Fashion & Style | Beyond

All That Jazz

Singer-songwriter Jamie Cullum’s obsession with jazz began when he saw The Fabulous Baker Boys. He was a 15-year-old piano prodigy at the time and had just started to get paid gigs in hotels. It didn’t matter that they were in Swindon, a small English town not noted for its rich jazz heritage. Teenage Jamie was just like his hero in the movie, the brilliant jazz pianist Jack Baker, though considerably less tortured.

Now 36, Cullum laughs this off as youthful folly. “When you’re a teenager, you grab on to certain icons to help you through the crippling nature of what it is actually to be a teenager,” he says. But in many ways he is still living the teenage dream. An acclaimed jazz pianist, he has released six albums and tours the world with his band. And this spring, he began a series of gigs Baker would have killed for: The Jazz Legends at St. Regis Series, an intimate set of live performances at St. Regis hotels around the world. Throughout the Jazz Age, the rooftop ballroom at The St. Regis New York played host to many of the jazz world’s biggest names, from Count Basie to Buddy Rich. Cullum has curated playlists and booked local acts to play alongside him as he celebrates St. Regis’ musical legacy.

Much of Cullum’s encyclopedic knowledge of jazz comes from his compulsive record-buying habit. “I’m almost permanently on the lookout for new sounds,” he says. As a teenager he dug everything from grunge to hip hop, but also loved to mine charity shops for old records. “I started picking up jazz albums by artists like Herbie Hancock, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk almost by accident. If there was a hip-looking dude in a kaftan holding a saxophone on the cover, that usually worked for me!”

This is how he acquired many of his favorite albums, such as Duke Ellington’s Money Jungle, which has “the rawness of a punk record”. He now owns somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 records, as well as about 5,000 CDs. “I’ve cut it down a little bit, but it’s actually quite a modest amount,” he says. “I know people with 15,000 vinyls, easily.”

He is not one to pay hundreds of dollars for rarities – if you know where to look, you don’t have to. And thanks to all the touring, Cullum has gotten to know many of the world’s best record shops. So where’s good? “In Paris, there’s a place called Oldies but Goodies. It’s the best store for old records in the world: a floor-to-ceiling library. America has a lot of good ones, too. Like Joe’s Record Paradise in Washington – for rock, rockabilly, jazz, hip hop… all the good stuff. When I’m in New York, I spend the most at Colony Records in Midtown, not too far from The St. Regis New York. Or Bleecker Street Records, another amazing one for collectors.”

One question remains. How much does his habit cost him a month? “Mmmmm, that’s a hard one!” he laughs. “I couldn’t even guess.”

Your address: The St. Regis Washington, D.C.; The St. Regis New York

The House That Jack Built

John Jacob “Jack” Astor IV was the American equivalent of a crown prince. His blue-blooded mother, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, shaped and ruled the New York social elite in the Gilded Age. From his father’s side, he inherited a legendary name and a vast fortune based on Manhattan real estate. No family has ever owned so much of an American city as the Astors owned of New York: thousands of buildings, miles of riverfront property.

The family fortune – worth about $6 billion in today’s dollars – was split between Jack and his first cousin William Waldorf Astor, who spent it in suitably lavish style. The men lived in a world of dazzling marbled mansions, liveried servants, palatial country estates, summers at Newport, social intrigue, elaborate balls and yachts (Jack’s 230-footer could seat 60 in its dining saloon).

Although the two cousins had grown up in neighboring mansions on Fifth Avenue, they did not like each other. William, 16 years older, believed in high moral seriousness and looked down on his younger cousin as a dilettante who frittered away his time on thoroughbreds, motor cars, parties and other idle amusements. When their fathers died in the early 1890s, and the two young men took over management of their fathers’ business empires, each immediately tried to outshine the other by building competing luxury hotels.

William landed the first blow with the Waldorf. After his mother’s death, he knocked down the family mansion and started building the grandest hotel the world had ever seen – right next door to the home occupied by his cousin Jack and his aunt Caroline. Caroline was a small, plump, regal woman who hosted the city’s most exclusive parties and cotillions in the mansion’s magnificent ballroom. Eighteen household servants, in blue uniforms modeled on royal livery, served ten-course French dinners on solid-gold plates. Caroline wore so many diamonds that one guest described her as “a human chandelier” and another as “a dozen Tiffany cases personified”.

When William’s engineers and construction workers started to build the hotel, she was, naturally, furious, and moved out. The situation was little better when the hotel was completed in 1893. Not only did it dwarf her mansion and cast her garden into shade, but it gave her a view of a 13-story brick wall.

Jack was enraged. He was devoted to his domineering mother, who had pampered him thoroughly, aided by her four daughters. He commissioned an architect to build her a four-story French Renaissance chateau with the largest ballroom in the city, 30 blocks uptown on Fifth Avenue, then announced plans to demolish her former mansion and build a row of stables there, so the Waldorf would have horse dung to contend with.

When his advisers cooled him down, Jack came up with a more ambitious scheme: to build a much bigger hotel next door. Teams of lawyers and accountants went back and forth, and eventually a truce was inked, allowing the two hotels to be connected by corridors. The double-hotel was named the Waldorf-Astoria, and a provision in the contract allowed corridors to be sealed off if the truce collapsed.

With 1,000 rooms and a ballroom that could seat 1,500 people for a dinner dance, the Waldorf-Astoria was bigger than any royal palace in Europe. The central corridor was 300ft long, marbled and mirrored, and lined with glittering displays. It was known as Peacock Alley, and 25,000 people promenaded through it on a typical day. The novelist Henry James, not an easy man to impress, described the hotel as “a gorgeous golden blur… one of my few glimpses of perfect human felicity”.

The desire to build luxury hotels wasn’t anything new for the Astors. The founder of the dynasty, John Jacob Astor I, had erected the family’s first in 1836 to commemorate his name and his extraordinary wealth, which he had created from absolutely nothing.

The semi-literate butcher’s son from Germany had crossed the Atlantic in 1783, at the age of 20, and found a job cleaning rabbit and beaver pelts on the New York waterfront. By 1830 he had made so much money in the fur trade that he began to buy land on Manhattan Island, and when New York boomed into a world capital, Astor became the richest man in America and the nation’s first multi-millionaire.

Astutely, he never sold any of his land, but instead leased it to developers and collected rents from tenement buildings. The only thing he built with his own money was his grand luxury hotel, Astor House on Broadway. Hailed as “a marvel of the age”, it contained such wondrous innovations as indoor plumbing and running water, pumped around the building by a great steam engine in the basement. There was a French chef with 12 cooks and 60 waiters, and a new menu printed every day on an in-house printing press. When Astor died in 1848, his hotel was widely acknowledged as the best in the world (although at the close of the century it was on its last legs, and was demolished soon afterwards).

Jack Astor was the founder’s great-grandson, and he called himself Colonel Astor after commanding his own artillery regiment in the Spanish-American War. Tall, thin and debonair, if slightly gangling and awkward, he married one of the great beauties of the American aristocracy, Ava Lowle Willing of Philadelphia. But it was an arranged marriage, and it turned out unhappily. Jack took refuge in his yacht, as his father had done before him, the many gentlemen’s clubs he belonged to, the corporate boards he sat on almost by birthright, his collection of 60 motor cars and, increasingly, his laboratory.

