy Pool, “was truly spiritual.”

St. Regis destinations, other than The St. Regis Lhasa Resort that Lisa and Ronald considered for their adventure-moon: The St. Regis Princeville Resort and The St. Regis Cairo

The second-moon

James and Sunita first honeymooned 20 years ago in Los Angeles – and remember it well. Both film buffs, they toured Hollywood studios, trekked up to The Sign, and even strolled together on The Walk of Fame. When, two (adult) children later, the couple want to “do it over” and celebrate the fact they’ve made it this far (unlike most of their friends), they want somewhere with a similar feel, but more exotic – like Bollywood. If in Hollywood they felt energetic, in Mumbai they’re positively on fire. This really is a city that never sleeps, and at The St. Regis Mumbai the couple really feel in the thick of it. Having toured the Bollywood film studios and taken a trip out to the 5th-century caves on Elephanta Island, they feel entitled just to hang out in their Gucci outfits in the hotel’s 40th-floor Asilo bar, sipping Aperol spritzes and gazing appreciatively out at the view. Tomorrow they’ll visit the famous Spice Market in the morning, with a synchronized full-body massage at the Four Senses spa in the afternoon. If this isn’t utter New India-style luxury, then they don’t know what is.

St. Regis destinations, other than The St. Regis Mumbai, that James and Sunita considered for their second moon: The St. Regis Langkawi and The St. Regis Punta Mita Resort

Roman Holiday

Natalia Vodianova

Natalia Vodianova looks incredible in red. Don’t get me wrong, she also looks incredible in white, black, pink, or even sludgy brown. But it’s in red that she really shines. Perhaps that’s because she wears it whenever she’s hosting one of her Naked Heart fundraising events, which she did in February of this year during London Fashion Week – a red sequined dress made specially by Francisco Costa of Calvin Klein to accommodate the model’s five-and-a-half-month pregnancy bump.

Vodianova, the 34-year-old Russian supermodel who is based in Paris, but regularly jets between New York, London, and Moscow, does not do things by halves. As well as being one of fashion’s most successful and instantly recognizable stars, she’s a leading figure in the charity world. Her first Love Ball in Moscow’s Tsaritsino Estate, held on Valentine’s Day in 2008, featured a 220-ton ice palace specially constructed for the event, the auction of a Damien Hirst work that fetched $1.2 million, and a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet. She set her sights high – and the rewards matched. The ball raised $6 million.

When I first met Vodianova, at her house in the English countryside, it was a few weeks before her now legendary London Love Ball, which included a sit-down dinner for 420 people and an auction conducted by Christie’s that raised $1.7 million. In typical Natalia fashion, she juggled the interview between a snowball fight with her children in the garden, a photo shoot where she slipped straight into cover girl mode, all dreamy eyes and soft lips, and negotiating logistics for the event. She had the air of someone who is very capable, used to taking control of situations – and getting things done.

“Looking back, I realize that growing up in Russia gave me tools that other people don’t necessarily have,” is the explanation she gives for her extraordinary drive, “such as the will to push that bit further, to make things happen, to succeed. I try to use these now to help other people.” Nor has her lavish lifestyle left her suffering celebrity amnesia: she is happy to talk frankly about her impoverished childhood and the difficulties of growing up with a disabled sister.

Vodianova set up the Naked Heart Foundation as a response to the 2004 Beslan school siege, when at least 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children. “I guess everyone who does charity has a moment when it strikes them, and it is unfortunately something horrible most of the time,” she told me. Her response to seeing the siege unfold on her TV screen in Moscow at the time was to cry. But through her tears, she had a vision. She decided she wanted to build a playground so that the children who survived would at least have some moments when they were lost in play and could forget the horrors of the siege.

She went back to New York, and with the help of her friend Diane von Furstenberg, set up a charity auction and raised $350,000. She had to wait five years before she could open the playground in Beslan, but that didn’t stop her opening her first in her home town of Nizhny Novgorod, and then opening playgrounds in more than 30 cities across Russia – many in the remotest, most forgotten towns.

Since starting the foundation, she has built 158 playgrounds across 103 Russian cities.

