VIE Magazine May 2018

TRAVEL SPOTLIGHT

NEW YORK CITY

An INSIDER’S BITE of the BIG APPLE

THE LARGER-THAN-LIFE

ASHLEY LONGSHORE POP ART’S REBEL QUEEN MAKES a SPLASH at BERGDORF GOODMAN

May 2018

Linda Miller belongs to the Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate, the most elite and comprehensive luxury real estate network in the world. It comprises a hand-selected group with properties in more than 70 countries that collectively sells over $300 billion in real estate annually showcased on the top portal for luxury properties online, LuxuryRealEstate.com. Luxury Real Estate has been named an industry leader by Forbes, The Webby Awards, Web Marketing Association, Maggie Awards, ADDY Awards, the Inc. 5000 List, and more.

The Board of Regents is an exclusive network of the world’s most elite luxury real estate professionals and has a global collection of the finest real estate brokers in the world. With an exclusive membership of more than 500 firms with 130,000 professionals in more than 65 countries, it collectively sells over $200 BILLION in real estate annually, with an average sale of $2,450,000. In addition to the benefits provided by Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate membership, Regents have access to elite tools and resources to command international business. The digital footprint for Regents is unparalleled, with prime placement for every agent and luxury listing on LuxuryRealEstate.com, as well as Regents.com.

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LindaMillerLuxury.com

#1 Sales Agent on Scenic Highway 30A

(850) 974-8885

Linda@TheSmileOf30A.com

#1 Sales Agent in Rosemary Beach®

#1 Listing Agent on Scenic Highway 30A

Board of Regents is a global collection of the finest real estate brokers in the world. With an exclusive membership of more than 500 firms with 130,000 professionals in more than 65 countries, it collectively sells over $200 BILLION in real estate annually, with an average sale of $2,450,000.

ROSEMARY BEACH® is a registered trademark owned by Rosemary Beach Holdings, LLC and is used with permission pursuant to a license from Rosemary Beach Holdings, LLC.

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In this issue On the Cover

Larger-than-life pop artist Ashley Longshore is known for her tonguein-cheek commentary on modern fashion, pop culture, and society. She’s

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THIS ISSUE’S TRAVEL SPOTLIGHT TAKES A BITE OF THE BIG APPLE! FOR TRAVELERS AND NYC LOCALS LOOKING TO HAVE AN UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCE WITH A PERFECT BACKDROP, THE WILLIAM VALE OFFERS A DUPLEX PENTHOUSE SUITE, THE VALE GARDEN RESIDENCE.

also a purveyor of all things beautiful, colorful, and fun. We were honored to photograph her at the illustrious Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City, where she held a solo art showcase from January 11 through February 25, 2018.

Photo by Carlo Pieroni Makeup by Keyerra

Photo by Jody Kivort

FEATURE 62

VOYAGER 99

Pop Art’s Rebel Queen: Ashley Longshore Makes a Splash at Bergdorf Goodman

100 In a New York State of Mind: An Insider’s Tips for Exploring the City

SARTORIAL 27

110 Original Cafés in NYC and Where to Find Them

28 Spring/Summer Trend Report for 2018

116 The New California Gold Rush: A Quest for

Laylock, Blushington

36 Bespoke Benevolence: Emma Willis of London

Extra-Virgin Olive Oil

Cape: Gucci

42 The House of Worth and the Birth of Haute Couture

INTROSPECTIONS 125

Ring: Ashley Longshore Sunglasses: A-Morir Rainbow French Fries Novelty Bag: Judith Leiber

PUBLISHED BY

48 Bellissimo! The Beauty of a Wig 54 Jessica Ogden: From the Streets of Paris

to the Streets of Ochi

126 The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Critic’s Review 132 A Musical Fashion Exposé 134 The Dean’s Tips Cocktail Party Attire

60 Jewel Tones

LE MONDE

C’EST LA VIE CURATED COLLECTION: THE FASHIONISTA 74

136 Melodious Alchemy: 30A Songwriters Fest

L’AMOUR 79 80 Caroline Coker and Joiner Pugh

LA SCÈNE 140 AU REVOIR! 149

86 Lacy Edwards and Billy Dawson TheIdeaBoutique.com info@theideaboutique.com

VISUAL PERSPECTIVES 92 A Serendipitous Assignment: I.C. Rapoport Photographyl V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 13

CREATIVE TEAM FOUNDER / EDITOR-IN-CHIEF LISA MARIE BURWELL Lisa@VIEmagazine.com

FOUNDER / PUBLISHER GERALD BURWELL Gerald@VIEmagazine.com

EDITORIAL MANAGING EDITOR JORDAN STAGGS Jordan@VIEmagazine.com

CHIEF COPY EDITOR MARGARET STEVENSON CONTRIBUTING WRITERS SALLIE W. BOYLES, GREG CAYEA, MEL ANIE A. CISSONE, L ACY EDWARDS DAWSON, ANTHEA GERRIE COLLEEN E. HINELY, AUDREY JOHNSON, BARBARA LIPPERT, SUZANNE POLL AK NICHOL AS S. RACHEOTES, VIRGINIA REED, L AURETTE RYAN, T.S. STRICKL AND

ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY ART DIRECTOR TRACEY THOMAS Tracey@VIEmagazine.com

GRAPHIC DESIGNERS OLIVIA PIERCE HANNAH VERMILLION LUCY YOUNG

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS DAVID ARKY, ALEX ANDRA ARNOLD, MICHAEL BAKER, ANDY BERRY, JIM CL ARK, SHEA EVANS CHRISTINE HAN, COLLEEN E. HINELY, JODY KIVORT, BRENNA KNEISS, BONJWING LEE, ED LEDERMAN, CARLO PIERONI I.C. RAPOPORT, JULIENNE SCHAER, TIM SCHENCK, STEPHANIE SORENSON, TODD WAWRYCHUK AISLINN K ATE PHOTOGRAPHY, MODUS PHOTOGRAPHY, SARAH LYNN PHOTOGRAPHY, SKY CINEMA, SHUTTERSTOCK

ADVERTISING, SALES, AND MARKETING DIGITAL MARKETING DIRECTOR MEGHN HILL BRANCH OFFICE MANAGER – IRELAND SHARON DUANE ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ABIGAIL RYAN BRAND AMBASSADOR LISA MARIE BURWELL Lisa@VIEmagazine.com

DISTRIBUTION MANAGER TIM DUTROW DISTRIBUTION COORDINATOR SHANNON QUINL AN

VIE is a registered trademark. All contents herein are Copyright © 2008–2018 Cornerstone Marketing and Advertising, Incorporated (Publisher). All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without written permission from the Publisher. VIE is a lifestyle magazine and is published twelve times annually on a monthly schedule. The opinions herein are not necessarily those of the Publisher. The Publisher and its advertisers will not be held responsible for any errors found in this publication. The Publisher is not liable for the accuracy of statements made by its advertisers. Ads that appear in this publication are not intended as offers where prohibited by state law. The Publisher is not responsible for photography or artwork submitted by freelance or outside contributors. The Publisher reserves the right to publish any letter addressed to the editor or the Publisher. VIE is a paid publication. Subscription rates: Printed magazine – One-year $29.95; Two-year $54.95. Subscriptions can be purchased online at www.VIEmagazine.com.

14 | M AY 2018

SHOP A l tar ’d S ta te A nt h ro po l o g i e B ro o ks B rot h e r s He m l i n e J . Ji l l J . Mc Lau g h l i n The Je we l K i n nuc an’s Spe c i a l t y O u t f i t te r L i l l y P u l i t ze r Th e O r v i s C o m p a ny O phe l i a Sw i mwe a r Pete r Mi l l a r Pot te r y B a r n To m my B a h a m a Photo courtesy of J. McLaughlin

V i n eyard V i n e s

D IN E A n ot he r B ro ke n Eg g C a fe C ant i n a Lare do Mo d e r n Mexi c a n The C ra f t B a r Em e r i l ’s C o asta l Ita l i a n eve r k r i sp F l e m i n g’s P r i m e Ste a k h o u se & W i n e B a r Gr i m al di ’s C o al B r i c k- O ve n P i z ze r i a P F C h ang’s C h i n a B i st ro Star bu c ks To m my B ah am a Re sta u ra nt & B a r Th e W i n e B a r V i n’t i j Fo o d + W i ne (S u m m e r 2 0 1 8 )

Photo courtesy of Emeril Lagasse

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GRAND BOULEVARD

Editor’s Note

LIVING OUT LOUD

I

Lisa Burwell and Ashley Longshore at Ashley’s pop-up grand opening on the seventh floor at Bergdorf Goodman on January 11, 2018 Photo by Carlo Pieroni

n a world of monotonous homogeneity, it is a breath of fresh air to meet a real original, someone who is a leader and not a follower. Meet pop artist Ashley Longshore. She wears her pied piper persona boldly while projecting confidence, joy, inspiration, and sincerity to her countless fans and art collectors alike. She is a social marketing wizard and uses various digital platforms to communicate her thoughts, beliefs, moods, wisdom, advice, and, of course, her coveted art in an irreverent—but always honest—way. Many who follow Ashley daily on Instagram can only dream of being able to own a piece of her artwork, but they find amusement, great comfort, and a boost of confidence as she preaches that if they work hard and believe in themselves, then greatness can be theirs for the taking.

When visiting Ashley’s Instagram feed, I am often inspired to pause and think. She truly lives out loud and boldly attacks each day to follow her dreams.

While on the road to finding her success, Ashley makes a lot of people laugh and smile. She’s an artist who not only creates bold and eye-catching art but she crafts joy as well. There are so many people in this world who do not shine as brightly as they could; that may be because they are not living out loud and being who they are truly meant to be.

Think how different the world would be if more people lived a free and liberated life, doing what they were intended to do. The world would be a much more diverse, dynamic, and dramatic place!

A Longshore Audrey (Audrey Hepburn is one of Ashley’s favorite muses) graced the cover of VIE’s 2013 Artist Issue (May/June). Ashley was already well on her way to fame and fortune by then. Today, the queen herself is on the cover of our 2018 Couture Issue. We are thrilled to show off this inspirational woman who is making her mark—and making the world a better place while doing it. So, grab a glass of wine, settle into your favorite easy chair, and read Melanie Cissone’s story, “Pop Art’s Rebel Queen,” to learn a lot more about my friend, Ashley Longshore, a soon-to-be legend. Enjoy!

Be bold and brilliant this year, and let joy be your constant companion!

To Life!

—Lisa Marie Founder/Editor-In-Chief

V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 19

The Creatives

We collaborate with talented photographers, writers, and other creatives on a regular basis, and we’re continually inspired by how they pour their hearts and souls into their crafts. Follow these creatives on social media and don’t forget to check out our account, @viemagazine.

LOUISE JORDAN Stylist, “Bellissimo! The Beauty of a Wig” @louisejordanhair

FOR THIS ISSUE, WE ASKED THE CREATIVES: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONAL WARDROBE STYLE?

My style is simple and clean-cut with a quirky edge! I always add a statement necklace or earrings to any outfit, and my go-to places to shop are COS and Zara. I sport a strong hair color, so I tend to dress to suit that. And, since my profession calls for me to be on my feet a lot, comfort is important.

I always like to have a good quality handbag on my arm and a strong lippy in my pocket!

WHETHER IT’S CHICKEN TAGINE SERVED AT A DINNER PARTY, RED LIPSTICK AND A FANTASTIC CHUNKY BAUBLE WITH JEANS AND A WHITE SHIRT, OR A WALL FILLED WITH ARTWORK THAT INCLUDES A SILKSCREEN DONE BY ONE OF MY SONS AND A LINOCUT DONE

BY ANOTHER ALONGSIDE SERIOUS PIECES FROM MY LATE HUSBAND’S AND MY ECLECTIC ART COLLECTION, I LOVE TO TWIST THINGS UP FOR SOMETHING UNEXPECTED.