He was fascinated by machines, electricity and the future, and he invented a new brake for bicycles, a marine turbine engine and a “pneumatic road-improver” that removed dirt from road surfaces and won first prize at the Chicago World’s Fair. He also wrote a science fiction novel called A Journey in Other Worlds, which predicted space travel, global warming, melting polar ice caps, television and genetic engineering. “He had imagination and a mystical side, but he was engineering-orientated really, and a damn good inventor,” says his 90-year-old grandson Ivan Obolensky, whose father, Serge Obolensky, a White Russian prince, married Ava Astor, Jack’s daughter, and was appointed to the board of The St. Regis New York. “He was the richest man on the Titanic, and if he’d have lived longer, he’d have died even richer. He was getting into torpedo designs and some really advanced stuff. The air conditioning system he designed for The St. Regis was a brilliant scheme.”

Having built the Waldorf-Astoria, the cousins continued to expand their hotel empire by constructing dueling hotels on opposite sides of Times Square. William had started with the 17-story New Netherland. When Jack started designing the $6 million St. Regis, he decided it would be 18 stories high: the tallest in the world.

Named after a vacation resort in upstate New York popular with Manhattan’s power elite, The St. Regis was his masterpiece, reflecting both his love of splendor and his passion for innovation. The limestone exterior featured decorative wrought-iron balconies and elaborately carved garlands, in the fashionable Beaux Arts Parisian style. The interiors, of creamy Caen stone and Istrian marble, were designed in a style inspired by the palace of Versailles, with ornate woodcarvings, antique furniture and Flemish tapestries.

But hidden inside the bowels of the building was a labyrinthine network of ducts, channels, tubes, wires and pipes that Astor designed himself. There were mail chutes on every floor, telephones in every room, and outlets for dust-sucking machines connected to a big central vacuum. Adjustable thermostats in every room accessed his novel heating, cooling and ventilation system that “purified” the air by forcing it into the rooms through cheesecloth filters, and cooled it with fans blowing over melting, evaporating ice. It combined American invention and European opulence, making it, as Astor had hoped, the finest hotel of its age.

Like his first hotel, this one, on Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, caused Astor big trouble with the neighbors. This was a very exclusive residential area known as Vanderbilt Row, and its tycoons and socialites did not want their mansions towered over by an 18-story skyscraper. Led by William Rockefeller, they blocked the hotel’s application for a bar licence, on the grounds that it lay within 200 feet of a church and so violated the state liquor law, and boycotted any events held there. The battle went on for two years, until an Astor-friendly senator changed the law to exempt large hotels.

When Prince Sadanaru Fashimi of Japan stayed at The St. Regis for two weeks, Vanderbilt Row was impressed and opposition started to fade. Soon after, Mr. and Mrs. William Vanderbilt announced that they would move into the hotel for the winter, and in the following years, Marlene Dietrich and Salvador Dalí would live at The St. Regis on a seasonal basis. Of all the hotel buildings commissioned by the Astors in New York, only The St. Regis still remains. Now modernized and refurbished, but fully in keeping with its original style and splendor, it is Jack Astor’s greatest legacy and the cornerstone of the St. Regis group.

Although Astor’s hotel empire was flourishing, his personal life was less successful. A year after his mother, Caroline, died in 1908, his wife, Ava, divorced him on grounds of adultery – to the horror of the high Episcopalian ministers in his family church. With his unhappy marriage finally behind him, though, Jack gained a new lease on life. He started to entertain lavishly, and accepted more invitations to society weddings and costume balls. In the summer of 1910, he met an attractive 17-year-old debutante called Madeleine Talmage Force, at Bar Harbor, Maine, and they fell madly in love.

The entire nation was shocked when their marriage was announced. No Episcopalian clergyman would perform the service and, after a frantic search, Astor found a Congregationalist minister who was willing to do it for $1,000 cash. The couple exchanged vows at Beechwood, the Astors’ summer mansion in Newport, and many guests showed their disapproval by staying away. “I’m afraid Madeleine was the Scarlet Letter in our family,” says Obolensky. “She came right out of the blue.”

The newlyweds spent the winter of 1911-12 in Europe and Egypt, but when Madeleine discovered she was pregnant, they decided to travel home in grand style. They booked a luxury suite for the maiden voyage of the biggest, most impressive ocean liner that had ever been built. With Jack’s valet, Madeleine’s lady maid and private nurse, and an Airedale terrier named Kitty, they boarded RMS Titanic at Cherbourg as the sun set on April 10, 1912.

Four nights later, after feasting on caviar, lobster, Egyptian quail and plovers’ eggs, as the string orchestra played Puccini and Tchaikovsky, the gentlemen in first class escorted their ladies down the grand staircase to their suites. At 11.40pm, there was a sudden violent shaking that lasted no longer than a minute. As the iceberg floated away, the ship sailed smoothly again, but fatal damage had been done, and Captain Edward Smith ordered the lifeboats to be prepared and all passengers on deck.

Jack Astor helped Madeleine into a cork lifejacket, showed her to a lifeboat, and inquired if he might join her since she was in “a delicate condition”. The lifeboats were for women and children only, he was told, and he accepted it gracefully. “The sea is calm,” he told her. “You’ll be alright. You’re in good hands. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Madeleine survived and gave birth to a son, but Jack Astor died: probably killed by a falling smokestack as the Titanic went down nose-first with her stern in the air. His body, clad in a lifejacket and a blue serge suit, with $2,500 in cash and a gold watch in the pockets, was found floating a week later by a passing steamer.

Thousands of people mourned the colonel as his coffin passed through the streets of New York, and songs were composed about him and legends multiplied. He sank with the ship while waving farewell to his bride, people said.

In the film Titanic, he drowns clutching on to his money like a miser, an inaccurate and unfair portrayal of a generous soul, says Ivan Obolensky, who was born three years after his grandfather’s death. “He was only 47 and really coming into himself. It was a terrible loss to our family, although we were too stoic to talk about it. He was a good, steady human being, benign and honorable, and disappeared in his prime.”

Carousel images courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library, Getty Images, Corbis

Gentleman Racer

Goodwood House might have remained just another of England’s lesser-known stately homes were it not for the fact that its present incumbent, the entrepreneurial Earl of March and Kinrara, has put it well and truly on the map as the site of the Festival of Speed and Revival events which attract car enthusiasts from all corners of the globe. But while visitors to the interior of the rambling 17th-century property get an impressive display of Sèvres porcelain, furniture by William Kent and paintings by Canaletto and Stubbs, they are seldom privy to the contents of Lord March’s office, which is crammed to the ceiling with an eclectic mix of the sort of car and motorcycle-related trinkets that are commonly known
as “automobilia”.

Lord March began the collection in the 1970s. “My grandfather, the aristocrat-turned-racing driver Freddie March, used to send copies of Veteran and Vintage magazines to me at school, and one of the things I’m most attached to comes from that time of my life,” he says. “It’s a copy of The Treasury of the Automobile by the American cartoonist Ralph Stein, which was one of the first of the big, full-color car books to be published during the 1960s. I used to love the pictures of great cars such as Type 35 Bugattis, and I’d spend hours doing drawings of them. “My grandfather was a very good model-maker. He made lots of models of cars and aircraft, some of which I still have. I’m also trying to collect all of the original Goodwood motor-racing-event posters produced when he originally operated the circuit between 1948 and 1966.”

One of the pieces Lord March most cherishes is also one of the smallest: a trophy in the form of a cigarette lighter engraved with the image of a horse. “My grandfather won it when the Lancia Car Club staged the first hill climb event at Goodwood in 1936. It represents the start of motorsport at Goodwood, which makes it very special. I also have his tattered silk scarf and armband from his racing days, and a lovely Roy Nockolds pencil drawing showing him winning the Brooklands Double Twelve in 1934.”