Born in 1982, Vodianova had a childhood that could not be further from the lives of her own four children (three from her previous marriage to Justin Portman, half-brother of the 10th Viscount Portman, who she met when she was 19, and one with her boyfriend Antoine Arnault, the son of LVMH founder Bernard Arnault). Vodianova’s mother Larisa, who raised her three daughters alone, had a stall selling fruit and vegetables. Natalia looked after her sister Oksana, was born with cerebral palsy, while her mother worked long hours.

In her teens, Vodianova was spotted by a French model scout. She moved to Paris in 1999 and was soon swept up in the glamorous new life as an A-list model. In 2004, Steven Meisel shot her for the cover of American Vogue in 2004 alongside Gisele and Daria – the three models of the moment. Calvin Klein booked her for the most lucrative fashion contract of them all (a seven-figure contract she held for an unheard-of eight seasons) and ten years later, she became the face of the brand’s Euphoria fragrance. In 2012, Forbes named her as the world’s third most profitable model, estimated to be bringing in a very handsome $8.6 million in one year.

What is most striking about Vodianova is her incredible work ethic and her philanthropic drive. Anyone would forgive a mother of four (soon to be five) if she wanted to take a break from professional life. But Vodianova was back on the catwalk two weeks after giving birth to her first son Lucas. And she is utterly committed to the Naked Heart Foundation. As well as opening playgrounds, she has extended her focus to work with orphanages with the campaign Every Child Deserves a Family, which works with children who are abandoned by their families because of unemployment or disabilities.

Small wonder, then, that Vodianova’s nickname is “Supernova” – a tag Diane von Furstenberg would surely endorse: “The more you know Natalia,” she says, “the more you are impressed with her. She’s a remarkable woman – and I don’t say that easily. She’s probably one of the strongest women I’ve ever met. Her beauty is nothing compared with her character.”

Natalie Vodinova's Charity: nakedheart.org

Prosper Assouline

1. Seville, 1962

I was born in Morocco, but my earliest memory of traveling was going to Seville with my parents when I was five. I can still remember the scent of orange blossom. I love Seville because it’s a crazy city. The people are so full of life. They enjoy every day because they have a constant tension between life and death: flamenco is life and the corrida [bull-fighting] is death.

2. The Louvre, Paris, 1972

When I was a teenager we moved to Paris. At the age of 15 I visited The Louvre for the first time. It made a big impression on me, and after that I went there nearly every week. My favorite place was an amazing room with 13 paintings by Rubens. The walls were a deep red. Today, we have 20 Assouline stores around the world and in all of them the walls are that same red.

3. St. Paul-de-Vence, 1976

I was 19 when I first discovered La Colombe d’Or [a restaurant in the Provençal town of St. Paul-de-Vence where famous artists would settle their bills with artworks]. It was my first real understanding of what luxury means. It’s not necessarily marble floors and vases of flowers but a simple restaurant with good tomatoes and great olive oil, where you’re surrounded by wonderful art and there’s an amazing view. I took my wife Martine there for the first time in 1992, a year after our wedding. She said, “We should do a book about this place.” So we did. We did it just for ourselves, as a hobby – I had an advertising agency at the time, Martine was a lawyer – but it was thanks to that book that we ended up going into publishing and working together.

4. New York, 2001

My first memory of New York was sitting on a step on a sunny day in SoHo eating a hot dog. It’s kind of a cheesy, touristy thing to do, but for me, that was a real New York moment. That was when I decided to set up an office in New York, and after that I was back and forth from Paris every two weeks until 2008 when Martine and I finally said to each other, “OK, New York is going to be our home.” I didn’t speak English at the time, but in a way that’s not a problem, because lots of people in New York don’t speak English.

5. Capri, 2006

I resisted Capri for a long time. I thought it would be superficial and snobbish. But then 10 years ago I decided to go there with my wife, to see what everyone was talking about. Now I can’t live without going to Capri every year, because it’s the most beautiful place on the planet. The best time to go is in June – you feel like you’re on the Côte d’Azur in the 1950s. There are no cars, and we enjoy being on our own, just strolling around, swimming and eating pasta. That’s true luxury.