MELANIE A. CISSONE Writer, “Pop Art’s Rebel Queen” @miss.mellyyyyy

ABIGAIL RYAN CARLO PIERONI Social Media Manager @strengthdignitystyle

Photographer, “Pop Art’s Rebel Queen” @carlopieroni

I would describe my style as bohemian with a modern flair. Living by the beach my entire life has definitely inspired me and influenced my style. I love mixing up high-fashion pieces, like designer sunglasses, shoes, or other accessories, with more eclectic, bohemian outfits. I try to stay aware of ongoing fashion trends but change them up to suit my style and personality.

I’m drawn to color and texture in my work and in my wardrobe. As I’ve grown older, my wardrobe expresses even more of my love for the vast array of hues, tones, and beauty found in nature. When I was younger, I wore a lot of black. But now, I see black as a necessary accessory and not a protagonist in my personal style.

My style is classic! That is, it’s classic with an exclamation point because I try to add a little “sumpin’ sumpin’” to what I wear, my home decor, and even the food I serve. Whether it’s chicken tagine served at a dinner party, red lipstick and a fantastic chunky bauble with jeans and a white shirt, or a wall filled with artwork that includes a silkscreen done by one of my sons and a linocut done by another alongside serious pieces from my late husband’s and my eclectic art collection, I love to twist things up for something unexpected.

I’m immediately drawn to the composition of the familiar juxtaposed with a surprise.

V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 21

La conversation

THE SOCIAL SCENE WE LOVE TO COMMUNICATE AND INTERACT WITH OUR READERS! AND WE LOVE IT EVEN MORE WHEN THEY PROUDLY SHARE THEIR STORIES AND POSE WITH VIE FOR A CLOSE-UP! THAT’S WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT: SHARING, LOVING, AND BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS. WE THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH AND WE APPRECIATE YOU!

@chels.calhoun Thanks #viemagazine for capturing and featuring this moment with my sweet momma last month.

Photo: @romonarobbinsreynolds

@Elisabeth Farris So thrilled to be featured in VIE magazine’s Culinary Issue!! They’re the best and I’m honored to be part of it. Article by Lucy Young and photos by Brooke Glassford

@Stacy LaFleur I love this shot in the March issue of VIE magazine. Hannah Martin’s party, La Lumière. I remember that moment when the photographer was fascinated with the fascinator I made. It was inspired by the Nicole Paloma gown I wore. #LaFleur #Blue #Butterfly #Fascinating

@Chef Jim Shirley What an amazing experience it was to cook for the James Beard Foundation! Thank you VIE magazine for this awesome article and thank you to my crew as well as all of the supporters!

LET’S TALK!

@angelenaspensacola Thanks VIE magazine for the opportunity! James Briscione and Brooke Parkhurst are so excited to have had the honor.

Looking forward to Angelena’s!

@blackbearbreadco We are honored (and super-duper excited) to be featured in @viemagazine’s April Culinary Issue! Thank you to our friends at VIE for including us + writer @colleensachs for a beautifully written story!

Images by @alissaarynphotography + @jack.gardner.photographer.

Send VIE your comments and photos on our social media channels or by emailing us at info@viemagazine.com. We’d love to hear your thoughts. They could end up in the next La conversation!

VIEmagazine.com

V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 23

Sartorial

Learn more at AshleyLongshore.com or shop other collections at JudithLeiber.com.

Photo courtesy of Judith Leiber

Sartorial STRIKE A POSE

XOXO! This sculptural evening bag was crafted with love by two of the funnest brands in the art and fashion industries—Ashley Longshore and Judith Leiber! Part of an exclusive capsule collection designed by Longshore and bedazzled with rainbow crystals, the Beso lipstick bag (beso is Spanish for “kiss”) is one of only five bags created for the collaboration. It’s a unique reminder for the wearer to pucker up, have fun, and not take fashion—or life—too seriously.

V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 27

Sartorial

2018 SPRING / SUMMER

TREND

By T R A C E Y T H O M A S

It’s time to put away those heavy sweaters, vests, and winter coats and say hello to warmer weather!

Sunny days bring bright, fun looks full of color and texture, and the runways of New York, Paris, Milan, and beyond reflected that as designers showed their spring/summer 2018 collections last fall.

Step into the season with confidence and style and let your best you shine through.

THE SEASON’S HOTTEST LOOKS 28 | M A Y 2018

FOR THE BIRDS

Adam Selman Chanel

Custo Barcelona

Dee Keller

Above: Dee Keller Susu Feather Heel $392, available at Willow + Mercer 30Avenue wearwillow.com Marchesa

Pamella Roland

V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 29

Sartorial

OVER THE RAINBOW

Tom Ford Badgley Mischka

Valentino

Gucci

Above: Dionysus Suede Super Mini Bag with Crystals $1,150, available at select Gucci stores nationwide gucci.com

Badgley Mischka

30 | M A Y 2018

Chanel

Valentino Christian Siriano

Tadashi Shoji

KREWE

Adam Selman

Pamella Roland

Above: KREWE St. Louis Stardust to Champagne 24K Sunglasses $255, available at The Alys Shoppe alysbeach.com; krewe.com

V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 31

Sartorial

SEEKING ARRANGEMENTS

Lela Rose

Chanel

Alexis

Above: Alexis Farah Dress $682, available at select stores and online shop-alexis.com Top right: Lela Rose V-Neck Bow-Back Dress $2,495, available at Neiman Marcus neimanmarcus.com Marchesa

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Badgley Mischka

GODDESS EFFECT

Gucci

FLOWER POWER

Pamella Roland

Tadashi Shoji

Dennis Basso

Alice + Olivia

Tory Burch

Christian Siriano

Above: Alice + Olivia Bray Pleated-Sleeve Wrap Top $330, available at Kiki Risa Clothing kikirisa.com; aliceandolivia.com V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 33

Sartorial

FRINGE BENEFITS

Custo Barcelona

Jean Paul Gaultier

Pamella Roland

Anna Sui

Opposite right: Alexis Tanu Caftan and Adonia Pant Caftan $539; Pant $319, available at Revolve revolve.com

34 | M A Y 2018

Marchesa

Chanel

SEAMSTRESS FOR THE BAND

Tadashi Shoji

Anna Sui

Alexis

Sartorial

BESPOKE

Wounded servicemen sporting customtailored clothing provided by Style for Soldiers

36 | M A Y 2018

BENEV

OLENCE

BY A N T H E A G E R R I E

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PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF EMMA WILLIS V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 37

Sartorial

W

hat does a bespoke shirtmaker whose designs are worn by Barack Obama and Prince Charles have in common with a soldier who has never owned a designer shirt in his life?

More than you might think, says Emma Willis, who has made shirts for several hundred severely disabled servicemen since their very different worlds collided ten years ago.

“I was driving when I heard some of them talking on the radio about their injuries,” says Willis, who was so affected that she had to pull over. “I have a son, and these were very young boys.”

Below: Willis measuring the neck of a wounded soldier Opposite: Willis in her flagship store on Jermyn Street in London

It was not a sense of pity that washed over her but the soldiers’ inspiring determination to overcome their disabilities and keep serving their country. “They were not complaining about their injuries—they were very stoical—but you could hear their fear that they might be forced to leave the forces. A new career in the face of life-changing injuries was a very daunting thought.”

Willis, whose working world is centered on London’s Jermyn Street, the very male-oriented thoroughfare dominated by bespoke shirtmakers, wondered what she could do personally to help these soldiers. She could only come up with one thought: “I could make them a shirt that would fit them perfectly, whatever their injuries—even if they had lost an arm.”

It took a year for her to get into Headley Court, the UK military rehabilitation hospital where new arrivals were never ending at the height of Britain’s engagement in Afghanistan. When she did arrive, just before Christmas in 2008, Willis was shocked.

“There was so much limb loss, but there was also

“I could make them a shirt that would fit them perfectly, whatever their injuries—even if they had lost an arm.” humor when I offered the soldiers made-to-measure shirts,” she recalls. “Some, especially those who had only ever worn a T-shirt or military uniform, fell about with laughter when they learned a bespoke shirt typically costs up to £350 (about US$490).

“But there was joyfulness, too, in seeing them get excited choosing the color of their shirt, going through all the collar and cuff style options. It helped them project themselves forward into imagining dressing up and going out, and it was so rewarding for me to see that they could enjoy something as superficial as a shirt.”

Willis’s generosity kept her seamstresses busy and her coffers needing constant replenishment. “There were always about thirty soldiers I was making shirts for at any one time,” she says. “I went to the hospital every two months for about eight years to measure up, and we have now got a database of about six hundred servicemen and women. Headley Court is still full of injured servicemen, but not to the extent

38 | M A Y 2018

it was since the UK withdrew from Afghanistan. It’s no longer a case of constantly adding new names, but there are still young men I haven’t met who we hear about from others on the database, and we’ll add them if asked.”

And these days, now that Style for Soldiers is a registered charity, they are likely to be offered more than a bespoke shirt from the outfitter who has dressed actors Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Kenneth Branagh, as well as Obama and the Prince of Wales. “We have partners who offer suits, some of them bespoke, as well as socks, the hats that are favored by many who have facial injuries, and beautiful walking sticks with a silver band,” Willis explains. “Some of them can’t wear nice shoes because of a prosthetic foot, and we make them bespoke shoes, which are sponsored by the Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers.”

She adds, “I tell everyone I meet the story to get as much support as possible.” Willis funded the shirts through her own business before reaching out to customers to help. She eventually applied for charitable status.

“When I know there’s a birthday or a wedding or an interview—or just if we hear they’ve been having a bad time—I’ll give them another shirt.”

“The first time we applied, we were turned down for being too ‘elite,’ but there’s nothing too elite about the men who wear our shirts. There is a real need, though; they say a bespoke shirt gives them the confidence to walk tall, even if they’re walking on double prosthetics. They tell us that confidence has helped them get a job, or that it has sometimes helped them get the girl they want.”

Willis’s generosity extends to these wives and partners. “At Christmas, the partners get £100 to buy something to wear and look fabulous. Every July there’s a party at Woburn Safari Park to which we bring the soldiers and their families and put them up. The Duke of Bedford gives us the park for free and puts on an enormous lunch. And this

November, to coincide with the centenary of the end of the First World War, we’re launching a show of the soldiers’ art in London.” There have also been dinners at smart Mayfair restaurants, fashion shows at London’s top jazz club, and even a retreat on a Mediterranean island.

But the charity is as much about keeping in touch as supplying top-notch clothes and events. “We want to be truly supportive,” Willis insists. “When I know there’s a birthday or a wedding or an interview—or just if we hear they’ve been having a bad time—I’ll give them another shirt.

We also get in touch with the quiet ones we don’t hear from and ask them how they are. A lot of people hide away, and these are the ones we really need to reach out to.”

Can men who are so depressed by their injuries feel good just by looking as immaculate as Kenneth Branagh’s Detective Poirot or Benedict Cumberbatch’s Marvel hero—by choosing a perfectly fitting shirt of the quality these stars wore on screen?

V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 39

Sartorial

Today, Style for Soldiers has made bespoke clothing for about six hundred servicemen and women.

It sometimes seems that clothes really do make the man, no matter how broken he might feel. “They have gone to parties and smiled and laughed for the first time in years, and I hear that from their wives and children,” says Willis, who has been recognized by the Queen with an MBE award. “I met Prince William when I went to the palace to receive it, and although I’m not making shirts for the young princes yet, I hope they may become customers in future!”

EmmaWillis.com/Style-for-Soldiers Anthea Gerrie is based in the UK but travels the world in search of stories. Her special interests are architecture and design, culture, food, and drink, as well as the best places to visit in the world’s great playgrounds.

She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, the Independent, and Blueprint.