But it is since the first Festival of Speed 21 years ago that his collection has really taken off. “People just give me things,” he says. “I have hundreds of model cars, dozens of crash helmets. One of my favorites is the helmet worn by the great American driver Dan Gurney when he was racing Ford GT40s. It is incredibly flimsy. “I also have a couple of Stetsons which were gifts from famous drivers. One came from Jim Hall, co-founder of the 1960s racing firm Chaparral, who presented it to me after I became one of relatively few people to drive one of the cars. The other belonged to the legendary NASCAR racer Richard Petty – it’s massive and decorated with strange animal bones and bits of fur. It’s possibly the maddest thing in the whole house.”

The 2015 Goodwood Festival of Speed takes place June 25 to 28 2015, and the Revival, September 11 to 13 2015, in Sussex, England. goodwood.com

American Beauty

Twentieth-century New York was full of fashion role models: high-society ladies whose wardrobes were as stylish as any European aristocrat’s, whose jewelry was priceless and whose elegance was the result of years of devoted attention. But none had quite the grace of Babe Paley.

Babe was the style icon of her day. The leader for a decade of the Ten Best Dressed list and an inductee into the Fashion Hall of Fame, she was a friend of and hostess to some of the most famous people in America. Babe was part of a circle alongside supposed wartime spy Gloria Guinness, actress and fashion designer C. Z. Guest, Hollywood socialite Slim Keith, Marella Agnelli, wife of Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, and Pamela Harriman, daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill and a future United States Ambassador to France. Truman Capote (a friend until he wrote an unflattering, minimally fictionalized exposé in 1975 that severed their bond) called these elegant women “the swans”, due to their propensity to group and glide through society like graceful birds.

What made Babe stand out from the rest of the swans was her compelling presence. As her friend, jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane, put it, Babe Paley, like the Mona Lisa, had a face that was both memorable and elusive. Eerily attractive and supremely charismatic, she was a product of a time when society figures were household names – and when women were schooled to be the epitome of elegance.

“One look from Babe and you melted,” Lane says. “You fell in love with her the moment her marvelous eyes looked at you. Every waiter in every restaurant fell in love with her. She made you feel that she was in love with you. If she walked into a room, people didn’t quite stop breathing altogether, but they held their breath for a minute. She had an aura.”

She also knew how to live in supreme style. After her marriage to CBS founder William S. Paley in 1947, she established an estate, Kiluna Farm, on Long Island, where the couple spent weekends and guests included the likes of Lucille Ball, Grace Kelly and David O. Selznick. In Manhattan they occupied a magnificent suite at The St. Regis, which Babe remodeled with the help of society decorator Billy Baldwin. “I was in my early twenties when I first saw their apartment at The St. Regis,” recalls Lane. “It was a corner suite, and it had been tented by Baldwin. There was a wonderful birdcage chandelier hanging in the middle of the drawing room.”

As David Grafton, who wrote the definitive biography of Babe and her family, The Sisters: The Lives and Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters, describes the apartment: “Using yard upon yard of Indian cotton… Babe transformed the space into an exotic fantasy.” Later, when she and her husband moved into their 20-room duplex at 820 Fifth Avenue, while still keeping her St. Regis suite, Baldwin “recreated their old St. Regis living room, which he had installed originally as a jewel-like library”.

Babe didn’t have to work her way up in society. She was born into it on July 15, 1915, to Harvey Cushing, a pioneering brain surgeon, and his wife Kate, a gracious but determined society hostess in Boston. As Grafton writes, “Early on, the Cushing sisters learned to entertain and cater to the comforts of an eclectic mix of personalities, many of whom were masters of their own medical or social fiefdoms.” The late Millicent Fenwick, a friend of Babe’s and a New Jersey congresswoman, remarked, “Each of the girls, and especially Babe, entered the world convinced that they were the most attractive young women in the world, combining beauty and brains.”

Barbara was the youngest of the five Cushing children – hence her nickname, Babe – and she and her sisters were groomed from the start to marry well, a goal that became a virtual profession for their mother. Kate proved instrumental in engineering the 1930 marriage of her first daughter Betsey to James Roosevelt, eldest son of Eleanor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Minnie would eventually marry Vincent Astor, Jr., who owned The St. Regis in New York.

In 1940 Babe married Stanley Grafton Mortimer, Jr., grandson of one of the founders of Standard Oil. She had been working at Vogue, less as a day-to-day line editor and more as one of the magazine’s legions of young, socially prominent women forging connections with designers of the day – the likes of Christian Dior, Coco Chanel and Cristobál Balenciaga. She was still at Vogue when the couple divorced in 1946, and she first met the significantly older, still-married Paley.

Their union in 1947 was, in some ways, unlikely, in that Paley, although powerful, was the son of Jewish immigrants – a detail that remained unsettling for Babe’s WASP mother at a time when such issues mattered among America’s elite. But with his intellect and contacts, and her social abilities, the couple became the hub around which high-society events revolved.

While powerful men need not be handsome or even charming, powerful women, especially in the mid-20th century, had to be beautiful. While Babe certainly possessed the beauty, she also had, as legendary interior designer Mario Buatta says, “substance and a sense of humor. I remember being at a client’s house for lunch one Sunday. Babe was at the table, about ten of us, and she was very quiet for some reason. But then she secretly put a piece of spinach on a front tooth. Finally, one of her friends at the table pointed it out to her. It got her the attention she wanted and it brought her into the conversation – a skill she never had any problems with.”

David Jannes, an art collector and former PR who handled some of New York’s most glittering society events, says, “You have to remember that Babe Paley and the women in her circle were true individuals. The society women of today don’t stand out in the way people like Babe Paley did. She dedicated her life to beauty – in her personal appearance, the objects she acquired, the people she surrounded herself with, the homes she made at The St. Regis and Fifth Avenue and elsewhere.”

The couple entertained CBS stars such as Edward R. Murrow, visiting dignitaries and politicians, and writers including Capote, who once famously said of his former friend, “Babe Paley had only one fault. She was perfect. Otherwise she was perfect.” Style was everything at their Fifth Avenue apartment. Sheets were ironed twice, once in the laundry, and once on the bed. Menus were archived to avoid serving the same meals to returning guests. Visitors complained of not being able to get into the bathroom because there were so many flowers. To cap it all, Paley had amassed a distinguished art collection, a centerpiece of which was Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse (previously owned by Gertrude Stein, and which now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, a gift from Mr. Paley).

Much has been written about Babe and Paley’s troubled marriage, both then and subsequently. Paley was devoted to Babe and keenly aware of the cachet she brought him, yet he was also a conspicuous womanizer. “Bill was Bill
and she knew it,” says Kenneth Jay Lane, who maintained a close friendship with Paley after Babe’s death. “She adored him. He was a fascinating man and much of her role was to make him happy.” Yet Capote, quoted in Gerald Clarke’s biography of the writer, said, “I never met anybody who was so desperately unhappy as she was… Once she tried to leave [Bill] and I sat down and said, ‘Look… Bill bought you. It’s as if he went down to Central Casting. Look upon being Mrs William S. Paley as a job, the best job in the world.”

Throughout her decades-long tenure as a society leader, the embodiment of high fashion, and a fundraiser for her favorite charities, Babe also occupied a role that could only have existed in her day. Certainly to fashionable women in New York, but also to those in the far reaches of America, Babe Paley was a recognized name, the exemplar of style and grace. Such was her power that one warm day, upon leaving a Manhattan restaurant, she removed her scarf and tied it to her purse. Paparazzi recorded the moment and “in no time, women throughout America were tying scarves to their handbags,” recalls Grafton. “So great was Babe Paley’s charisma that women of all ages and from every walk of life would do nearly anything to emulate her. They wanted not only to look like her but to be like her.”