6. London, 2013

I never liked London. I had nothing but bad memories of the city. But the first time I saw the building that would later become Assouline’s first “maison”, it was a revelation. This building [196A Piccadilly] had been a bank for nearly 100 years and then an art gallery, so it was completely empty and it had no windows, but for me there was something magical about it. I had always dreamed of combining a café, a cocktail bar, a gallery and a bookstore – and here my dream became a reality.

7. Costa Mesa, California, 2009

Henry Segerstrom was one of the most impressive people I’ve ever known. He was a true visionary – he created a mall in Southern California called South Coast Plaza, which became the most important mall in America. I met him eight years ago – when he was 84 – and he invited me to visit him in Costa Mesa, where he gave me a tour of the mall at night, with a glass of champagne. What impressed me most was that even in his eighties, he still had the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old. He was still dreaming every day. He died two years ago, but I think about him a lot.

National Treasures

Edythe Broad clearly remembers buying her first artwork. “It was a Picasso print, on a school trip. I saw it, I liked it and I bought it. The excitement was like someone had hit me in the stomach. But then, I’m like that: buying for me is an emotional process. Eli’s the smart one.”

More than six decades later, Edythe and her husband Eli, the American property developer and philanthropist, own so many works of art that last summer they opened a $140m museum in the heart of downtown Los Angeles to house them. Today, The Broad, an elegant white space a few doors from the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Hall, houses more than 2,000 artworks amassed by the couple since the 1960s.

The first “serious work” they bought, Edythe recalls, was by Van Gogh. “But the more we looked at art, the more we enjoyed contemporary pieces. So, we exchanged it for a Rauschenberg.”

Today their contemporary art collection includes works by 200 of the world’s biggest names, including Damien Hirst, Andreas Gursky, Jasper Johns, William Kentridge, Barbara Kruger, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. What’s impressive is not just the number of important works they have but how many by the same artists. Today, they own the largest collections of works by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein (outside the Lichtenstein Foundation) and Joseph Beuys.

This, says the museum’s director/chief curator Joanne Heyler, is because “Eli and Edythe have been collecting for more than 50 years, and have known many of the artists. They’ve been friends with Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman – so they have access to many of their finest works. When Eli first bought Basquiats, he understood that they were more than just graffiti; he’d met the artist when he was living in a basement.”

Although initially the couple bought art for their own pleasure, their collection has now been put in trust for the nation. “We feel it’s important for people to have access to works that reflect our times, so they have a greater understanding of what’s happening around them,” says Eli. “Art is a mirror that reflects the world. We want people to be able to look into that mirror and get a better picture of what’s going on – whether it’s Barbara Kruger’s Your Body Is A Battleground or photographs of the Missouri riots.”

To ensure that the collection remains current, the Broads buy about one new work a week. “It’s a passion and an addiction we’ve had for 30 years,” Eli admits. “Thankfully, we’re privileged enough to keep doing it. By opening The Broad, our hope is that others can enjoy what we have too.”

Unlike many other American institutions, entrance to The Broad is free, and will always be so, thanks to a substantial endowment created by the couple. That, says Eli, “really makes us proud. It’s a great feeling knowing that everyone has access to something that we love.”

The Broad, 221 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles (thebroad.org)

Come Together

When John Lennon left Britain to begin a new life in America in the summer of 1971, the transatlantic move represented something more than just a change of location. Encouraged by his wife Yoko Ono, it was a decisive step in shedding what remained of his Beatle skin, and, he hoped, towards reinventing himself as a radical chic bohemian. He no longer wanted to be just a rock star.

Happily assured of wealth for the rest of his life from the songs he’d already written, his emigration was achieved in some style as he and Yoko moved into two adjacent suites on the seventh floor of the elegant St. Regis Hotel on New York’s East 55th Street. The St. Regis played a significant role in mid-century Manhattan life, attracting a mixture of high society and bohemia that made it the place to be and be seen. From there Lennon would fall in love with New York, as Yoko showed him around what he described as her “old stomping ground” – that is, the city in which she’d begun her career as a conceptual artist.

The St. Regis and Manhattan were a complete change from the Lennons’ previous home and surroundings, Tittenhurst Park, a Georgian mansion and 72-acre estate near Ascot, 20 miles southwest of London. There, the nearest neighbors had been a small herd of former seaside donkeys in a field outside the couple’s bedroom window, along with a Hare Krishna troupe, who, until their chanting got on his nerves, Lennon had allowed to decorate a small temple in his extensive gardens.