Evening dress in satin brocade with appliquÊd velvet stars; asymmetric bodice with bias panels decorated with lace, silver-thread embroidery, and brilliants; and mock tie at waist with beaded tassels, ca. 1905. Museum of the City of New York (44.158.1) Photo Š 2011 David Arky

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Sartorial

THE HOUSE OF

and the Birth of Haute Couture

BY A N T H E A G E R R I E

|

P H O T O G R A PH Y C OU R T E S Y OF HO U S E O F WO R T H

t’s a fashionista’s fairy tale: the poor boy with just a few dollars in his pocket put to work at eleven, who began designing frocks for the Parisian royal court within years of arriving in the city. Charles Frederick Worth, the unlikely, Britishborn father of haute couture, went on to dress the world’s fashion-conscious queens and dozens of American socialites—but the story of the House of Worth has a dark side. It’s still a mystery why his great-grandson, the last of four generations of legendary designers, abruptly quit, and what became of the fortune that should have been left as a legacy for his descendants.

“There were dresses and perfume bottles, yes— but I had to buy the ones I have collected,” says

Chantal Trubert-Tollu, the designer’s great-great-granddaughter, with a wry shrug as we sip cafés noisettes in Paris’s Café de la Paix. It’s just steps from the Worth showroom that was the talk of le Tout-Paris from 1858 until 1935 when it moved to the city’s new couture hub, the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

The legacy should have been glorious, but there are no riches for the descendants, only memories—and fabulous gowns in the world’s great fashion museums as a testament to their ancestors’ legendary talents. “We don’t understand why we were left with nothing apart from some old photographs,” says Chantal, with just a tinge of well-disguised tristesse. “My grandmother was dressed by Worth, of course, and my mother got married in a Worth wedding dress, but it was wartime, and there were shortages, and she had to give it back.

“In my case, all I inherited was 6.65 percent of English blood!”

V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 43

S Sartorial

She now has something concrete to leave as her own legacy as the coauthor of a sizeable tome about the House of Worth, with the emphasis on the word House.

“My main motivation for the book was to pay homage to the subsequent generations whose talent kept Worth at the top,” Chantel explains. “You only ever hear about Charles Frederick, when those who study fashion know his sons and their sons made their own unique contributions to keeping the company at the top.

“Why did that not continue? You’re not the first one to ask why Roger Worth left the business and what happened to everything after it was sold,” she says of his unexplained departure in 1950.

Chantal, who has devoted her career to the associated field of perfume marketing, emphasizes how unconventional making bespoke outfits was considered in 1845 when Charles Worth set foot in a post-revolutionary France where the notion of fashion itself had become politically incorrect. As she and her fashion historian coauthors explain in The House of Worth: The Birth of Haute Couture, “The French royal family had shunned imperial splendor in favor of a solidly bourgeois approach. Fashion, or rather, silhouettes, changed only once a decade, the fabrics available to buy were devoid of imagination or flair, the cuts of different dresses were frequently indistinguishable from one another, and garments were hastily thrown together by seamstresses with little finesse or embellishment.

“It was a cutthroat market in which dressmakers scraped a pittance and were not expected to be creative.”

Worth, who arrived in London at age twelve from the English provinces and developed an astute eye for how to best accessorize the Parisian ready-to-wear he was employed to unpack at the famous Mayfair department store Swan & Edgar, changed all that in 1853, seven years after he managed to get himself to Paris. He started making one-offs for discerning clients, launched his own house five years later, and made his name dressing the newly reestablished Parisian court, including Empress Eugénie herself. World royalty followed, including Queen Victoria, who, to

44 | M A Y 2018

have a Worth gown of her own, broke the protocol that demanded the palace commission only British firms. “Most of the orders for the coronation of Edward VII in 1901 went to Worth,” notes the book. It also lists the Romanovs of Russia, the queens of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, and Belgium, Britain’s own Queen Alexandra (who came to the rue de la Paix for a fitting), and even the Empress of Japan as clients.

By this time, Charles Frederick’s younger son, Jean-Philippe, was in charge of design, his father having retired in the 1890s. Jean-Philippe’s alliance with Cartier, whose jewels he stitched directly onto clothes—a forerunner of the embellished sweaters of today—became one of the House of Worth’s most important innovations. The two houses were intertwined by marriage as well as business, and Jean-Philippe also pioneered the stitching of Swarovski crystals into designer gowns.

Both Charles Frederick and Jean-Philippe assiduously pursued American patronage, which kept the House of Worth supplied with funds through bad times as well as good. “Worth loved American clients because they paid, and paid right away, not like the French,” says Chantal succinctly. Not to mention the fact they spoke English, Worth’s native language, and were happy to accept his design ideas without demurral. “They accepted his approach of ‘I, not you, am going to decide what to make for you.’”

The legacy should have been glorious, but there are no riches for the descendants, only memories—and fabulous gowns in the world’s great fashion museums as a testament to their ancestors’ legendary talents.

One of Worth’s earliest transatlantic clients was Lillie Greenough, a singer from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who married Paris-based American banker Charles Moulton. But it was Worth’s flair for the theatrical that brought him to the attention of American society on US turf via his creation for the W. K. Vanderbilt costume ball in 1883. He dressed Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II as “the Spirit of Electricity” in gold satin richly embroidered with metallic filaments and overlaying midnight-blue velvet; she brandished a torch powered by batteries concealed beneath her dress. It did the trick of getting the Vanderbilts, hitherto not accepted by American high society, onto the famous Astor Four Hundred list.

Left: Formal dress made from two asymmetric tunics in chiffon, both longer at the back, with cloverleaf motifs embroidered in glass beads, covering a narrow silk satin underdress with a train of pointed streamers, gold lamé bodice, and belt, ca. 1910–13.

Private collection Opposite: The “Spirit of Electricity” costume made by Worth for Alice Vanderbilt, 1883.

It comprises a dress of seventeenth-century inspiration in midnightblue velvet, overlaid with white satin on the bodice and gold satin on the skirt, embroidered with sequins, beads, and crystals. Museum of the City of New York (51.284.3a-h) Photo © 2011 David Arky

Charles Frederick’s lickety-split approach appealed to the fast-moving, forwardlooking Americans of the late nineteenth century; he took only twelve days to make Lillie Moulton eighteen couture outfits for a week’s stay at Napoleon III’s country palace. “He was a tyrant—he didn’t stop,” says Chantal of a productionline approach that saw bodices made in one workshop and skirts in another, presaging the eventual move of couturiers into ready-to-wear designing. He also spread the word about his designs abroad by selling his patterns.

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B

By the time Jean-Philippe took the design helm at the turn of the twentieth century, transatlantic crossings were all the rage for the wealthy, who would come to Worth with letters of introduction and spend tens of thousands of francs. He was still dressing Vanderbilts—now Consuelo, who had married into British aristocracy as the Duchess of Marlborough. He even designed a uniform for the American society women who volunteered to work for the YMCA during the First World War. By that time, US buyers who came to Paris with commissions from private clients, as well as high-end department stores, were so crucial to Worth that the company issued them loyalty cards!

One society commentator explained tartly in 1928, “Old Europe still has a few princesses able to go to Paris to dress themselves. But America now fills rue de la Paix, place Vendôme, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the ChampsÉlysées with corned beef archduchesses, rubber queens, and oil empresses.”

The shockingly fast decline of a brand that passed out of family hands in 1954 had started more than two decades earlier but was accelerated when war put a strict quota on silk and other luxury fabrics. Then Roger quit, despite having been the president of the couture manufacturers’ federation for six years. Chantal thinks the advent of Christian Dior and other post-war new wave designers marked the end of the era for the founding fathers of bespoke fashion. “Worth was not the only house to die after Dior came on the scene, but its death was certainly accelerated by the lack of a successor,” she says.

“Worth was not the only house to die after Dior came on the scene, but its death was certainly accelerated by the lack of a successor.”

At least the influence of the father of haute couture and his successors never died; twenty-first-century designers from John Galliano to Alexander McQueen, Jean-Paul Gaultier to Vivienne Westwood have taken inspiration from Worth with shapes and materials. Christian Lacroix even wrote the foreword to The House of Worth. “His designs were so far from what others were doing; Charles Frederick would have been proud to have been an inspiration,” says Chantal.

46 | M A Y 2018

The name of Worth also lives on through Je Reviens, the most successful of all the Worth perfumes, the first of which was launched in 1924. The name means “I shall return,” and the skyscrapers of Manhattan inspired the 1932 bottle. Charles would have been moved by the fact that his great-great-granddaughter, who gave up her career in perfume marketing to research the book, believes it will pay homage to the innovator who has inspired today’s designers to be brave and go for it.

The House of Worth: The Birth of Haute Couture by Chantal TrubertTollu with Françoise Tétart-Vittu, Jean-Marie Martin-Hattemberg, and Fabrice Olivieri is published by Thames & Hudson. It is available for purchase through most major booksellers.

Left: “An Evening Gown from Worth” by A. Sandoz from Harper’s Bazar, January 20, 1894. Private collection

Anthea Gerrie is based in the UK but travels the world in search of stories. Her special interests are architecture and design, culture, food, and drink, as well as the best places to visit in the world’s great playgrounds. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, the Independent, and Blueprint.

Opposite: Afternoon dress in satin brocaded with rose motifs, open skirt front over a panel of coral-colored satin, ca. 1883–84. Museum of the City of New York (31.3.5a-b) Photo © 2011 David Arky

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48 | M A Y 2018

THE BEAUTY OF A WIG

By Sa llie W. Boyles Photog raphy cou r tesy of Bellissimo Ga lway

Known for her candid interviews, journalist Barbara Walters once asked Dolly Parton how long it took to create her larger-than-life, signature hairdos.

The country music artist and actress replied, “I don’t know—’cause I’m never there!”

Ah, the beauty of a wig!

Over the ages, women and men have donned wigs and hairpieces for two fundamental reasons: appearance and convenience. To keep cool and well-coiffed during the oppressively hot summers, the ancient Egyptians shaved their heads and then covered up their baldness (deemed unsightly) with human hair, palm leaf fibers, wool, or silver. Ever since, many

cultures have found clever uses for wigs, including everyday wear, costuming, rituals, and disguises.

During much of the last century, most women favored more natural, unstructured hairstyles. Big personalities like Dolly Parton were the typical wig-wearing exceptions. In recent years, however, the reappearance of wigs in haute couture has inspired many to explore the countless cuts, textures, and colors that would be impossible or impractical to achieve with their own hair. Additionally, material and manufacturing innovations have generated lifelike creations that are easier to wear and maintain. Besides, like any great hairstyle and makeup, a fabulous wig or hairpiece can transform how someone looks and, ultimately, feels.

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nspired by a woman who radiated glamour, Bellissimo Hair Health and Beauty Complex devotes significant resources to providing expert wig consultations for the premium products they sell. Operating two “super salons,” one in Galway and the other in Limerick, Ireland, Bellissimo does fashion work (i.e., hair and makeup for photo shoots) for VIE’s sister publication, Connemara Life, based in Galway, as well as other publications in the area. The luxury salons also offer spa treatments. Mike O’Connor, who mastered the art of hairstyling before launching Bellissimo twenty years ago (his mom was the glam lady), says, “Over the years, we have become known as a one-stop shop for everything hair and beauty related, and, naturally, wigs and hairpieces have become a huge part of this.”

About Wigs at . . . Bellissimo, as the salon’s wig division is called, Mike says, “This area of Bellissimo has developed into a full showroom with a private fitting studio. We have clients who are necessity wearers due to treatments that they may be undergoing and, of course, we have the accessory wearers, who just like to have a piece that can be popped on when they need to look perfect instantly for an early morning meeting or change of look. It truly is incredible how a hairpiece can totally change your look or tidy you up in a nanosecond.”

50 | M A Y 2018

Some premium synthetics will withstand heat, allowing the stylist to apply a curler or straightener based on the manufacturer’s guidelines.

Nevertheless, a wig made of human hair still offers the most styling flexibility, as well as more movement and a softer texture.