Although Babe died in 1978, she is referenced for her style and look as if she were still attending parties and opening the door to her apartment to receive guests. “I think one of the reasons Babe endures is that she doesn’t look outdated. She looked like a modern-day woman even in the late ’40s and ’50s,” remarks Annette Tapert, who included a chapter about Babe in her iconic book, The Power of Style. “There’s also the fact that her name keeps getting passed down in style folklore. Young girls at fashion magazines today invoke her name.”

Poignantly, it was probably in part the pressures of maintaining the image of style icon and socialite supreme that created fissures in her marriage and contributed to her premature death. While Paley liked to see his wife project an image of impossible glamor, forever draped in furs and the most expensive jewelry, Babe’s love of fashion and design made her an early champion of the unconventional pantsuit. As she aged, rather than attempting to preserve an illusion of youth, she eschewed hair dye and presented her graying locks to the world.

Like many other women of her time, Babe also smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Just a day before she entered a New York hospital to begin treatment for the lung cancer that would eventually lead to her death, she called her friend Kenneth Jay Lane, and invited him to meet for lunch. “She showed up wearing a long strand of big green beads,” he says. “I loved them. I said, ‘Babe, are those…’ and she said, ‘Yes.’ They were emeralds and I’d never seen the necklace before. ‘I haven’t worn this for years,’ she said, ‘but I knew you’d love them and I wanted to wear them for you.’ That’s the kind of person she was.”

Your address: The St. Regis New York

Images: Horst P. Horst © Condé Nast Archive/Corbis, CBS Photo Archive/Contributor, Erwin Blumenfel D © Condé Nast Archive/Corbis

Let There Be Lights

Just over a decade ago, the chandelier was languishing in design Siberia, deemed a fusty form of lighting that had no place in a chic modern interior. But no longer. In a quite remarkable reversal of fortune, today the chandelier is one of the most exciting, challenging and sexy objects in interior design, and big-name designers are creating dazzling chandeliers that are light years away from the traditional designs of the past.

One of the latest to create a sensation is architect Daniel Libeskind, who won the competition to design the masterplan of the World Trade Center reconstruction. Unveiled at last year’s Salone del Mobile, the trend-setting design fair held annually in Milan, his Ice chandelier fuses mathematics with the centuries-old craft of hand-blown glass. Commissioned for the Czech lighting company Lasvit, the chandelier features a series of clear-glass, angular pieces that fall like icicles from a reflective glass plate. Light shines through each glass piece, illuminating the edges to give the chandelier a shimmering, ice-like luminosity.   

All of which is a far cry from the chandelier’s origins. The earliest chandeliers, in the 14th century, were simple wooden crosses with spikes for fixing candles to, raised to the ceilings of churches and monasteries by a rope or chain. Over the next two centuries the chandelier developed its more familiar shape, with arms to hold the candles, and moved from public buildings into private homes. Chandeliers in the houses of the prosperous were made of wood, wrought iron and tin. In wealthier residences, they were more finely crafted and fashioned from gilded bronze, known as ormolu, as well as brass. In palaces, precious metals, such as sterling silver, were used.

The creation of lead glass, or crystal, transformed the chandelier into an extravagant and glittering centerpiece. From the late 18th century onwards, hugely ornate chandeliers were found in the palaces of Europe and Asia. The Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, built between 1843 and 1856, is dripping with chandeliers made by the French crystal company Baccarat, the most spectacular found in the Ceremonial Hall. A gift from Queen Victoria, it remains one of the largest chandeliers in the world, weighing 4.5 tons and featuring 750 lamps and hundreds of Bohemian crystals.

Today’s models are equally eye-catching – but very different in design. Take the Gabriel chandelier, for instance, designed by Studio Bouroullec for the palace of Versailles. Made to hang above the immense neoclassical Gabriel staircase that is the public entrance, the 40ft-long chandelier resembles an illuminated string of pearls hanging from the ceiling, the soft glow of the many crystal-encrusted LED bulbs changing with the daylight.

 The Gabriel chandelier was made by Swarovski, the Austrian crystal-maker that has been at the forefront of the chandelier revival. Its Crystal Palace Project, launched in 2002 and curated by interior designer Ilse Crawford, had the ambitious goal of creating chandeliers with an aesthetic rooted in the 21st century rather than the 19th. The project got off to an inauspicious start. “At that time the classical chandelier was not taken seriously by the contemporary design set. Initially when I approached some well-known designers, most of them refused,” says Crawford. However, a posse of young designers took up the challenge, and their concepts were groundbreaking. One chandelier was made entirely of rose-pink crystals in the form of a haute-couture ball gown. Another was made of crystal prisms and resembled a glistening block of ice. Most unexpected was Tord Boontje’s Blossom, shaped like a flowering cherry-tree branch.

 In the years since, many of the world’s most respected designers and even architects have realized the chandelier’s potential to thrill. “Manufacturers of chandeliers started to be interested in working with contemporary design rather than sticking to pastiche tradition,” says Crawford. The result has been some extraordinary creations. Award-winning architect Zaha Hadid’s limited-edition Fade, for example, incorporates 86 floor-to-ceiling cables, set at a 45-degree angle to create a fluted cone wrapped by 2,700 internally-lit crystals. Belgian designer Vincent Van Duysen’s Cascade is a series of LED-lit crystal strings that fall from the ceiling to resemble a torrent of water, while Beau McClellan’s Reflective Glow is officially the world’s largest chandelier. Suspended from a glass atrium between two office complexes in Qatar, it is 126ft long and lit by more than 2,300 hand-ground optical crystals and 55,000 LEDs.

Modern chandeliers also incorporate materials other than crystal into their design, such as copper piping and leather. Jo Whiting’s stunning chandelier for UK interior designer Abigail Ahern is made up of hundreds of small squares of porcelain, each of which has been hand-rolled in muslin for added texture. “Modern chandeliers evoke all the grandeur of the past, but have an edgy new update,” says Ahern.

No longer simply a light, the chandelier is now a work of art, too. “It is more fluid, more unique in design,” says Lisa Santana from Unitfive Design, responsible for the amazing rock chandeliers – 8,000 individually-made rock crystals suspended on hand-forged metal frames – at The St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort. “Now it’s possible to develop one-of-a-kind pieces that are a piece of art. They have become a reflection of one’s sense of style and fashion.”

Most recently, it is the development of the LED that has allowed greater scope. “LEDs flood the crystal with light, allowing it to do the talking,” says Billy Canning, chief lighting designer for the Irish crystal company Waterford. Although known for its traditional designs (its chandeliers are in London’s Westminster Abbey), Waterford stepped into the modern arena in dramatic fashion with a spectacular LED ball for the 100th anniversary of the annual Times Square Ball Drop on New Year’s Eve, 2007. The design of 672 Waterford crystal triangles lit by more than 9,500 LEDs made for a wonderful spectacle as it descended the flagpole.

However, even traditional chandeliers are enjoying a surge of interest as their star quality is once again appreciated. Baccarat’s Zenith 84 was also unveiled at Salone del Mobile, its glittering opulence a sharp contrast to the bare stone walls surrounding it. A reminder, if one were needed, that the chandelier has the power to transform even the most austere of spaces.

Your address: The St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort

Label of Love

In 1927, the year that The St. Regis hotel opened its new wing and ballroom on 55th Street, a Jewish-German teenager left his home in Berlin to try to find work in New York and to pursue his love of jazz. At first he lived rough in Central Park, walking by the grand hotel to find work in the city’s docks. By 1939 he had founded Blue Note Records, the most iconic jazz label in the world and the epitome of style and cool. His name was Alfred Lion.