The tranquility of the English countryside might have helped him write and record the Imagine album, which would top the U.S. charts shortly after he and Yoko arrived in New York, but it was too sleepy for the ever-sparky Lennon and his ambitious wife. Brash, boisterous New York, with its cosmopolitan population and aggressive cultural energy, was the place to be.

At the time, I was a journalist at London’s Evening Standard newspaper and had been befriended by the Lennons during the break-up of the Beatles over the previous two years. So I was intrigued when, a few weeks after they moved to New York, they invited me to fly across and join them at The St. Regis and then celebrate John’s 31st birthday by attending an exhibition of Yoko’s art at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY.

Almost as soon as I got to the hotel, John was enthusing about his new hometown. In a grand suite stacked high with newspapers, magazines, fan mail, posters and film-editing equipment, he raved about how the jaunty abrasiveness of New Yorkers reminded him so much of the people of his Liverpool youth. Like every craze he had, and New York was his latest, he threw himself into it with total enthusiasm.

Before then, the only time he had visited the U.S. had been with the Beatles, where the band were held prisoners at the heart of mass hysteria. But now, having “divorced” himself from the group, as he put it, he was getting to know America properly, starting with New York. And he talked about how, just a few days earlier, fellow St. Regis guest Fred Astaire had knocked on the door of his suite to say “hello” and immediately agreed to appear in an experimental film that the Lennons were shooting there. The following day, Jack Palance, also a hotel guest, was happy to be filmed there, too.

To John, the openness and acceptance he and Yoko experienced in the U.S. were in stark contrast to the treatment they’d received back in the U.K. in recent months. There, Yoko had been overwhelmingly blamed for the Beatles splitting up, and John had been forced to defend her, while a public exhibition of his erotic lithographs had provoked predictable tabloid outrage and inevitable police charges. (The private gallery owner presenting the exhibition later got off on a technicality.)

As he fashioned his new ex-Beatle persona, Americans, and especially New Yorkers, would, he felt, respect “nutty John”, as he would laughingly call himself, more than his own countrymen. “Look at this,” he said to me, picking up a letter. “A university in Tennessee is offering me $60,000 just to talk. Just to talk! I don’t even have to bother singing! It’s unbelievable. Invitations like this come every day.”

Indeed, one invitation, the retrospective of Yoko’s work in Syracuse, had already been accepted. And when we flew up there the next day, accompanied by Phil Spector, who had just produced Imagine, and secretary May Pang, who would become John’s lover two years later, it was unabashed lecturers as much as their students who mobbed the ex-Beatle and his wife.

This appealed to John’s new image of himself. As he moved around the exhibition, with its water theme, which also contained works by Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Willem de Kooning, he let it be known that he wanted to be considered an artist, too. Although, as usual, there was a joke in his artistic contribution – a plastic bag half-filled with water which he titled Napoleon’s Bladder.

Two years earlier he had written and recorded the anthem Give Peace A Chance, a song that students across America were now singing at every anti-Vietnam War demonstration. So, later that day, he sat singing it for a group of Syracuse college kids as slices of his birthday cake were passed around. His career as a musician (not to mention his lack of academic qualifications) had meant there had been no college for him after the age of 18, so to be lionized at universities was flattering.

He didn’t want to be one of “four gods on stage” any more, he told me that week. Deep down he wanted to be considered an intellectual, and, always on the side of the underdog, a beacon of protest.

With this in mind, the next day we were off in a limo, followed by a caravan of media vehicles, to visit a tiny Native American reservation, the inhabitants of which were taking on the state of New York, which was claiming the right to build a road through their land. Whether the publicity the visit generated did any good or not, I have no idea, but, unbeknownst to John, the regular protests with which he had now become associated were not going unnoticed. The FBI was compiling a file on him as an anti-war activist.

Back in New York, the Lennons’ HQ in The St. Regis would have looked to the FBI, had they seen it, like the headquarters of a counterculture movement, as the notorious social activists, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, quickly latched on to the politically naive John. Quite what the front reception desk thought as the Lennons’ new friends passed through the lobby was never recorded.