A hairdresser by profession and the director of Bellissimo’s wig department, Linda Geraghty says, “Wig training is vital for consultancy. Learning the makeup and qualities of wigs is essential; however, personality is equally important.” She believes the latter is why her international clientele travel far distances to the salon. “Empathy, listening skills, and compassion are the three most important qualities a wig consultant must have.

“The initial consultation takes one hour.” Linda continues, “We begin by listening to our clients’ expectations and concerns regarding losing their hair or changing their hairstyle.” For the fitting, she says, “We explain the different types of wigs, wig bases, hair types, styles, and colors. Face shape, contours, and tones are prioritized in the selection.”

Bellissimo stocks a wide selection of wigs that customers may purchase and wear immediately, although the salon personalizes each piece as desired. Likewise, a regular item ordered in a chosen color usually arrives within two days. “Custom pieces are popular for the client who has permanent hair loss,” Linda says, noting that the consultant takes an exact template of the individual’s head. The production lead time could extend to fourteen weeks, but a precise fit makes the wait worthwhile.

Also, texture and color samples are selected “to get that next-to-perfect match.”

Customers are often surprised by the quality of today’s synthetic wigs. “Synthetic or fiber hair is the most popular option for several reasons,” Linda informs.

“The pieces come ready to wear with just some personalizing to be done. They are easy to care for with no styling whatsoever.” For most synthetics, she says, “No blow-drying or heat of any kind can be used, so they simply fall back into style when shampooed.

Caring for hairpieces has never been easier.” Some premium synthetics will withstand heat, allowing the stylist to apply a curler or straightener based on the manufacturer’s guidelines. Nevertheless, a wig made of human hair still offers the most styling flexibility, as well as more movement and a softer texture. “It can be colored (darker colors only) and behaves just like your natural hair.” The disadvantage, Linda points out, is the need to style the wig each time it’s washed.

The type of cap most influences the wig’s cost.

“Fully machine-wefted wigs are manufactured by machining the synthetic hair onto the base cap,” Linda says. “This is the quickest and cheapest way to produce a wig. On close inspection, you will see the machine work protrude to the scalp side, which has a visual impact on the wig.” A more pleasing and popular option is a wig that’s machined on the sides and back, but hand-sewn on the top. “This,” Linda says, “leaves a much more natural-looking scalp.”

The most expensive and realistic, whether the hair is human or synthetic, are the fully hand-sewn caps with a lace front.

With so many different products on the market, investing wisely in a wig begins with choosing a trusted source.

Opening photo and left: The Ignium wig styles created by stylists from Bellissimo Galway represent the vibrancy and fire both in the salon’s “tribe” members and the fiery colors they used in the collection.

Opposite top: As wigs and hair wefts become more popular choices for all genders and ages for both health and fashion uses, Bellissimo has expanded its offering of styles and personalization for clients.

Opposite bottom: Kylie Jenner attends the 2017 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala in New York City sporting a platinum blonde wig.

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Right: This intricately braided style from the Ignium collection shows just how versatile and realistic a high-quality wig can be.

Opposite: Bellissimo tribe members work with clients at their chic two-story salon and spa location in Galway, Ireland.

igs and hairpieces can be purchased in wig shops and hair studios in every corner of the world,” says Mike.

“However, there are particular brands that have stood the test of time. It’s such a huge industry that is not regulated worldwide, so it can be a little hit-and-miss with the supply of quality hairpieces. We highly recommend a professional consultation and a personalized fitting of your piece, and we advise that no one buy directly from the internet, as this can lead to a badly fitted, wrong color wig and simply the wrong style for the client.” To consumers in the United States, he recommends Amore and Ellen Wille, Bellissimo’s main brands.

Hairstylists from Bellissimo, led by Louise Jordan, the salon’s artistic director, have also collaborated to introduce their own collections. Known as Team 52 | M A Y 2018

Tribe, they amplify their creative shapes, forms, and textures with vibrant color, as shown in their current collection, Ignium (Latin for ignite or fire).

Using blonde and brown human hairpieces obtained from their suppliers, they have created what Louise describes as “a mahogany-red-based color palette, ranging in varying depths and intensity, using revised color techniques” for a modern effect.

Bold hues are trending. Louise also references “icy blondes” and “a rainbow spectrum of playful, creative colors.” Since stylists and fashion designers don’t have free rein to cut and color the hair of professional models, such dazzling wigs find

plenty of commercial work, but they’re made for all spontaneous souls who love bursts of drama in their lives, not a lasting commitment.

Whether a passing fancy or a profound reflection of the individual’s true essence, a wig possesses an uncanny ability to ignite a chain reaction of positive changes. When done right, the effect is beautiful—bellissimo—and liberating.

BELLISSIMO.IE Sallie W. Boyles works as a freelance journalist, ghostwriter, copywriter, and editor through Write Lady Inc., her Atlanta-based company. With an MBA in marketing, she marvels at the power of words, particularly in business and politics, but loves nothing more than relaying extraordinary personal stories that are believable only because they are true.

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JESSICA OGDEN

F R O M T H E S T R E E T S O F PA R I S TO T H E S T R E E T S O F O C H I

BY AUDREY JOHNSON

54 | M A Y 2018

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P H OTO G R A P H Y C O U R T E SY O F J E S S I C A O G D E N

“TOOLS ARE THE KEY TO MAKING,” SAYS JESSICA OGDEN. FOR A CREATOR WHO IS AS MULTIFACETED AS SHE IS PROLIFIC, THE LINES BETWEEN ART AND LIFE ARE OFTEN BLURRED.

Jessica’s design work with Jean Touitou’s cult French label, A.P.C., began much in the same way as her fashion career. In 1994, she joined Oxfam’s NoLoGo project, repurposing garments that were quite literally thrown into the basement where she was working. Come full circle to present day, and Jessica is using end rolls of archived A.P.C. fabrics to tell the history of the brand through limitedproduction quilts.

London Fashion Week set the stage for Jessica Ogden collections from 1996 to 2006. “It was a time in London fashion where it didn’t have the status it has now,” Ogden says. “We were a little bit of a lost city for fashion.”

After Ogden shut down her London studio, it was Touitou who convinced her to move to Paris. The friends have collaborated on projects for fifteen years now and are currently working on the newest round of A.P.C. quilts.

AUDREY JOHNSON: When did you know that you were a creative person?

JESSICA ODGEN: Learning to sew from Mom and having this memory of making my first skirt in the big hall. I’d always watched her sew. But that first, “Oh my goodness, I’ve made a skirt, and I can wear it”—that was incredible. Especially growing up in Jamaica, there weren’t shops. There were in Kingston, but Mom was not a big shopper. She made our clothes when

“It isn’t just about, ‘I’ve done a fashion label, and that’s all I do,’” Ogden says. “I’ve expanded into textiles, and then there’s the watercolor side and the interiors side.

After spending so many years doing my fashion label, it’s nice not just to be doing that one thing.”

Ogden made a life in Paris for just under ten years before returning to her family’s home in Jamaica, where she was raised by British parents atop a thirty-foot cliff overlooking the Caribbean Sea. She now curates her beloved late mother’s art gallery, Harmony Hall, while making a home for travelers at her guest cottages and continuing work on her fashion projects.

I caught up with Jessica after visiting her guest cottages and got her take on inspiration, travel, and making a home wherever you are:

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There’s a huge pool of talent.

AJ: You seem to think about things critically, from interiors and quilt making to even your parents’ art collection. How do you manage to stay so present?

JO:

we were young. She made her clothes. I thought “Wow, it’s possible to make clothes.” At eleven, you want clothes.

AJ: What was life like in Paris versus the pace of life now, being back home in Jamaica?

JO: I giggle about going from the streets of Paris to the streets of Ochi (Ocho Rios). It’s a difference in pace—that’s part of the reason for coming back. Yes, there were losses, but then I wanted to spend more time here because I enjoy the space. Also, there’s the nature—having the sea right in front.

I wouldn’t have moved back just to move to Kingston. It was to have the space to continue my work. I guess there’s a bit more solitude, which is good and bad.

When friends visit, knowing that this has been home since I was eleven and it’s a family home, they’re like, “Oh, you grew up here?” And I’m like, “Yes.” These were our surroundings, and we are blessed to have experienced this culture. It wasn’t just to make a sunny Jamaica vacation home. It was to share the culture of Jamaica and still is. Those are the types of projects that I want to be involved in—it’s not just about being in the tourist industry, which is important, but also about creating on-the-ground cultural projects.

AJ: I follow you on Instagram, and I’ve started following a couple of artists from your page and those that I saw at Harmony Hall. From what I can see, there are a lot of talented people doing very creative things.

JO: Yeah! It’s interesting. There’s a big theater and dance scene in Kingston.

I’m not even involved in that. I know it’s there and maybe one day I’ll be able to 56 | M A Y 2018

I do love working. The process of creating things, whether it’s re-creating things that I didn’t necessarily start—like with Mom and Peter’s collection—or the process of putting things together, there’s nothing that gives me more satisfaction than a really intense project. The thing I always find is that you can’t know the result unless you take it step by step. It’s not about seeing exactly how it will be at the end. It’s about step one: clear the board; step two: make sure your tools are correct, and so on. In that process, the thought comes. Once you’re working, work leads to work and thought leads to thought. I don’t think I can ever believe that creating is about the final package. It’s a process.

AJ: How did you and Jean Touitou meet?

JO: I went to Paris with a collection and shared a showroom with a couple of London designers, and he was brought in by a stylist, Christopher Niquet, and he liked what he saw. He commissioned one of my skirts from that collection to be in the A.P.C. collection. It was a skirt printed with stencils, and the shape was a pleated wraparound. It was that project, and then we did a project with him sending over like fifty garments a month for us to customize.

That was mad. We would get the box, and there’d be anything from knickers to jeans or whatever. We’d go a bit crazy on them. It was an intense project.

We ended up going to Japan to do the same thing over there, which was superexciting. There have been several projects over the years. We just became closer, more like family. I spend time in their family home now and actually am the godmother of their daughter. It was a fateful meeting that was amazing.

AJ: It’s funny how you start out and where you’re led before it’s all said and done. I don’t really believe in accidents. I think people and things are put in your life for a reason. It’s funny to look back and see, “Wow, that happened.”

Do you agree?

JO: You wonder what your life would be without that. I wouldn’t have moved to Paris without that. It is a key in my life. I can’t speak Jean’s mind at all, but I know he would say it’s not just the work that drove our connection. That’s the other part. The projects are real, and they go places. For some unknown reason to me, Jean has a way of setting projects that work. They bring out the best in me.

For instance, last year I did a T-shirt line with A.P.C. that was based on Jamaica.

And the quilts are a huge project. I love doing it, and it works perfectly for A.P.C., having all of these excess fabrics from the last twenty-five to thirty years. What a great way to use them. It’s a win-win situation.

LEARN MORE AT JESSICAOGDEN.COM. Audrey Johnson is a freelance journalist, copywriter, and editor based in Destin, Florida. She enjoys writing about food, travel, art, and people. See her work at AudreyLJohnson.com.

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Every year, fashion lovers, designers, and home decor experts eagerly await Pantone’s announcement of the trending colors that will inevitably show up in everything from runway shows to throw pillows. In addition to selecting the color of the year, the experts at Pantone also release a palette of colors to keep in mind seasonally, and the Spring 2018 palette included jewel tones, natural hues, and soft pastels to create a veritable bouquet of swatches. nspired by the Spring 2018 Pantone palette, diamond purveyor and expert Jordan Fine of JFINE and the team at M.S. Rau Antiques have put together a sparkling array of diamond and gemstone pieces that reflect the colors of the season.