The city in which he arrived had already become the jazz capital of the world. The first jazz record had been cut there just before the end of World War I,
and soon after dozens of venues had sprung up all over the city, from grand ballrooms to tiny spaces. Besides well-known spots such as the Cotton Club in Harlem, where Duke Ellington made his name, a thriving underground scene had evolved around 52nd Street, where musicians gathered to experiment with the form – and imbibe a drink or two – in the small, smoky interiors. It was here that Lion hung out.

When he wasn’t in clubs, Lion spent a great deal of time at Milt Gabler’s Commodore Music Shop on 52nd Street, talking to the owner and his brother-in-law, Jack Crystal (the father of comedian Billy Crystal),  who worked at the shop and helped run gigs at a nearby club. Gabler not only sold records but had his own label, which in April 1939 would put out one of the most important political records ever made: Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, about the lynching of black men in the Southern states.

Alfred Lion’s new Blue Note label had released its first 78rpm disc a month earlier, and while it didn’t have the political resonance of Gabler’s release, it had arguably just as significant an impact. In the last days of 1938 Lion had gone to a landmark concert at Carnegie Hall, showcasing black music from spirituals to swing, and then had been a guest at the opening of Café Society, the first club in the city in which blacks and whites were treated as equals, greeted at the door with the words “Welcome to Café Society, the wrong place for the right people”. Having spoken to Gabler, he suddenly knew what he wanted to do: get boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis to make some recordings.

In those days, very few records were pressed – and when they were, artists often weren’t paid. So when Lion spoke to the artists, and promised not only to pay them, but to pay them well, the deal was sealed. A studio was booked on the West Side of Manhattan, a bottle of whisky was procured, and Ammons and Lewis performed a series of solos and duets. At the end of the session Lion didn’t have enough money to cover both the studio time and his artists, and had to return some weeks later for the masters. When he listened to the discs back at his apartment, his life was changed: “I decided to go into the music business.” He pressed 25 copies each of BN1 and BN2, the former featuring two slow blues tunes, and the second two boogie-woogie numbers. With no distribution in place, he offered them by mail order at $1.50 each.

Over the next quarter of a century Blue Note Records not only became the leading jazz record label, but went on to release music by just about every great name in the genre, from Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk to John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Smith. It also produced some of the most distinctive and beautiful covers in the business, with sleeves that were works of art in themselves. Lion’s boyhood friend Francis Wolff, also Jewish, whom Lion had helped to escape Germany in September 1939, took many of the mostly black and white photographs. The arresting graphics, with their echoes of the Bauhaus, were pioneered by Paul Bacon, who describes his early work as “graphic visions of the music. They were drawn by hand and represented the best I could do at the time with two colors.”

In 1954, Bacon was joined by another young designer, Reid Miles from Esquire magazine. While continuing to use Wolff’s portraiture, Miles placed a heavy emphasis on lettering and graphic marks, using stencils and woodblocks, which he intended to represent something of the rhythm and tone of the music. Ironically, given that Blue Note album sleeves have become the benchmark against which all album designs are measured, Miles was not a jazz fan. But he had a talent for reducing the feel of the music into a simple, modern design that reflected not only the revolution that was taking place in music, but in society. With their spare aesthetic, cropped photographs and glorious colors, even today, they look as fresh and revolutionary as they did then: the epitome of cool. And they were clever, too, reflecting Lion’s belief that jazz was an expressive medium to be taken as seriously as any other high art.

When swamped with work Reid Miles would farm out jobs to friends, including
a young Andy Warhol, then a struggling artist desperate for commissions. Warhol produced four album sleeves, three of which were for guitarist Kenny Burrell. Warhol would go on to create one of the most celebrated pop album covers of all time – the banana on the front of The Velvet Undergound and Nico – but his designs for Blue Note were not on par with those of Miles and Bacon.

The St. Regis New York is proud of its longstanding connection to jazz. Count Basie and Duke Ellington played at its historic rooftop ballroom, and celebrated modern-day exponent Jamie Cullum gave a private acoustic show at its King Cole Bar & Salon in October as part of the Jazz Legends at St. Regis series. Blue Note, too, has endured down the years and moved with the times, under the same guiding principle on which Lion established the company in 1939: allowing musicians the opportunity to make records with “uncompromising expression”. Robert Glasper, Gregory Porter, Derrick Hodge, Ambrose Akinmusire, Wayne Shorter and Jason Moran are just some of the names who record for Blue Note today and they, like just about everyone who has preceded them, make records that are the soundtrack to New York City. Records that define jazz in both their sound and in their look.

Uncompromising Expression: Blue Note: 75 Years of The Finest in Jazz by Richard Havers is published by Thames & Hudson and Chronicle Books; thamesandhudson.com; chroniclebooks.com

Your address: The St. Regis New York

Carlos Huber

What do you recollect of the scents of your childhood?

Although I’m absolutely in love with plants, I’ve actually always lived in apartments. But growing up in Mexico City I remember, when the elevator doors would open, always discovering a new flower arrangement that my mom had made. So the scent of flowers would always welcome me home.

How does your love of place and history connect to perfume?

More than any other sense, smell is linked to memory. As abstract and evanescent as a perfume can be, in our minds it is always tied to a concrete time and place. I’ve always been very connected to the discovery of a new city, a new landscape, through its aromas. With each of our scents, I want to guide you through a journey. That’s why it’s very important for me that the perfumes be “transparent”, that you are able to smell each ingredient so that you recognize them as clues in the story.

What was it like to train under Rodrigo Flores-Roux at Givaudan US?

When he discussed a specific note, or an historic perfume accord, he would set it up
in its period so I would understand the world around it. It was a cultural history
of perfume.

How would you describe your work?

I see myself as a fragrance architect: designing the scent so it highlights the significance of a beautiful story. I strive to be meticulous. The more of the picture I can paint for you, the more connection you will find with your life.

Your scents allude to historical events such as the meeting of Louis XIV
of France and María Teresa of Spain in 1660. What inspires you about
such moments?

History is my favorite subject. I read about the meeting of the French and Spanish courts in 1660 when the Peace Treaty of the Pyrenees was consolidated. For Fleur de Louis I investigated not only what they used as perfume, but also what they used to scent the room. The king’s cousin said that the pavilion where they met was so new that it still smelled of pine and varnishing tar.

What are the most exotic locations you have visited in your
perfume adventures?

Waiheke Island in New Zealand: it’s full of honeysuckle and jasmine. And Sydney is such a fragrant city – full of star jasmine in late spring, magnolias in the early summer, and frangipani later on. My favorite ingredients are gardenia, magnolia grandiflora, vanilla, lavender and rosemary, from Mexico, Australia, Spain and France.

You live in New York. What is the olfactory character of the Big Apple?

The waterways are definitely important. I love the Hudson for its sharp, briny scent.

And the aroma of home?

I like to buy fresh flowers and to change them depending on what’s in season, to experience a new scent. I also love burning candles. In the living room there will be a green floral (the St. Regis scent actually), in my bedroom something warmer, and in the bathroom something mossy and green.

What is the story behind the perfume you have created for St. Regis?

The ambient scent and candle are inspired by Mrs Astor’s ball, held at her Fifth Avenue home on January 29, 1900. Guests were greeted by the scent of American Beauty roses, the hostess’s favorite flower. They made their way down halls lined with potted palms and pillars of apple, quince and almond blossom. From there, they would enter a ballroom decorated with red roses, white lilies, yellow jonquils,
violets and carnations. Our scent is a custom composition that is historic, modern, truly signature.

Does perfume allow us access to something akin to a sixth sense?

Absolutely. Perfume can create a reaction almost like a vibration. It can excite, remind or attract you to something that’s beyond rational explanation.