Not that it was all demonstrations. Records were good for protests, too, so John quickly turned the melody of the folk song Stewball into the festive song Happy Xmas (War Is Over) while sitting with his guitar on a sofa in his St. Regis suite. A few weeks later, he and Yoko would record it together with 30 children from the Harlem Community Choir a few blocks away at the Record Plant on West 44th Street. It wasn’t exactly John at his best, but we still hear it played on the radio every Christmas.

Music was always there. One afternoon when John and I were engaged in a singsong of old rock ’n’ roll hits while riding in the back of his limo, he told me rather regretfully that since his divorce from his first wife Cynthia in 1968, he’d lost track of his boyhood collection of early Elvis records. I fixed that with a quick phone call to RCA Records, who sent a complete collection of Elvis singles over to The St. Regis a couple of days later. Hound Dog would be a regular on John’s jukebox for the rest of his life.

Yoko had already begun showing John around Manhattan, introducing him to Max’s Kansas City, the Russian Tea Room and the Museum of Modern Art, and, energized by the sheer verve of the city, he felt, tragically, as it would eventually turn out, that he could move around untroubled by fans. “It was Yoko who sold me on New York,” he would say later, “as she made me walk around the streets and parks and squares to examine every nook and cranny. In fact you could say I fell in love with New York on a street corner.”

The street corner he most fancied was that at 1 West 72nd Street, which housed striking gothic millionaires’ apartment building, the Dakota. It offered a spectacular view across Central Park, and, while I was staying at The St. Regis, John put on a suit and tie to go to the Dakota and be interviewed by the reputedly stuffy board of residents there. He was unamused when Yoko’s dress for the interview was a pair of floral hotpants, and he insisted, not altogether politely, that she wear something more sober for the visit. When it came down to it, John knew very well how to behave like the well-mannered middle-class young man he had been brought up to be.

I left New York the following day, carrying a private letter from John to deliver to Paul McCartney in London, an attempt by him to bypass the managers and lawyers who were engaged in the bitter feud between the two former best friends. As it transpired, the legal wrangles, which included McCartney filing a lawsuit against his bandmates, would drag on for years, so my efforts as a go-between clearly didn’t work.

John and Yoko moved out of The St. Regis at the end of October 1971 to rent a two-room apartment in Bank Street in New York’s West Village, at which they would become further involved in political demonstrations and protest records, and from where they would also explore their neighborhood by bicycle. John’s new radical-chic persona would survive for only one more year. With the FBI increasingly anxious to have him thrown out of the U.S., and him anxious to stay there, in early May 1973 he and Yoko achieved a long-held ambition when they bought an apartment in the Dakota building. This would be the eccentric millionaire’s last home and the location of his murder in 1980.

Reflecting on why he preferred New York to London, to which he never returned, John would tell interviewers: “If I’d lived in ancient times, I’d have lived in Rome. Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself. New York is at my speed.”

Your address: The St. Regis New York

The Art of Hospitality

Ever since Claude Monet was made artist-in-residence at London’s Savoy hotel in 1899, painting a series of iconic views of the River Thames from his top-floor room, hotels and art have enjoyed a fruitful relationship. St. Regis in particular has a glorious tradition of working closely with artists, notably in the murals that adorn the walls of each St. Regis hotel bar. This custom dates back to 1932, when Maxfield Parrish’s celebrated Old King Cole was installed at The St. Regis New York, depicting – legend has it – the hotel’s founder, John Jacob Astor IV. Today, all St. Regis hotels and resorts feature eye-catching works, often by local artists, ranging from Andrew Morrow’s Love and War at The St. Regis San Francisco to Bedri Baykam’s Bosphorus Breeze at The St. Regis Istanbul.

Now St. Regis has teamed up with fashion and lifestyle illustrator Maya Beus, whose sketches and watercolors have previously been commissioned by the likes of Vogue and Oscar de la Renta, on a three-month project exploring the role of the butler. For Beus, who is based near Split in Croatia, the project, entitled Butler Stories, involved intense three-day drawing assignments at three St. Regis hotels – Florence, Rome and Istanbul – meeting the staff, getting a feel for each property and doing quick-fire sketches that she later transformed into delicate watercolors.