Spring Crocus PANTONE 17-3020 Bubble-Gum Pink Sapphire Ring M.S. Rau Antiques

Pink Lavender PANTONE 14-3207 Diamond and Argyle Pink Diamond Earrings JFINE/Argyle Pink Diamonds

“Many of the diamonds in the 2018 spring collection complement each other beautifully,” Fine says. He admits that despite what experts say about trends in color, he prefers to honor the philosophy of Coco Chanel: “The best color in the whole wide world is the one that looks best on you.”

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PANTONE 13-0550 Peridot and Diamond Pendant M.S. Rau Antiques

Rapture Rose PANTONE 17-1929 Emerald-Cut Fancy Vivid Purplish-Pink Diamond Ring JFINE/Argyle Pink Diamonds

Ultra Violet PANTONE 18-3838 Untreated Purple Sapphire and Diamond Ring M.S. Rau Antiques

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Palace Blue PANTONE 18-4043 Untreated Cushion-Cut Tanzanite Ring M.S. Rau Antiques

Blooming Dahlia PANTONE 15-1520 David Webb Coral, Emerald, and Diamond Pin M.S. Rau Antiques V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 61

62 | M AY 2018

P O P

A R T ' S

R e b e Rebell

Queen ASHLEY LONGSHORE MAKES a SPLASH at

BERGDORF GOODMAN

By Melanie A. Cissone Photography by Carlo Pieroni

As Ashley Longshore’s limo rounds the midtown Manhattan corner of West Fifty-Eighth Street onto Fifth Avenue, the New Orleans pop artist and self-described badass melts into tears and utters a few hushed “Oh my Gods.” It’s heart-stirring and spine-tingling at once for the energetic fortytwo-year-old. Seeing the wall-to-wall displays of her paintings, furniture, rugs, and sculptures in all six of the world-renowned Bergdorf Goodman Fifth Avenue windows for the first time, Longshore is overwhelmed.

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A

single sentence from the documentary Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf ’s puts the scenario into context: “The very best the world has to offer can be found in one block.”

As the spotlight shines on Longshore’s artwork in the fashion mecca’s storied windows, which are viewed weekly by some 1.5 million pairs of eyes, it’s only natural that the Crescent City gal would get a little misty-eyed.

Excited beyond measure, Longshore hops out of the limo and morphs back into the wildly hilarious and unpredictable Instagram personality that her admirers, patrons, business partners, and friends find so refreshing. With her usual joie de vivre, she prances in front of the haute couture–dressed mannequins that are surrounded by her artwork. She poses for some photos before going inside the enormous department store to attend the grand opening fête where she is the star attraction in the show of shows.

Longshore marks the store’s first solo installation of a female fine artist in its prestigious seventh-floor Decorative Home department.

“It will go down as one of the all-time greatest days of my life,” Longshore says.

FIRST TIMERS “Be memorable. Don’t be timid. Be bold. A little outrage is a virtue in window display,” advises David Hoey, Bergdorf ’s senior director of visual presentation in BG’s Get Scattered video clips. “You want to be a little like the kid who brought the hornet’s nest to show and tell.” It’s the second of five guidelines the talented window dresser references in transforming a twelve-by-eight-by-three-foot lifeless stall into a jewel box intended for displaying the à la mode of fashion’s finest. Hoey’s window display wisdom seems to cross over into life lessons and Ashley Longshore; her artwork and her January/ February window display met his and the luxury retailer’s every expectation. “Our windows thrive on the interplay between the fashion and the fantasy environments surrounding the fashion,” Hoey says.

“Ashley Longshore’s work inspired us to search our collections for very ‘blingy’ fashion, colorful and sparkling, making big statements that could hold their own against Ashley’s bold artwork.”

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Seven floors up, the artist’s pop-up installation spanned 945 square feet, lining the walls and the corridor in the Bergdorf Goodman Decorative Home section.

It was a stroll through Longshore’s imaginative mind.

With no shortage of color or bedazzlement, the store displayed more than one hundred of the artist’s most popular pieces. Atop Longshore’s coveted gemstone rugs sat her sequined “Time Out” chairs, butterflylined dome chairs, life-size lipstick sculptures, a giant sculptural money roll of Benjamin Franklins, and more. On neighboring display tables were table top lipstick sculptures, plates that look like gemstones, and lucite trays with “Ashleyisms” on them. Bejeweled butterfly paintings adorned the walls alongside stylized

“

“It’s a refreshing, unfiltered, and beautiful hot-mess mix of female empowerment, skewed

politics, glamarama, glittering and almost edible art, quick wit, and pure and simple joy.

”

–LI N DA FA RG O

portraits of Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Frida Kahlo, Kate Moss, Abe Lincoln, Lil Wayne, and Teddy Roosevelt, to name a few. Longshore’s colorful pop art paintings often come with a tongue-in-cheek perspective on today’s culture.

The January 11 celeb-studded grand opening event was an enormous success, covered by all the major New York fashion and style media. In the packed hall, Longshore posed for pics with Real Housewives

of New York City alum Kelly Bensimon; TV and film star Blake Lively (who was clutching the Longshoredesigned Judith Leiber rhinestone-studded lipstick evening bag); fashion designer Christian Siriano and his husband, music producer Brad Walsh; highwheeling brand consultants Angie Niles and Wendy Wurtzburger; Beyoncé stylist Ty Hunter; costume designer and stylist June Ambrose; managing director for the Novogratz design duo, Hadi Sattari; and a fashion legend—Bergdorf Goodman’s own senior vice president of the fashion office and store presentation, Linda Fargo.

Both a client and a friend of Longshore’s, Lively describes the artist as “one of the most fabulous, fun, empowered she-heroes I know.” Other celebrated Longshore collectors include Penélope Cruz, Salma Hayek, Lorraine Schwartz, Eli Manning, Katherine Heigl, Ryan Reynolds, and some of Wall Street’s top financiers.

“Ashley’s work is as no-holds-barred as she is,” Fargo expounds. “It’s a refreshing, unfiltered, and beautiful hot-mess mix of female empowerment, skewed politics, glamarama, glittering and almost edible art, quick wit, and pure and simple joy. You’ll catch yourself laughing out loud even with no one else around—a welcome antidote anytime these days.”

Named one of the top business women of the South

by Forbes, Longshore hit the million-dollar mark in sales five years ago and now refers to herself as a “double comma momma.” Her Bergdorf Goodman pop-up installation and boutique were first-time undertakings for the artist and uncharted waters for the retailer, as well. Nonetheless, with a history rich in showcasing leading and emerging designers and artists, BG has relayed to Longshore that her show was one of the greatest success stories the seventh floor has ever seen. While the artrepreneur is enthusiastic about the bump in her revenues, she is equally excited about the worldwide exposure her BG show netted. “We sold to people all over the globe,” she says about the installation’s seven-week run there.

And although the pop-up show is over, it might not be the end of Longshore’s presence at the almighty retailer. Fargo says, “I’m ready to turn over the keys to Bergdorf ’s to Ashley and let her loose—hmm, maybe that will be our next collaboration!”

Longshore and Blake Lively Photo by Alexandra Arnold

“

One of the most fabulous, fun, empowered, she-heroes I know.

–BL A K E LI V ELY

”

HORNET’S NEST

Longshore’s art filled the iconic Bergdorf Goodman windows on Fifth Avenue this past January.

Groomed from a young age to be a “show pony,” as she calls it in her 2017 book You Don’t Look Fat, You Look Crazy: An Unapologetic Guide to Being Ambitchous, Longshore says her mother dressed her in frilly dresses and took her to children’s tea parties. Try as she might to mold her daughter into a monogram-wearing, card-carrying garden club and junior league member of Southern society, Longshore asserts that she would have been much happier outside digging for worms. A girl whose Barbie dolls were having sex and who wrote her first expletive in perfect handwriting in her firstgrade phonics pages—“Have a nice day asshole”— Longshore deadpans, “I was grounded a lot.”

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he Montgomery, Alabama, native, who’s more racehorse than show pony, began to figure out in her teens how to turn her “weird side” into her best side and morph awkwardness into awesomeness.

Later, as an established artist, her early experiences and those to come acted as catalysts for humorous representations in paint.

For example, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour unenthusiastically observes crying little girls in the painting Tantrum Tea Party, likely representative of Longshore’s sentiment as a child.

When she was sixteen, Longshore’s parents went away for the weekend and, to celebrate, she threw a party. Unannounced, her mother returned home, kicked everyone out, and the next thing Longshore knew, she was headed to boarding school. At the former Brenau Academy, a girls’ preparatory school in Georgia, the nonconformist soared academically, and her differences were embraced. Longshore received awards from the school and validation from her peers; she was named “Class Favorite” and “Most Likely to Succeed.” Most importantly, she writes, “They let me be whatever I wanted to be.” In 2015, the Brenau graduate was named to the school’s Alumni Hall of Fame for making “an impact in the world” and for “serving as a role model for the Brenau graduates of the future.”

After a very short stint in college at Ole Miss (six weeks) to please her parents, Longshore went home

“

Work hard, eat carbs.

This thinking was and is what really runs through my mind.

”

to Montgomery. On the drive from Oxford, Mississippi, Ashley had heard a song about Montana on the radio and promptly told her father that that was where she wanted to go. She describes her Montana arrival and the promise of adventure with a meaningful observation: “Not a Southern belle in sight.” Longshore’s spontaneous reaction to an early 1990s Jackopierce lyric proved to be a game changer for the soon-to-be artist.

The emergencies-only credit card that Longshore’s father gave her to use at the University of Montana found its way to an art supply store in town. Longshore told her dad, whom she calls “Pappy,” that she was taking up hobbies. Inspired by wanting to be good at something after years of mother-induced extracurriculars,

Longshore bought paintbrushes, paint, canvases— and bongo drums. She asserts that her mother probably thought that her daughter couldn’t have sat still long enough to learn something like painting.

In an interview with her book publisher, Judith Regan of Regan Arts, Longshore describes that lightning-bolt moment when it occurred to her that she might have found her passion. “I just sat there with my thoughts. It was so meditative and relaxing in the strangest ways that it just possessed my entire mind and body and it was all I wanted to do.” Hours and hours passed unnoticed. “I just loved it.”

A Grateful Dead fan at the time, Longshore’s first completed painting was, yep, acid bears. Her subject matter evolved from trippy prancing bears and Montana-inspired nature to the more audacious— masturbating couples. Whether she was conscious of it or not, this was likely the beginning of the young woman’s manifestation on canvas of what she calls her “inner monologue.”

“Work hard, eat carbs. This thinking was and is what really runs through my mind,” Longshore confirms.

Fueled both by rejection on the part of Missoula’s galleries and by a local market saturated with elk, bald eagle, and Native American–inspired paintings, Longshore approached one final gallery with her

portfolio during a self-initiated school hiatus. The gallerist liked Longshore’s no-holds-barred work and mounted a show for her. Longshore promoted the opening all over campus and town, had a hand in producing it, and got a local reporter to write a story about it. The event was a success. Ashley sold

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Longshore and Linda Fargo

several paintings, made some money (gave half to the gallery—the usual split and a life lesson) and left the evening feeling as though she “had arrived,” as she recalls.

Longshore’s father, Spencer Longshore III, an extremely successful retired advertising guru, laughed about being called to a teacher conference for his daughter’s use of the word “asshole.” He was immediately agreeable to her going to Montana, too.

Ashley’s apple doesn’t fall far from her father’s tree.

Welled with emotion on witnessing his daughter’s Bergdorf opening, he’s her biggest fan. She’s told her father, “I’m more like you than anyone else on the planet. I’m just better ’cause I’m a woman.”

Longshore’s Montana years were a seminal and instructive time. A Leo to the core, it comes naturally for the lioness to mix her passion to create with charming perseverance and unabashed promotion.

Longshore says, “I love to paint the paintings. I love to sell them as much as I love to paint them. It’s so intoxicating when somebody loves my artwork enough to pay money for it.” Without hesitation, Longshore further describes the feeling: “That is a drug greater than any sex or cocaine on the planet.

It’s magic. It’s ambitchous.”