Fashion’s New Address

The cavernous TriBeCa headquarters of the online fashion retailer Moda Operandi has all the urgency and buzz of an old-fashioned newsroom. Except that most newsrooms (or internet fashion companies for that matter) are not decorated by the society interior designer Daniel Romualdez, complete with a vintage bronze coffee table, floral upholstered Louis XVI-style chairs, and oversized custom linen lampshades hanging throughout the industrial space, which is painted in its very own hue, Moda Pink. Its founder, Lauren Santo Domingo, has the unruffled presence and gait of a swan. The blonde, lissom Santo Domingo, one of Vogue’s most photographed belles, is dressed in a Stella Jean printed cotton party dress, with fitted bodice and a full skirt, topped by an ecru Carven cropped sweater (worn backwards to perfect effect) and Lucite heels by Nicholas Kirkwood. This effortless mix personifies Moda Operandi’s savvy intent: to service its fashion-obsessed global clientele with outfits and combinations that they can’t find elsewhere and allow them to purchase them with a click.

The site itself is based on the idea of the traditional trunk show in which designers, such as James Galanos, Bill Blass and Carolina Herrera, would make personal appearances and cater to special clients, but in a modern high-tech way. “I once thought the trunk show was about to go the way of the fax machine,” says Santo Domingo. “But based on the success of our business, I’d say it’s back. In a big way.” Fashion designers, such as Bibhu Mohapatra (who has dressed Michelle Obama) and Barbara Tfank (Diablo Cody and Rita Ora are fans), and noted jewelers including Jade Jagger and Kara Ross, have all expanded the old-fashioned trunk show to cater to clients who want not just a more personal approach with the clothes, but with the designer. And the designers are not complaining. “It’s the backbone of my business,” says Cornelia Guest, whose cruelty-free line of handbags has found a thriving niche, thanks to private lunches in such cities as Houston and San Francisco hosted by the international society doyennes Lynn Wyatt and Denise Hale (friends of Cornelia’s late mother, the incomparable C. Z. Guest). “There’s no better entrée,” she says. “And, trust me: these women love to shop.” In the 1980s, women would flock to catch a glimpse of an Oscar de la Renta or Geoffrey Beene. Robert Burke, former senior vice-president of fashion at Bergdorf Goodman and now CEO of the consulting firm Robert Burke Associates, recalls how VIP clients would plunk down en masse an easy million dollars at a Chanel trunk show. “They were a serious part of the business,” he notes. This isn’t just about sales, though. Designers really enjoy this kind of interaction with their customers and getting personal feedback.

Michael Kors can’t resist working three or four dressing rooms at once; Donna Karan, who built her business on intimately knowing her clients and their body shapes, famously loved to jump inside and undress herself alongside the customer; and Dennis Basso took the term “trunk show” back to its roots, stocking the trunk of his car with his priceless furs and going from door-to-door in the New York suburbs. Both Zac Posen and Jason Wang credit more than a modicum of their success to knowing the needs of the women themselves. “It’s important,” says Wang. “I need to know what my clients are like; it puts my work into perspective. It’s really thrilling… The clients are really into the clothes. Last time I went to Nordstrom to do a trunk show, one woman bought 41 pieces.” Nor have designers lost sight of the importance of wooing deep-pocketed customers in the sky-rocketing markets of Asia and the Middle East with private events and behind-the-scenes tours that offer a more personal service than stores normally offer, including meeting designers themselves. Naeem Khan, Reem Acra, and Monique Lhuillier all court the Middle-Eastern customer. “They all want to get customer loyalty, especially in places like Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Russia,” says Burke. Matches, the London-based string of upscale boutiques, frequently hosts trunk shows and parties in an elegant townhouse set aside for entertaining and private shopping and also takes young British designers on road shows to the Middle East.

“The trunk show or personal appearance has evolved since it began,” adds Roopal Patel, a former fashion director of Neiman Marcus who now heads her own consulting firm. Why do they want them? “Customers are looking for special, exclusive products that they can’t find anywhere else and designs they can’t find just anywhere.” And no designer is taking them for granted. Take Mary Katrantzou, arguably one of today’s hottest designers, who has been out to Brazil and the US and is headed to Dubai and Singapore this autumn. “We didn’t really understand the power of the trunk show at first,” she says. “It is really important to build these relations with loyal customers and court them. And we were amazed at how much you can sell.” After Karolina Kurkova had dropped into a trunk show at the East Village jewelry showroom, Bijules, she knew where to go for something edgy for this year’s annual Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Ball, which had a punk theme. She left with the perfect cocktail ring, a 14ct gold handlet and a two-piece knuckle-ring set. “No saleswoman can sell a piece of my jewelry like I can,” says the boutique’s owner Jules, whose clients include Rihanna, Beyoncé and Alicia Keys, and who recently traveled to Dallas for a personal trunk show. “These women don’t want to go into stores and be treated anonymously. They came in and dropped a ton of money.”

When Anne Hearst recently hosted a gathering for Jade Jagger in her Manhattan penthouse for girlfriends including Laurie Durning, the wife of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and her niece Gillian Hearst, the famed interior designer Milly de Cabrol recalls: “I only went because it was by invitation only, given by my friend and with Jade Jagger. That was what made it special.” After casually glancing at Jagger’s jewelry spread out on a coffee table, de Cabrol found herself departing with a ruby-heart gold ring. “Jade was absolutely charming and very down-to-earth. It does make you want to buy.” Jagger, who’s held trunk shows in Hong Kong, Bombay and New York, says: “The ladies tend to get more excited. They tend to go for the higher-end pieces, and it’s good to cut out the middle man. It just creates a great buzz.” After jeweler Lynn Ban’s friend, the Singapore fashionista Cindy Chua-Tay, tossed a trunk show there on her behalf, Ban, who’s already appeared at Lane Crawford in Hong Kong, says: “Now I’m in [the chic Singapore boutique] Club 21”, where she recently sold a $20,000 black diamond gash cuff. “Word of mouth is very effective,” says Jane Pendry of Dovima Paris (“the Tory Burch of Europe”) whose trunk shows in Paris and around the US are by appointment, and where she personally tailors individual ensembles. “You get influencers in fashion from all over the world,” says the New York-based Jennifer Creel, whose eco-friendly sunglasses have been relished at homey trunk shows in London, and who now finds her across-the-pond girlfriends Pia Getty and Marie-Chantal of Greece, among others, spreading the gospel from St. Barths to the Cote d’Azur. The New York jeweler and handbag designer Kara Ross has found herself hosting trunk shows in Jeddah and Al Khabar in Saudi Arabia for a bevy of princesses who might be swathed in an abaya, but nevertheless cherish her diamond ostrich Electra bag. While Sally Perrin of Perrin Paris 1893 hosts Qataris and Saudis who pass through Paris in her Left Bank apartment. “Have trunk show, will travel, is our motto,” she says triumphantly.

According to the Vanity Fair fashion expert and special correspondent Amy Fine Collins, the trunk show of today is “a sensory, migratory experience”. Moda Operandi’s VIP clients are now traveling to TriBeCa to its Salon Moda, with its fabric-painted trompe l’oeil, striped silk drapes, and divine clothing, including a Wes Gordon ink petit swan print sable and lace inset dress and a Nina Ricci long fringe and lace dress in rose crystal. All at the ready for the client who, as Santo Domingo points out, “can have anything in the world her heart desires, but, ironically, could never get her hands on the dresses and looks she wanted”. Stylists who’ve traveled to Abu Dhabi and Bahrain to deliver Marquesa and Giles gowns for a fashion emergency, are at the ready. “You feel like you’re getting something nobody else is,” says Brittany Weeden, who ended up spending $8,000 on her most recent visit. “It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to have that.’ And once I found out that the salon is a replica of Lauren Santo Domingo’s closet, well, I felt very special.”