“Normally I work from photographs so it was a new experience for me to sit in a hotel lobby or a bar trying to capture a moment and tell a story,” says Beus, who featured among the world’s leading up-and-coming illustrators in Taschen’s publication, Illustration Now! Fashion.

“It was great to be able to pick my viewpoint, focus on what I thought was interesting and then sketch an outline. I sat for a long time watching people work – waiters, receptionists, butlers. It was a kind of theater; the staff move around these amazing spaces almost like dancers.”

Beus has traveled widely in the course of her work for major fashion houses and luxury brands, but this was her first stay in Istanbul, where she describes being “mesmerized” by the beauty of the architecture of the new St. Regis hotel. “The lobby is one of the most beautiful spaces I’ve ever seen,” she says. “The main chandelier is like a sculpture – the color changes during the day depending on the light. It’s really magical.”

Part of the brief for Butler Stories was to create original artworks depicting the hotels’ most impressive spaces, but Beus’s illustrations also offer a glimpse of a more intimate aspect of hotel life: snapshots of the daily routine, such as the serving of afternoon tea, the “sabrage” ritual (opening champagne bottles with a sabre), and “family traditions”, which might involve arranging a surprise treat for a guest’s birthday.

The most challenging aspect, Beus reveals, was getting her subjects to relax. “I would watch people working and then try to capture a particular moment. It was vital for them to feel comfortable. In a drawing you can really see when someone’s position is stiff and unnatural.”

As the title, Butler Stories, suggests, the project required Beus to shadow St. Regis butlers as they went about their work. “What I realized after talking to them,” she adds, “was that to be a great butler you really have to like people. It’s not enough simply to look elegant – it has to make you happy to make other people happy. That’s a very special quality.”

Your address: The St. Regis Florence; The St. Regis Istanbul; The St. Regis Rome

Capitol Style

Smarten Up

In 1571 Queen Elizabeth I of England was given the most advanced timepiece ever created. It was a small clock that could be worn on the wrist. In 2015 Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, presented what he referred to as “the most advanced timepiece ever created” to the world. It was a small clock that could be worn on the wrist.

Both Elizabeth’s “arm watch” and Cook’s Apple Watch are marvels of miniaturization. And yet youngsters of the iPhone generation might take one look at the queen’s mechanical bauble and wonder what the fuss was about. It could not, they might point out, respond to voice commands, measure its wearer’s heart rate, function as a contactless credit card or alert the sovereign to incoming emails – all of which Apple’s state-of-the-art gizmo can do, and more.

“Wearable technology” has come a long way. And the sector is set to go a great deal farther. How big might the boom be? According to Lisa Calhoun, founder of Write2Market, a technology PR firm, “Wearable tech is currently an $8 billion industry, projected to hit $50 billion in the next five years. With a change in image, the industry could accelerate and possibly even surpass that potential for growth.”

The wearables market is dominated by smartwatches and health- and fitness-related devices. At least in the short term these will remain the two biggest categories. When wearable fitness-monitoring devices created by companies such as Nike, Fitbit, Intel and Jawbone emerged a few years ago – measuring steps taken, calories burned, heart rate, skin temperature and sleep quality – they seemed to represent a move towards what has been termed “the quantified self”. In 2015 and beyond, expect to see further moves in the same direction, including motion-tracking socks and underwear, light-reactive jackets that glow in response to exertion, wireless devices for scanning blood-sugar levels, and shoes that can help runners manage their pace and navigate unfamiliar streets.

Meanwhile, other applications are being found for wearable technology. Car-makers are developing apps that will let people unlock and start their cars remotely using their smartwatches and phones. Airlines are investigating how wearable technology might help streamline the check-in process. Anxious parents can attach devices that use GPS technology to curious toddlers with a tendency to wander off. And sun-lovers can avail themselves of bracelets that monitor desired tan levels and swimwear that changes color to warn them when they are in danger of going from tanned to burnt.

Indeed, the point at which technology and fashion intersect is one in particular to keep an eye on. “In five to ten years’ time, all the little gadgets we have to carry around – like mobile phones, cameras or bracelets – will disappear and everything will be integrated into a garment,” speculates Francesca Rosella, creative director of CuteCircuit, which is at the cutting edge of fashionable wearable technology. CuteCircuit made its name with a “hug shirt” that mimics the sensation of being embraced when someone with the corresponding app sends the shirt’s wearer a text message. The brand is also known for its miniskirts and dresses that glow and switch between patterns, which have been shown off to striking effect by celebrity fans such as Katy Perry and Nicole Scherzinger.