Fast-forward through the artist’s post-college years to now. In between, there was a Locust Valley– lockjaw-trophy-wife-seeking boyfriend, a move to New Orleans, a job in advertising sales, getting fired from that job, a “young and hopeful” marriage, an

expensive lesson in negotiating an exhibit in New York, a divorce, and the discovery of Longshore’s true and lasting love, Michael Smith, a New Orleans photographer.

THE BUSINESS OF ART AND THE ART OF BUSINESS Longshore embodies the words of Star Wars Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, who, while training a young Anakin Skywalker (Darth Vader), says, “Always remember, your focus determines your reality.” The resulting personification of that advice for Longshore is an ever-growing list of patrons, fans, affiliations, partnerships, and collaborations.

In the last decade, the artrepreneur’s world has exploded upward, something she attributes to the cultivation and nourishment of personal relationships with people who embrace her world and her willingness to hustle. Longshore says, “If somebody inquiries about a painting or collaboration or anything else and leaves their telephone number, I call them up, dammit!” Her talent, infectious humor, jocular perspective on the universe, and incessant positivity, topped with a huge dose of social media—she now has over a hundred thousand Instagram followers—are why existing relationships have mutated into new associations that continue to catapult her into professional validation and financial success.

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S

everal years ago, Longshore caught wind of an Anthropologie design-and-branding team’s inspiration trip to New Orleans.

She begged a friend who had a connection to “please, please help me get on their schedule.” Longshore says, “I spent every dime I had entertaining the group over an expensive sushi lunch.” The bootstrapping paid off. The boho-chic retailer licensed Longshore’s work for use on ceramic latte bowls, furniture knobs, lampshades, pillows, and Audrey Hepburn–themed weekender bags.

The experience was a lesson in how she would shape future collaborative agreements. As the years progressed, Longshore maintained a relationship with Wendy Wurtzburger, Anthropologie’s former global copresident, chief merchandising and design officer, and head curator. Both the experience and the relationship ultimately led to the founding of Longshore’s own manufacturing company in which Wurtzburger is both an advisor and a partner.

Similarly, Longshore credits social media with her connection to Clé de Peau Beauté, the luxury skin-care and makeup brand from Shiseido Cosmetics. On the hunt for an artist to create painterly art deco–inspired limited edition compacts and packaging, Ai Hirakawa, a fashion branding and marketing consultant for the Japan market, had several competing artists under consideration, one of whom was Ashley. After her submission, instead of waiting for a return email, Longshore called Hirakawa and asked her, “Have any of the other artists called you?” They hadn’t. As only Longshore can, she slipped some adept salesmanship into her charming enthusiasm and got the assignment. The company sent her to Shanghai—she is the only artist for whom the company has done this—to its Fearless Beauty global media launch, where Longshore met Amanda Seyfried, the brand muse at the time. Not surprisingly, the artist remains friends with Hirakawa.

“

I spent every dime

I had entertaining the

group over an expensive sushi lunch.

”

Longshore and her team transported hundreds of artworks from New Orleans to New York for the Bergdorf installation, including paintings, sculptures, books, furniture, and more.

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“

We all think these things, but Ashley says them.

–A N DR EW A LFOR D

”

Longshore is wearing a Gucci cape and custom Swarovski Endless Echo hat by New York designer Heidi Lee.

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I

n 2015, New Orleans’ Pontchartrain Hotel closed its doors for a $10 million renovation by its new owners, AJ Capital Partners (AJCP).

On a trip from Chicago to the Big Easy to check on the undertaking, AJCP’s CEO Ben Weprin met up with the company’s senior managing director of investor relations, Cooper Manning (Eli and Peyton’s older brother), who is a resident of New Orleans and a Longshore collector.

He showed Weprin her work and introduced the two. In a telephone call to AJCP chief creative officer Andrew Alford, Weprin said, “I think I just met your soul mate.”

Alford says about his now friend, “We all think these things, but Ashley says them.” Describing her as the other half to his whole, he thought, “I think Ben’s right about this soul mate thing.”

With the Pontchartrain Hotel renovation under way, Alford says, “In all our projects, we seek to capture the spirit and vibrancy of the local community.” It seemed only natural to create tension

by incorporating some irreverence to a wall filled with floral still lifes in antique frames. Alford decided to hang Longshore’s large, green-glittered, rhinestone-grill wearing Lil Wayne portrait in the famed Caribbean Room, the hotel’s fine dining restaurant. Longshore calls the creative director—with whom she has an ongoing Instagram banter over the hashtag #f*ckbeige—“a genius.”

An attendee at the

The hotel reopened with rave reviews BG x Ashley Longshore opening event posing in mid-2016 and, in a curious turn of with a signature events, Bergdorf Goodman’s DecorAudrey painting. ative Home buyer, Nicole Dillon, would dine in the hotel’s Caribbean Room.

Dillon was a regular in New Orleans because her Forty Five Ten. Dillon remembers connecting the Lil boyfriend lives there, but the nature of her job, of Wayne portrait with the Mark Cross Grace boxes and course, is to know what’s trending. She says about the thinking, “I need to pay attention to this artist.” hotel, “I love the decor.” Last September, Dillon read an article in Women’s Wear Daily about Longshore’s In the interest of considering the New Orleans artcollaboration with American luxury leather goods ist for the store’s annual or semi-annual art-themed brand Mark Cross for the Dallas designer boutique exhibit, Dillon reached out to Longshore. Not one to

A Marketing & Publishing Boutique Brand Curators Creative Influencers Boutique Publishing House Design Studio TheIdeaBoutique.com Santa Rosa Beach, Florida (850) 231-3087

Clifden, Co. Galway, Ireland +353 (85) 158 9879

handmade $20,000-plus Hermès bag named for actress and singer Jane Birkin. As she’s armed with excellent business instincts, her own manufacturing company, desirable artistic talent, and a great sense of humor, the possibilities are endless for this steel magnolia.

From her perch on the Pacific Ocean in Carmel, California, during one of her recent essential creative sabbaticals, Longshore says about the opportunities being presented to her, “No is just as powerful a word as yes.” She continues, “I don’t want to be oversaturated. I want to believe in the brands I’m going to be working with. I want to make good decisions.”

Longshore with her father, Spencer Longshore III

demur on anything, Ashley jumped on the outreach and, with a tendency to overdo, upsold the luxury giant. Longshore says, “You know, go big or go home!”

Bergdorf Goodman started out wanting to hang some of Longshore’s paintings and ended up with—well, just look at her painting titled Can You Hear Me Now?

BEING THE BIRKIN Longshore is unwavering in her desire to build her brand. “I want to be the Birkin,” she says of the

Longshore walks the walk; she celebrates and collects the work of other artists and fashion, jewelry, and accessories designers and encourages them to value themselves. Dismissive of galleries, Longshore says, “I do not f*cking give up 50 percent.” The proof is in the pudding; she’s a case study in the emergence

of a painter-turned-brand who, in large part, used technology and social media to propel herself to where she is today. Longshore continues to field calls and emails from around the world resulting from the Bergdorf Goodman show. She has another book due out in 2019, and who knows? There are likely other intriguing collaborations on the horizon that give great reasons for the Jennifer Lawrence of the art world to sign off nearly every Instagram post with #f*ckyeah.

ASHLEYLONGSHORE.COM New York City transplant to the Emerald Coast Melanie Cissone has been a freelance writer for twenty years. A patron of the arts, she is inspired by beautiful architecture and design and loves learning about people’s backgrounds, especially over a dry Italian red wine.

THE FASHIONISTA

It’s true what they say—good fashion sense never goes out of style. The beauty of it is that if you love the way you look, it’s all good! In today’s world of ever-evolving trends and no one style really dominating the industry, there’s never been a better time to explore your creativity and unique taste. Here are some of our favorite colorful new pieces for spring and summer looks that are sure to impress.

1

It’s All Gucci

GG Marmont Medium Bag in Black Chevron Velvet $2,800 – gucci.com 74 | M AY 2018

Crescent City

3

Mignonne Gavigan Paloma Tassel Earrings $150 – mignonnegavigan.com 2

Step-by-Step

Christian Louboutin Hardcover Book $150 – net-a-porter.com

Mint to Be

4

Linda Farrow 239 C48 Round Sunglasses in Spearmint $645 – lindafarrow.com

Pencil Me In

5

Hunter Bell Chastain Dress tootsies.com/houston

6

Wear Art Thou

Eyes Shadows Clutch with Art by SOCHI $285 – artteca.com

Mother of Pearl

7

Margot McKinney Exotic Abundance Collection margotmckinney.com

8

Make It Rain

Loeffler Randall Logan Sneaker $325 – loefflerrandall.com V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 75

C’est la vie

9

Blush Hour

Loeffler Randall Straw Circle Tote in Ballet Raffi $295 – loefflerrandall.com

Red Hot

10

Valentino Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2018 valentino.com

11

9021-Oh!

Asprey Beverly Hills Collection Belle Handbag $9,100 – asprey.com

12

Take the Plunge

JETS Plunged Mesh Underwire One Piece in Slate $215 – shoplagreen.com

Tier Up

13

Mercer Earrings $269 – wearwillow.com

14

On the Avenue

Madison Clutch $269 – bentandbree.com 76 | M A Y 2018

15

Jump to It Sachi Sleeveless Flared-Leg Linen Jumpsuit by Alexis $495 - kikirisa.com

16

Bloom Town Sabella FloralEmbroidered Dress by Alexis $660 - kikirisa.com

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L’amour

Learn more or shop now at LettersAndDust.com.

Photo by Sarah Lynn Photography SarahLynnPhotographyPDX.com

L’amour IT’S ALL YOU NEED.

When Tatiana and Nate chose this custom rosé design wedding board for their nuptials, they had no idea that even the adorable four-legged guests would love it! The Portland, Oregon–based company Letters & Dust is a veritable treasure trove of bespoke wedding and event goods, including signs, invitations, menus, and more. Owner and designer Brittany Hampton works with clients to create decor and paper goods that will make their ceremony, reception, or other special event shine.

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L’amour

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Caroline Coker & Joiner Pugh

A C E L E B R A T I O N of LOVE & OYSTERS

By V ir g inia R eed

E

very girl dreams of planning the perfect wedding, one that reflects her personal taste. When it includes an iconic location, historical buildings, and a beautiful venue with vantage points for photographs, it's sure to be a magical and memorable soiree. When the bride and groom are also foodies who share a love of the Gulf Coast and oysters, the theme is pretty well set.

The hand-stitched and embroidered lace fit-andflare bridal gown by Romona Keveža that Caroline Lillie Coker wore on her wedding day was luxurious, sophisticated, and timeless. Timeless might also be used to describe her courtship with Thomas Joiner Pugh.

A few years later, Susan and Philip Benton, Caroline’s parents, received the official call asking for their daughter’s hand in marriage as well as help with ring shopping.

“We were overjoyed,” says Susan, “and I introduced Joiner to Sarah Davis at Jewelers Trade Shop in downtown Pensacola. Together they selected a gorgeous three-carat oval-cut stone for the engagement ring.”

On a cold and rainy Christmas Eve, after a taxing day at work, Caroline arrived home to a dimly lit room filled with flickering candles, her favorite Veuve Clicquot champagne on ice, and fresh flower petals covering the floor. They were from Joiner’s grandparents’ garden, and he was in the middle of them on bended knee. “It was a perfect proposal, and he gave such a heartfelt speech as he held my hand,” recalls Caroline. “All I could do was squeal the word ‘Yes!’ as he slid the most breathtaking ring on my finger.”

Caroline and Joiner were matched by mutual friends. There was an instant attraction, but they were each busy with their respective schedules at the University of Alabama. So they parted ways for a while but kept in touch. Soon they circled back around for a second date that included sushi at Caroline’s favorite restaurant, where at one point they both knew that what they were feeling was kismet. “Joiner made me feel at ease,” describes Caroline. “He has a calming presence, and I didn’t want the date to end.”