Images by Maciek Kobielski/Art Partner, Xavi Menos, Getty

Georgina Chapman

Tell me a bit about your English childhood.

I was brought up in Richmond, just outside London, and went to boarding school in Wiltshire. We had a country house we went to at weekends. I used to ride ponies and go to gymkhanas, though I was never very successful. Then I studied at the Wimbledon School of Art and we [she and co-designer Keren Craig] launched Marchesa there. I never imagined I’d end up in America.

So how did it happen?

It was a gradual move. Nieman Marcus became our biggest client, and we were selling really well to Americans so we decided to set up an office in New York. When we first arrived, we were lent some studio space in the garment district in Midtown, but we couldn’t start working until 7pm when everyone else had left, and we had to do all our dyeing in the men’s bathroom. It wasn’t the most glamorous start for an eveningwear company. Eventually we got our own offices in the Meatpacking District, but we didn’t go out much because we were working so hard. Meeting my husband [the film producer Harvey Weinstein] sealed the deal, of course. Now my family is here, and my daughter India is about to start school.

Where are your favourite New York hangouts?

I’ve always lived in the West Village, which reminds me a bit of London.
Having children has given me a new perspective on the city: we’ve got a playground right on our street, which is very lucky. I like to walk to my offices in Chelsea along the High Line, a former elevated railway that’s been turned into a park. It has amazing views of the city and is beautifully planted, with cafés all along it. Both India and Dash [her second child with Weinstein, Dashiell] come into work with me a lot. My favourite shop in New York is Bergdorf’s; it’s beautiful, and I love the layout. And I love Showplace Antique + Design Center (nyshowplace.com), which is an indoor antiques emporium of old Louis Vuitton luggage and vintage clothing. I often go there and sift through everything for little treasures, looking for inspiration.

What are the hotels you love in New York?

I go to The St. Regis quite often for tea, and for fittings with very glamorous people who are staying there. The atmosphere is lovely because the service is fantastic yet it’s relaxed, which is a rare combination. I also love eating at the Waverly Inn, and if Harvey and I are going out, we like Per Se in the Time Warner building and the Monkey Bar uptown. But Harvey works so hard that if we do spend time together, it’s usually in Connecticut.

So how do you spend your weekends?

Our home in Westport is where I can really relax. When I was looking for somewhere for us to get married, I looked everywhere and eventually I said, “Why don’t we just do it here?” That’s not to say it all went smoothly. I made my own dress and the embroidered panels I’d ordered from India arrived stained brown, which was a bit of a heart-attack moment. And then I got the flu, so I was lying in bed pinning the dress together. But it all got done in the end. On a normal weekend, because we’re both so busy, we like to eat in and watch movies in our screening room. There is a restaurant in Westport that we love, the Dressing Room. It was started by Paul Newman, and it serves home-grown, organic food. Everything there is so fresh and delicious.

What other parts of the States are special to you?

I had my bachelorette party at Price Canyon Ranch, a really small place in Tucson, Arizona. I took my girlfriends, and we all shared rooms and went out day and night on horseback wearing pink cowboy hats and, I seem to remember, pink leotards. It was really fun and definitely anti-style. And I sometimes go with Harvey to Sundance. It’s a serious film festival, but because it’s in a ski resort lots of people bring their kids, and there’s a lovely relaxed atmosphere. So I go skiing during the day while Harvey works, and in the evening we all meet up.

What do you love about LA?

My favourite thing is the change of climate when you arrive. I’m always so happy to escape from New York in the winter. I head for The Way We Wore, which sells beautiful vintage clothes. I found a pair of matador trousers in there which inspired my last collection. I like to eat out at Cecconi’s and Soho House, which has fabulous views, but my favourite restaurant of all is Giorgio Baldi in Santa Monica. I always have the sweetcorn ravioli with truffles. It’s making me feel hungry just talking about it.

What’s it like dressing people for the red carpet?

Really nerve-racking. You feel an incredible responsibility. They’re walking out in front of the cameras and about to be critiqued by the world, so you want them to feel their best. Your heart’s in your mouth, thinking – don’t let anything happen to the dress! Harvey and I are often at the same event, both feeling nervous. Still, we’re very lucky that our industries overlap so much that we need to be in the same place.

How do your worlds converge professionally in other ways?

Harvey is incredibly supportive of what I do, and I love what he does. In fact, I’ve just directed a short film for Canon’s Project Imaginat10n film festival, and I’ve been using every bit of help from him that I can get. I’ve told him if he ever feels like designing a dress, I’ll be there for him.

Has the rise of red-carpet dressing influenced the way ordinary women dress?

I think so. When we first started Marchesa, people told us nobody did evening dress any more. These days, people don’t reject it as old-fashioned. It would be very boring if there wasn’t a spectrum of things to wear, and we only had cocktail dresses. Wearing an evening dress is fun; you feel gorgeous, and it’s romantic. There’s nothing more magical than walking into a room where everyone looks incredible.

Where do you get your inspiration for Marchesa?

From movies, from museums, at night on the internet looking at artists…sometimes I’m zoning out on the treadmill when I have an idea. Our new contemporary line, Marchesa Voyage, came about when Keren and I were on vacation, and we realised it would be great to design some clothes we could take with us that had the Marchesa attitude and the prints, but not the corsets and heavy beading. I’m really excited by it.

Do you design differently for American and British women?

I don’t like to generalize. I’m not designing for a particular British or American woman. You might find you have more success with hotter colour palettes in warmer parts of the world, but the same would apply in the States. My own look hasn’t really changed since moving here. It’s hard to be groomed if you’re working with your hands, and I’ve never been a weekly mani/pedi girl at all. I just can’t sit still for an hour. That’s why I love the new stick-on nail art we’ve brought out with Revlon. The nails are designed to match our embroidery, and they take about two seconds to put on.

What would you miss if you had to leave the States?

The service and the can-do attitude. New York is a 24-hour city, and I do find it frustrating when I leave it. What do you mean I can’t get what I want at 2am?

What advice would you have for visitors to America?

Explore as much of it as possible, because it’s such a diverse place. Beaches, skiing, beautiful landscapes and city life. It’s all here.

marchesa.com

Images by M.Sharkey/Contour by Getty Images, Camera Press

Lords of The Turf

I tell you what I like about polo: it attracts an interesting bunch of people, and few more so than Porfirio Rubirosa. Rubi was the playboy’s playboy. With his magnificent physique, the five-times-married Rubi pulled off the unusual double of counting among his spouses two of the richest women in the world: Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke. But, as well as being a ladies’ man, Rubi was a man’s man, too. It is rather fitting that he died at the wheel of a Ferrari after a long night celebrating the victory of his Cibao La Rampa polo team over Baron Elie de Rothschild’s team at the Bagatelle polo club in Paris. It may sound rather ghoulish, but it is my favourite polo story because it sums up what the sport is about (or at least what I think it should be about): dashing Latin-American lotharios careering around on horses, partying until dawn, seducing women and driving sports cars.

Polo just can’t help itself. Whether as racy fiction, as in Polo, by the British author Jilly Cooper (a classic, even among those who have not read it), or with the backing of a global apparel brand such as Ralph Lauren, a distinctive jeweler such as Cartier, or an elegant hotel group such as St. Regis, polo sells. Or rather, the idea of polo sells: the quivering, sweat-flecked, athletic bodies; the thunderous drumming of the hooves; the crisp crack as the head of a stick connects with the ball. All are as irresistible today as they were in Rubi’s day. Or even before that, in the latter half of the 19th century, when the game made the seismic cultural shift from being the rough-and-tumble pastime of military and nobility from Persia to China since the 5th century BC to the preferred sport of the British Army in India.