But so far the highest-profile mainstream fashion label to express a keen interest in wearable technology is Ralph Lauren. Last year it launched the Polo Tech, a tightly fitted sports shirt that monitors heartbeat, breathing and stress levels. That data gets sent from the shirt to an app via a detachable Bluetooth-enabled box. (The shirt itself is fine in the washing machine; the box loaded with delicate biometric circuitry is not.) “The technology has evolved to a point where it can now be synthesized with clothing,” said David Lauren, Ralph’s son and the brand’s executive vice-president, on the occasion of the launch. “The goal now is to merge it into all kinds of clothing. It will be mind-blowing five years from now.”

Although the number of wearable devices is growing every day, the majority of consumers remain fitness fanatics. Yet studies also show that wearable fitness-trackers are apparently not as compelling as smartphones, with many users admitting to losing interest in and even abandoning their new toys after a short while.

On a technical level, another factor limiting the attractiveness of many wearable devices is their typically short battery life and inability to function unless connected to a nearby smartphone. With so many electronic gadgets to juggle already, why should consumers want to buy more – especially when their phones can already do practically everything wearables can?

Another obstacle is that eternal and, for the manufacturers of consumer goods, maddeningly unpredictable quirk of human nature: the perception of what is and is not cool. The rejection of Google Glass, smartglasses that overlay data and augmented imagery on what the wearer is looking at through their spectacle lenses, is a case in point. In principle, Google Glass is an exciting idea, and it seems likely that the technology will prove useful in industrial settings, making it easier, for example, for warehouse workers to locate and handle stock. But ordinary consumers were allergic to the product, perceiving it as not only creepy and intrusive but also, and most damningly, uncool.

Wearable technology’s true believers predict a future in which electronic devices worn on the wrist or neck will become part of every area of our daily lives, serving as a form of ID, allowing us to shop, navigate and communicate, as well as to gather and interpret data on our personal activity and wellbeing; in short, to provide what technologists call a “persistent digital identity”. We are certainly well on the way. But we have not quite arrived there yet. Elizabeth I’s arm watch is not entirely obsolete, after all.

The Line of Beauty

During fashion’s flirtation with Surrealism in the late 1940s, Carmen Dell’Orefice, still in her teens, found herself at The St. Regis New York on a wildly extravagant set designed by the self-anointed high priest of the movement, Salvador Dalí. Cecil Beaton, a friend of Dalí’s, who was working at the Condé Nast studio on Lexington Avenue that day, dropped by to check on proceedings (the photographer was the matinee-idol-handsome Horst P. Horst).

Beaton had returned to New York after a tour of duty as a war photographer and was staying at The St. Regis New York, where his neighbors were Dalí, his wife Gala and their pet ocelot, Babou. Knowing that the artist was on the lookout for a model and that Carmen could use the extra money, Beaton had introduced the two over lunch at Le Pavillon – later La Côte Basque – and Carmen had agreed to pose. It’s the way things happened back then. “He was a showman,” says Carmen of Dalí. “It was all a performance, but one he very much enjoyed. He pretended he couldn’t speak English, but that was just part of the ruse.”

Carmen was supposed to represent La Primavera – a painting by Botticelli also known as The Allegory of Spring – and to be naked to the waist. “That didn’t bother me,” she says nonchalantly, “and it didn’t bother him.” Of much more interest were the charcoal drawings of horses that littered the floor of Dalí’s suite. One day he offered her one in lieu of payment. “I was getting my regular $12.50 an hour, so I said I’d have to go home and ask my mother about it. Now, my mother wasn’t stupid, but we needed the money so badly. She said no.”

Carmen Dell’Orefice has dozens of extraordinary tales to tell, and since she is celebrating 70 years working as a professional model, this would seem to be the perfect time to share them. Born in New York in 1931 to an Italian concert violinist and a Hungarian dancer, she began modeling at the age of 13 after a bout of rheumatic fever and a preternatural growth spurt left her too weak (and too tall) to pursue her early passion for ballet. Deemed to be “too mature-looking” for Seventeen and Junior Bazaar magazines, she began her career as a high-fashion model under exclusive contract to Vogue. Within weeks Carmen was working with the defining photographers of the era: Irving Penn, Erwin Blumenfeld, John Rawlings and Horst. “They were mentors who provided a gateway to the rest of my life and the world,” she says.