Soon, Joiner was introducing Caroline to his family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Caroline was bringing him to her hometown of South Walton, Florida, along Scenic Highway 30-A. “It may sound cliché, but I knew that Caroline was the one, and I was thrilled to meet her family and close friends,” says Joiner.

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L’amour

hen it came time to plan the wedding, Caroline and Joiner agreed that they wanted it to take place in Pensacola, Florida— Caroline’s second home since the age of five, where her stepfather has an orthopedic practice. “I fell in love with the city’s rich history and always dreamed of walking down the aisle at Old Christ Church,” she says. The couple also wanted to have their guests feel connected to them through a more intimate experience and enlisted the help of wedding planners Megan Kennedy and Jessica Jensen. “We chose the pair because there were so many details, and both planners were needed to pull off the wedding of our dreams,” Caroline adds.

“It was a perfect proposal and he gave such a heartfelt speech as he held my hand. All I could do was squeal the word "Yes!" as he slid the most breathtaking ring on my finger.”

The wedding weekend was held in the peaceful setting of the private Portofino Island Resort on Pensacola Beach, where Caroline’s family also owns a Sky Home. Her parents hosted a casual welcome reception for the bridal party and out-of-town guests on their expansive outdoor balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. The party was catered by David Penniman of Classic City Catering. Guests also received gift bags that included a hydration and hangover kit along with local snacks. Wedding weekend itineraries were screen printed and tied to each bag using a Pensacola Bay Oyster Co. oyster shell.

The following evening, everyone convened for a sunset trolley ride to 5eleven Palafox in the historic Trader Jon’s building for a rehearsal celebration that featured a sumptuous four-course dinner, once again prepared by Classic City Catering.

There was also a live performance by well-known pianist John Ripley.

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There wasn’t a dry eye in the venue after the short and sweet speeches—and especially after Caroline’s stepfather, Philip, played his acoustic guitar and sang “Humble and Kind” to the couple.

A hurricane bore down on the Gulf Coast that weekend but ultimately turned west, leaving Pensacola with temperatures in the seventies as family and friends gathered together to celebrate the union. Caroline’s former Point Washington United Methodist pastor, Tonya Elmore, drove from Enterprise, Alabama, to officiate. A family friend, Sean Dietrich, also known as Sean of the South and beloved for his storytelling, played acoustic guitar as Caroline walked down the aisle, making the ceremony even more sentimental. Caroline reflects, “It was the most magical day I could ever have dreamed of.”

Caroline’s “something old” was her late great-grandmother’s diamond ring, which she wore on her right hand; it was a wedding gift from her grandmother as she is the namesake. Her “something new” was a pair of diamond earrings, a wedding gift from her husband. Her “something borrowed” was a diamond cuff bangle lent to her by her mother, and the “something blue” was the couple’s wedding date stitched into her Badgley Mischka shoes.

After the ceremony, the bridal party took a trolley to the Boardwalk on Pensacola Beach, where they boarded a boat for a champagne excursion to Portofino Island. Meanwhile, guests were also taken by trolley to the poolside reception

As if the night was not spectacular enough, it ended with a stunning fireworks display over the sound before the Pughs were whisked away by boat. at the resort overlooking the Santa Rosa Sound, where they enjoyed music, cocktails, and appetizers.

Dinner began at seven with passed appetizers and food stations that included jumbo Gulf shrimp, filet mignon, a mashed potato bar with various toppings, local beet salad with goat cheese, and haricots verts bundles. A team from the Wandering Oyster was also on-site to shuck and serve four appellations of fresh cold oysters with mignonette sauces. The passed appetizers continued throughout the evening, with the menu changing each hour and ending with late-night bites: Kobe beef sliders and the bride’s favorite, grilled Alabama Conecuh sausage with mustard sauce for dipping. And though guests

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L’amour Two chandeliers of repurposed oyster shells dangled close by, while another floral chandelier was suspended over the fresh crushed-strawberry-and-cream layer cake that sat atop a base made from oyster shells. enjoyed two open bars, Donner-Peltier Distillers personally created two signature cocktails for the couple as a wedding gift.

Soft white fabric with twinkling lights billowed in the breeze and a floral crystal-and-pearl chandelier designed by Fiore of Pensacola hung above the monogrammed dance floor. Two chandeliers of repurposed oyster shells dangled close by, while another floral chandelier was suspended over the fresh crushed-strawberry-and-cream layer cake that sat atop a base made from oyster shells.

The newlyweds skipped the traditional garter toss to allow more time for the guests to dance the night away to tunes performed by Big Bling and the Funk Machine, a high energy band from Atlanta. The couple chose Etta James’s “At Last” for their first dance, the bride and her two fathers shared a dance to “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond, and the groom swayed with his mother to “Days Like This”

by Van Morrison.

As if the night was not spectacular enough, it ended with a stunning fireworks display over the sound before the Pughs were whisked away by boat.

Of course, the only way to follow up such an epic celebration is with an unforgettable honeymoon, and with the help of Maria Poole Luxury Travel, the couple soon departed for an extended vacation in Saint Lucia.

Like Shakespeare’s quote from Much Ado About Nothing, “I will not be sworn, but love may transform me to an oyster,” Joiner has found his pearl and everything he was looking for in Caroline.

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Special Thanks Wedding planners: Megan Kennedy Dickson and Tiffany Latshaw of Megan K Events, and Jessica Jensen of Portofino Island Resort Photographer: Aislinn Kate Photography Videographer: Lance Holloway Productions Caterers: Rehearsal dinner: Classic City Catering Wedding: Portofino Island Resort under the direction of Chef Jera Hughes Oyster bar: Beth and Bill Walton, The Wandering Oyster Design: Floral design: Fiore of Pensacola Oyster design: Anne Lomax, Drift with Anne Draping and lighting: Wedding Walls Soft seating and stage: SOHO Events & Rentals

Letterpress invitations, programs, and reception menus: Ginger Bender, duh for Garden & Home Calligraphy: Angela Welch of Montgomery Bridal gown: Romona Keveža, Ivory & White in Birmingham Groom’s attire: Mobley & Sons in Tuscaloosa Bridesmaids’ dresses: Jenny Yoo Mothers’ dresses: Effie’s in Tuscaloosa Engagement ring: Jewelers Trade Shop Wedding cake: Betty Weber Hairstylist: Brooke Miller Makeup artist: DeSheri McClure Entertainment: Music Garden; Big Bling and the Funk Machine Honeymoon planning: Maria Poole Luxury Travel Transportation: Beach Bum Trolley

L’amour

LACY EDWARDS & BILLY DAWSON n as hv il l e ,

t e nne ss e e

10.8.2016

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A

chance encounter—and then several more—brought this Oklahoma belle and Texas singer-songwriter together in Nashville. From passing the ketchup to walking down the aisle, this is one love story that is worthy of a hit country song. The bride shares their journey:

our love story Billy is from a small town in Texas called Sunray, and I am from Moore, Oklahoma. It took both of us moving to Nashville, Tennessee, for us to actually meet. One night, my family and I were eating at Chili’s with a friend, and from the next table, Billy asked if he could borrow our ketchup; he had run out. He loves ketchup—haha! And, because Billy never meets a stranger, he started a conversation with us. We went back to eating, and so did he with his company, and we all left. We ran into each other over and over again throughout the next five or six months. Fate? It eventually led to Billy asking me out on a date. The rest is history!

the proposal Billy proposed on Christmas Eve 2015. We were at my sister’s house with my whole family. We had begun to open presents, and Billy grabbed this huge box and handed it to me to open. I started to open it and inside were a lot of other little gifts. I opened

We ran into each other over and over again throughout the next five or six months. Fate?

It eventually led to Billy asking me out on a date. The rest is history! each one, and they were presents from his family to me. The last one was shaped like a necklace box, so when I opened it, I was stunned to see a ring! He then got down on one knee and asked me to marry him, tears welling up in his eyes. I, of course, said yes! He had proposed with a family ring that had been his grandpa’s.

So, I got the best of both worlds; I was completely surprised when he proposed, and then I got to pick out my own setting for the diamond!!

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L’amour the plans Planning our wedding was both fun and a little stressful. It was pretty much a DIY wedding, including my gown. My mother made it—and she did so all while battling cancer and going through treatments.

She was a fantastic seamstress and made dresses for my sisters and me when we were growing up, so it was fitting for her to design my wedding dress. It will be something I treasure forever.

My mother made it—and she did so all while battling cancer and going through treatments.

the venue Aurora Acres is a rustic wedding venue that belongs to a friend of ours. On the property, there is a beautiful woodland area with an old tree in the center. This particular area had never been used for a wedding before, but we knew we had to get married in front of that beautiful tree. We had to do some clearing of the land to accommodate our two hundred guests, but it was so worth it. It felt like we were in a hidden oasis in the woods.

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o u r w e d d i n g d ay I wanted it to be like a woodland wedding underneath the trees with natural moss everywhere— but with an element of glam. We had twinkle lights and crystals dripping from the trees. Ivory flowers and succulents were everywhere. It was an intimate, love-filled day with family and friends!

A particularly special moment for me happened as I was tucked away in the woods waiting to walk down the aisle. Seeing my soon-to-be husband walking my mom down the aisle—and then hearing everyone give her a round of applause because they knew what she had been going through— was an unforgettable moment.

O

ur wedding songs included “Gonna B Good” by Keith Urban (wedding party processional) and three songs written and recorded

by Billy: “Angel Dressed in White” (bridal processional), “4 Wheel Drive Me Crazy” (recessional), and “Calm in My Storm” (first dance).

For the reception, we did a DIY taco bar that included brisket from Major League BBQ in locally made organic corn tortillas topped with a choice of specialty sauces. We also had a coffee bar with Noteable Blends coffee and sweet tea from McAlister’s Deli.

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L’amour the honeymoon Our honeymoon was a two-week getaway in Rosemary Beach, Florida, because it is heaven on earth.

special thanks Flowers/decor: DIY by the bride’s mother and sister (maid of honor) DJ: DJSC (official DJ of the Dallas Cowboys) Day of wedding coordinator: Cristin Malone Officiant: Steve Cummings Photographer: Stephanie Sorenson Videographer: James Rayner Hair and makeup: Lauren Young and Lainey Edwards—Lacy’s sisters and maids of honor

VIE would like to dedicate this article to Lacy’s beautiful mother, K A R E N J E A N N E E DWA R D S May 10, 1958 – October 22, 2017

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Resting on the quiet shores of Ballinakill Bay, and beautifully secluded within 30 acres of its own private woodland, Rosleague Manor in Connemara is one of Ireland’s finest regency hotels.

Member of Ireland’s Blue Book Awarded No.9 in Top 25 Small Hotels in Ireland on TripAdvisor CALL OR VISIT OUR WEBSITE TO BOOK AND EXPERIENCE IRELAND TODAY. info@rosleague.com • (+353) 095-41101 • Rosleague.com • Connemara, Co. Galway, Ireland

Pilates exercise system founder Joseph Pilates (standing) works with a client at his Eighth Avenue gym in New York City on October 4, 1961.

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A Serendipitous Assignment b y L aur ett e Ryan photog ra phy b y I.C. R ap op ort

If you have ever seen pictures of the creator of Pilates, Joseph Pilates, you are likely viewing iconic photographs taken by I.C. Rapoport in 1961 for Sports Illustrated.

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t that time, twenty-four-year-old photojournalist Chuck Rapoport was getting ready to enter the US Army, having been drafted during the Berlin crisis.

nomination, and his photos of Marilyn Monroe leaving Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan in 1961 were published in Paris Match magazine.

He had already done notable work, such as photographing Fidel Castro in 1959 after Castro’s successful revolution. The then prime minister had made a surprise visit to New York, and Rapoport waited with several other journalists outside Castro’s suite until 3 a.m. to capture his iconic photo of the thirtyfour-year-old revolutionary leader.