The game had made its way to England by the 1870s, where within a very few years it had caught on as another of the attainments upon which the Corinthian gentleman prided himself, combining courage, quick thinking, exigent hand-eye coordination, horsemanship and finances. By the early years of the 20th century, almost as a metaphor for the transfer of power from Old World to New, American society, and Harry Payne Whitney in particular, had taken command of the sport by developing a fast game of long shots played using a specially bred type of pony. Today, it’s played at more than 250 American clubs, from International Polo Club Palm Beach, where the US Open is held, to Santa Barbara Polo Club, host of the Pacific Coast Open. Although the game’s origins are in the northern hemisphere, today its center of gravity has shifted to the southern, its calendar following the sun. Having opened the season in England in April, the players travel through Europe and America, arriving in Argentina in November for its Open Championship, before dispersing around the world to Florida or Australia or South Africa. The game also has a way of following the money. Just as it moved from England to America in the past century, so the game has shifted to a host of new destinations in the past couple of decades.

Today, it is played in more than 77 countries (although professionally in only 16), including those in the Middle East, such as the U.A.E., Bahrain and Jordan, as well as East Asia, where there are clubs in countries ranging from Singapore and Thailand to China. The latter now has two clubs, founded in the past decade. These days, of course, it is all a rather more serious affair than it was in Rubi’s day – and slightly more expensive. Rubi was lucky; his wives kept showering him with presents, including strings of polo ponies. But today if you want to play polo and you aren’t Argentine and weren’t born in the saddle, forget it. That is, unless you happen to have a few million burning a hole in the back pocket of your riding breeches, in which case you can become a patron and surround yourself with people who really know what they are doing (professional players, who are ranked according to handicap, with ten-goal players being the best).

There is a third way you can get involved with the sport: as a business. The demographic and the glamor of polo slots in perfectly to the marketing strategy of most of the companies offering the better things in life, and increasingly, top polo players are attracting sponsorship from luxury brands, particularly watch companies. For instance the ten-goal player and respected breeder Pablo Mac Donough, who was part of the Cartier Queen’s Cup winning side in Windsor, England, last year, is linked to the avant-garde watchmaker Richard Mille. Cartier is the king of polo sponsorship, linking the world of luxury goods with the sport of kings. And much of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s success has been built on the reputation of the Reverso: a watch that was developed during the Art Deco period to be flipped over on the wrist so as to protect the face from stray balls, hooves and sticks. Over the years, the latter watchmaker has become increasingly involved in the sport, sponsoring polo fans such as Clare Milford Haven, who has worked closely with St. Regis in the past. Her Great Trippetts Farm polo yard near Cowdray Park in West Sussex has become a home away from home for players and their ponies in England in the summer. Trippetts is an impressive operation. Such is the condition of the horses’ coats that they look as though they have been to the hairdressers. And Milford Haven’s candlelit suppers in the middle of the stable yard, the soft light reflected in silver trophies the length of the table, are enough to convert even the most equine-phobic guests into polo addicts. Lady Milford Haven, the former social editor of Tatler, exemplifies how completely polo can take over your life. “I never actually thought I could play polo,” she confides over dinner. “I thought it was very much a man’s sport, and that it was going to be way beyond my capabilities. But I just fell in love with it and the challenge of it. I love the people involved. I thought they were going to be very superficial, but in fact they’re very down-to-earth, fun, like-minded people.”

Having talked to other polo-playing friends and their spouses (including Clare’s husband, the Marquess of Milford Haven, who was once a two-goal player), I have come to the conclusion that there are two separate games of polo that exist in parallel. On one side there is the athletic, demanding, engrossing business of playing the game. And then there is the glamorous side that you see when you go to a big game at Greenwich Polo Club, Connecticut, where last summer some of the greatest players in the world, such as Nacho Figueras (see our interview overleaf), played against British royalty in the name of Prince Harry’s charity, Sentebale. Games such as this, says Milford Haven, are “the culmination of weeks of playing very hard, competitive games. But in the end, the match is all about people dressing up and having a day out. It is all just about having fun, which is great.” For my part I am all for the hard work, training, practice matches and injuries, just as long as someone else is doing it. I really don’t need to know one end of the horse from another. It is more than enough for me to know that both ends are dangerous. And, what’s more, I have it on good authority that the middle is far from comfortable.

Nacho Figueras – A Life in the Saddle

The Argentinian star and St. Regis Connoisseur on polo, ponies and playing chukkas with Prince Harry of Wales. Interview by Charlotte Hogarth-Jones.

Ignacio “Nacho” Figueras, 36, is widely recognized as the international face of polo. Currently captain of the Black Watch team, he started playing at the age of 9 on his family’s farm in Argentina, and now plays all over the world.

What do you love most about polo?

The horses. I’ve always loved the sport, but as the years go by it is the horses that I’m getting more passionate about. Nine years ago I started learning about bloodlines, nutrition and training. I’ve found that it makes the relationship you have with a horse much more rewarding. When I was 14, I’d just pick a horse and say, “Let’s go.” Now when I get on a chestnut mare I know her mother, her father; I saw her being trained, and I saw her being broken. It makes a big difference.

How often do you train?

Knowing exactly how a horse is going to feel gives you a real advantage, so I try to ride as much as I can. In between practice I’ll take a couple of horses out for two or three hours, and if I’m not on a horse then I’m still in the stables or I’m thinking about them.

What do you think about when you are on the field?

When you first go out to play you don’t think much about the horse, you feel so in sync with them that horse and player are one. Team-wise, too, you will have discussed with your team-mates how you’re going to play, and you know them well enough that you don’t worry about that. When there’s chemistry within a team it’s really great, and it shows. The main thing is keeping concentration. It is easy to lose focus and start looking at the ball, the crowd and other things that you’re not supposed to be looking at. I’ve even seen people score in the wrong goal. Hopefully you know enough about the team that you’re playing, and you have a strategy so it’s just about staying focused and remembering what the plan was. It should be working and, if it’s not, it is time to go back to the tent and change tactics.

How do you feel about the social side to polo?

You do socialise a lot at the polo, as you do at every other sport. In the States, I have been to many of those VIP boxes where people are talking all the time, working and making contacts, and that is fine. At the end of the day, there will always be some games that keep you on the edge of your seat and some that don’t.

This summer you played with Prince Harry of Wales for his charity, Sentebale. Is he a good player?

Yes, he’s very competitive and he’s been riding all his life, his grandfather played, his father played… Polo isn’t what he does for a living, but he’s a great rider, he’s fun to play with and he uses the game as a platform for charity, which I think is great. It’s a real honor for me to be by his side.

How did your relationship with St. Regis come about?

The original founders of the first St. Regis hotel in New York, Mr. and Mrs. Astor, were very into their polo. They would go to matches and host polo players at their hotel. Since then the brand has continued to support polo around the world, which I’m very passionate about. For me it’s been a very organic relationship. I don’t feel as though they’re pushing me to support something that I’m not associated with, and of course, it’s good to have so many places to stay in around the world.

How do you see polo expanding globally?

There’s a lot of development of the sport in China, and there’s a big polo explosion in the UAE. I think it’s really picking up in many other places around the world, too. It’s getting more attention and more spectators, and it’s going back to the way it was in its heyday. Now is such an exciting time for polo.

In his role as St. Regis Connoisseur of Speed and Sport Nacho Figueras has worked with the brand to develop an exclusive polo website, featuring a global calendar of polo events, closely linked to the St. Regis Aficionado program designed to provide once-in-a-lifetime experiences around the world.

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