While Carmen spent her days modeling designs by Charles James and Mainbocher, life at home was somewhat different; with her father absent, she assumed the role of breadwinner and was soon paying the rent on the fourth-floor walk-up apartment she shared with her mother on Third Avenue. There was no telephone (until Horst eventually insisted she get one), so Vogue would dispatch a runner whenever her presence was required.

Photographs taken in the 1950s show Carmen variously as a blonde bombshell à la Monroe (with whom she modeled hats for society milliner Mr. John), a raven-haired society swan, and everything in between. “I was a chameleon, a silent actress. I was never an ‘It girl’,” she says. Her career reached a high-water mark in 1957 when she shot the Paris collections for Harper’s Bazaar with Richard Avedon, under the fashion direction of Diana Vreeland and the all-seeing eye of graphic genius Alexey Brodovitch.

Although Carmen never officially retired from modeling, in the mid-1960s she scaled back her work to concentrate on family life. She had married for a third time and had a daughter, Laura (today a psychotherapist), by her first husband. When that marriage ended in divorce a decade or so later she found herself in need of a job and made tentative steps back into the industry.

At a party she ran into her old friend Norman Parkinson, who declared that she “didn’t look bad for an old bag”, and flew her to Paris for French Vogue, relaunching her career. The resulting pictures were a sensation and revealed a new Carmen: sexy, silver-haired and on the brink of 50. Her old agency, Ford, opened a new division specifically to handle her, and once again she was working with the greatest photographers: Helmut Newton, Patrick Demarchelier, Arthur Elgort, Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel.

Things had changed radically since her heyday, with models now expected to be personalities as well as faces. Carmen quickly adapted. She wrote a beauty book, hit the chat-show circuit, took cameo roles in movies by Woody Allen and Michael Cimino, and appeared on the catwalk in earnest for the first time in her sixties. Along the way she made it into the Guinness Book of World Records (as the oldest professional model).

I first met Carmen in April 2000 after pestering her agents to see if she would consider sitting for me. She eventually agreed, and we arranged to meet at her apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. When I arrived she was whipping her hair into its trademark white squall, “to give you something to draw”. She posed all afternoon with Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald on the sound system, changing clothes, thinking things through, finding the line, and paying me the compliment of taking things seriously.

The drawings turned out well, and since then we have worked together whenever time and tide have permitted: in London, on the catwalk for Hardy Amies; in Paris, backstage at Dior; in Florence, in a deconsecrated church for Alberta Ferretti; and, coming full circle, last year at The St. Regis New York, almost 70 years after she posed for Dalí. For the occasion we hung one of Carmen’s own paintings by the artist on the wall, and felt the magic still.

What makes Carmen so inspiring to draw is that she has such an innate understanding of image-making. She has developed a sixth sense – or is it a third eye? – so that she sees what you see and “edits” herself accordingly for the page. There’s her beauty, of course, but that is just her opening play; she is also riotously funny, ribald when the mood takes her, and has the discipline instilled by decades on fashion’s front line.

Carmen has learned to be a gracious receiver of compliments, which is just as well, since they are the white noise of her life. “I know you hear this all the time,” gushed one lady of a certain age, when we were having dinner in New York recently. “I’ve never heard it from you,” was Carmen’s consummate reply.

And so she goes on. Standing sentinel at the age of 84 and staying true to her aim of representing her generation as positively as she is able. And although she is happy to talk about the past, she will not be pitching her tent there any time soon. There is a book to be getting on with, a documentary which is in the process of being edited, and the offers of work that keep on coming. “I am amazed by everything that is happening in my older old age,” she mused recently. “Perhaps today I am an It girl after all.”

David Downton: Portraits of the World’s Most Stylish Women is published in September by Laurence King

Your address: The St. Regis New York

Category Archive: Fashion & Style

The classic honeymoon

The baby-moon

The mini-moon

The adventure-moon

The second-moon