Two weeks before Rapoport was drafted, Buddy Bloodgood of Sports Illustrated gave him a call and asked if he had time for a one-day shoot in Manhattan. Rapoport said sure. Buddy told him, “Go to 939 Eighth Avenue, by Fifty-Sixth Street, and meet our reporter. There’s an old guy there named Joe Pilates who has some sort of health gym. One of our freelance writers has been going to him for some kind of treatments, and he’s written an article about him. Go there and illustrate that article. The guy’s got these torture machines with belts and pulleys and springs, and he connects them to people and stretches them out, or God knows what. Get some pictures of him looking wild. You know, crazy, too. Wild and crazy.”

Shortly afterward, Rapoport photographed French film director François Truffaut after his Oscar

Rapoport describes meeting Pilates: “a near-naked man stepped into the room, barefoot and wearing only black briefs; he dried his hands on a small white towel.

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Above: Joseph Pilates offers photographer Chuck “I.C.” Rapoport a firsthand demonstration of his Bednasium machine on October 4, 1961.

Opposite: Marilyn Monroe leaving Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan in 1961

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“‘Joe Pilates,’ he said, smiling. I had been told he was eighty years old, but this guy, though looking way older than me (I knew what my grandpa looked like at age eighty), didn’t look a day over sixty. As far as the shape he was in, he could have been in his midforties. The only telltale sign of his age was the crepe-like texture of his golden-brown skin. But under the skin were ageless muscles, iron hard, taut, and powerful. In the afternoon of our photo shoot, Joe had run me through all of the cliché strength confrontations: thumb wrestling (he pinned me in a moment; the pressure he exerted on my thumb: unbearable). We arm wrestled. ‘Just do it with me,’ he said with a soft, Teutonic accent. I did. No contest. He had me stand on his stomach while he sucked it in and then raised me higher using only his abdominal muscles. When he asked me if I could touch my toes (I couldn’t), he bent forward and touched his palms to the linoleum-covered floor

and twinkled his eyes at me. ‘You know why I do this?’ he asked, then answered, ‘Because I train. Every day, I have trained. When I was in the circus, I was training.

When I was home, I was training.’ He pointed to his gym. ‘In here, with all this, you too can also touch your hand to the floor.’”

That day, Rapoport took many pictures, and he and Mr. Pilates discussed how and why the Pilates method came to be. Mr. Pilates believed that most people had lost their connection to standing, sitting, and moving their bodies in the most natural and efficient ways.

Later in their meeting, Chuck was photographed on the Bednasium. This historic Pilates invention resembles a hospital bed with springs attached to its metal-frame headboard.

Rapoport recalls, “When I climbed onto the bed wearing trousers, shirt, and tie, Joe stopped me. If I was going to exercise on his equipment, I had to be in ‘trunks,’ same as his Speedo-like briefs. I went into the changing area where I found a cardboard carton containing a dozen black Jantzen briefs, chose a medium, then posed for a photograph meant for Buddy Bloodgood’s wall. I couldn’t possibly

know that fifty years later this photo would be seen by thousands of people around the world.”

Rapoport entered the army weeks later and all but forgot about this strange and intriguing assignment.

Fast-forward almost forty years.

Mary, Rapoport’s wife, has taken up Pilates. Her instructor, Emily Lawrence, comes to their home with an odd foldable contraption called the Reformer.

When she set it up, Rapoport explained that he photographed the guy who invented that thing. Lawrence didn’t believe him until he showed her the contact sheets of Mr. Pilates in action. At this time, Pilates was enjoying the beginning of popularity in mainstream exercise trends, and Lawrence was amazed at the discovery of these treasured photographs. She encouraged Rapoport to “get them out into the world.”

Ken Endelmen, CEO of Balanced Body (a popular Pilates apparatus manufacturer), offered to sell the photos in his catalog—and so was born I.C. Rapoport’s Pilates journey.

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apoport is now one of the most recognized personalities in the Pilates world. Enthusiasts and teachers gather around him at conferences to purchase his photographs and hear about his personal experience in meeting the larger-than-life creator of Pilates. Rapoport enjoys going anywhere people are interested in viewing these photographs up close and hearing his stories about Mr. Pilates. It has become a life he could not and would not have imagined on that fateful day in 1961 when given the assignment to go shoot pictures of that “wild man on Eighth Avenue.”

get back into his routine. He came up with the concept of a Pilates pilgrimage. He offered a print of the iconic photograph of himself in trunks on the Bednasium in return for a lesson from various teachers in the LA area, each with a different approach.

The pilgrimage continues as Rapoport, age eighty, visits New York and other places to experience the perspectives of many Pilates teachers. He often takes photographs of them and with them as a prized and treasured souvenir from each encounter.

Our lives are filled with seemingly inconsequential meetings and experiences that in time may bring us onto incredibly meaningful paths. One day, so many decades ago, has come full circle. Mr. Pilates, a man, not well known in his time, with a burning dream and a desire for impacting the health and wellness of the world, planted a seed of his vision with those who would hear him—and with a twenty-four-yearold photographer. Over fifty years later, that same photographer, through his historical work, personal experience, and practice, adds to the legacy of that wild and crazy man!

I.C. Rapoport has a portfolio of beautiful, moving, and meaningful work beyond Pilates, but when I

Mr. Pilates, a man, not well known in his time, with a burning dream and a desire for impacting the health and wellness of the world, planted a seed of his vision with those who would hear him—and with a twenty-four-yearold photographer. asked him to describe his Pilates journey, he replied, “A fascinating trip around the world. To think that a one-day assignment when I was beginning my photography career would be the most important assignment of my life. It wasn’t the best—my weeks in Aberfan, Wales, documenting the recovery and beginnings of new life after 116 children and 28 adults were killed by a devastating landslide, was the best work of my entire career. But as far as helping me in my retirement years, both monetarily and

Even after Mr. Pilates himself encouraged Rapoport to take up his method, it took almost forty years for the photographer to begin his practice faithfully.

He has studied in LA at Vintage Pilates, where Jay Grimes—who also personally met Joseph Pilates— teaches along with other notable trainers.

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physically, Joe Pilates is more than a mentor: he’s an inspiration. And I see that inspiration in all the Pilates gatherings and studios, Pilates Eye postings, and Instagram ‘see me’ photos.”

You can never be sure what will inspire you and have a lasting impact on your life. Be open to the wild and crazy—it might just sow the seed of a new adventure!

Laurette Ryan is a professional in the health and wellness industry and has been a national fitness presenter for over thirty years. She is the author of four books on fitness, self-improvement, and life coaching. She is also the mother of four amazing children.

I.C. Rapoport I.C. Rapoport studied photography at Ohio University.

In 1959, Rapoport impressed Paris Match with his photo-reportage work and began shooting assignments for Match. He later worked for the Saturday Evening Post, Time, Life, and Sports Illustrated. His Life photo essay of the aftermath of the horrendous mining avalanche in Aberfan, Wales, brought his reportage work to national attention. He is well known as the photographer with the only photographs of Joseph H. Pilates, the originator of the Pilates exercise method. Rapoport is also known for his award-winning writing for the television series Law & Order.

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Book your stay at VillaDiPiazzano.com.

Photo courtesy of Small Luxury Hotels of the World

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SEE THE WORLD

For over five hundred years, Villa di Piazzano has hosted travelers in the Italian countryside just outside Cortona, a town on the border between Tuscany and Umbria. (You might know the area from Frances Mayes’s memoir Under the Tuscan Sun and the movie adaptation.) Originally a hunting lodge, the Renaissanceera country estate is family run and has been lovingly restored to provide down-to-earth luxury to guests.

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Brooklyn Bridge Park is an eighty-five-acre park on the Brooklyn side of the East River in New York City with fantastic views of the Manhattan skyline.

Photo by Julienne Schaer 100 | M A Y 2018

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STATE OF MIND

AN INSIDER’S TIPS FOR EXPLORING THE CITY

Any “guide” to New York City is a daunting and perplexing prospect. As that still-powerful but now sort of cliché song goes (and turn up that Frank Sinatra sound on the Victrola), “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

New York tends to attract residents who are always striving for their competitive best. Talk about “out”: these people don’t want to stay anywhere near the lines or the box. Therefore, getting recommendations is tough. Once a place becomes a “thing,” it becomes so overcrowded (or worse, so two days ago), that the recommender is already moving on.

That’s why we’ve decided to focus on two disrete areas that have emerged in the last decade as full of life and charm for visitors: the High Line/Meatpacking District, and Brooklyn, particularly Williamsburg and Bushwick. Enjoy!

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ne of the marks of a great city is its ability to restore itself—how the nineteenth-century factories and train platforms of the Industrial Age, for example, can be transformed into a dynamic public garden and walkway. That area then becomes a magnet for new and inventive shops, hotels, museums, and eateries to pop up around it and reclaim the neighborhood.

a stroll on the High Line presents. The Standard has become famous for turning passersby into accidental voyeurs, as some guests tend to forget (or not) and stand nude or semi-dressed in front of their room’s expansive floor-to-ceiling windows.

And with its rooftop bar and penthouse discotheque, the Standard still sets, well, a standard for Hipsterville on the Hudson. If you’re thinking of staying there, the rooms are small but offer comfy beds with chic linens, stunning city and Hudson

Among them, the Standard Biergarten offers a lively indoor-outdoor carnival-like experience with twinkling café lights and garden hedges, communal picnic tables, and a host of gaming and ping-pong tables outside. The inside offers a more buttoned-up experience. The food is German influenced, heavy on sausage, potatoes, and humongous pretzels.

With a dizzying depth of lagers on tap, it’s heaven for beer drinkers, but an array of specialty cocktails is also available.

That’s the story of Manhattan’s High Line, a wild yet urban aerial greenway built on a historic elevated railroad line that starts at the Hudson River on West Thirty-Fourth Street and continues for about a mile and a half south to the Meatpacking District.

First opened in 2009 and then built in stages, the wood-planked High Line walkway has a wild, natural, overgrown aesthetic. It is the work of contemporary Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, who took his inspiration from the selfseeding flowers and grasses that emerged naturally on the rusted tracks after the train stopped running in 1980. Designed with eleven access points with stairs and elevators, the public park boasts artisanal snack vendors (natch!), art installations and sculptures on rotation, and views of colorful murals painted on the sides of the surrounding factory buildings that are now home to new tech businesses and more.

THE WALKING EXPERIENCE IS PARTICULARLY PRETTY AT SUNSET, BUT THE ELEVATED PARK IS OPEN RAIN OR SHINE—ALTHOUGH IT OCCASIONALLY

The museum is famous for its oftencontroversial picks for its biennial exhibitions, curated to showcase up-andcoming and otherwise unknown American artists.

CLOSES FOR BAD WINTER STORMS.

The walking experience is particularly pretty at sunset, but the elevated park is open rain or shine—although it occasionally closes for bad winter storms. While you’re there, don’t forget to stop and smell the prairie dropseed, a native grass that’s oddly fragrant.

River views from the aforementioned floor-to-ceiling windows, a peek-a-boo shower with tub, a sitting area, room service, and free Wi-Fi. They’re also not as pricey as some uptown hotels, and deals can be found through various online hotel aggregators.

While walking, it’s hard to miss the übercool Standard Hotel, an architectural tour de force of modern concrete and glass built on stilts that straddle the High Line. It’s a particularly great spot for people watching, one of the many pleasures that

While part of its profile no doubt consists of the million-dollar views, the Standard is also firmly rooted on the ground—on those nineteenth-century Meatpacking District cobblestones, to be exact— alongside an array of crowd-pleasing destinations.

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For a dazzling cultural fix, it’s a quick walk from the Standard to the Whitney Museum, which famously moved from upper Madison Avenue to the foot of the High Line in 2015. The Whitney is a must-see, first for the soaring Renzo Piano–designed building, which resembles a high-tech ziggurat with cantilevered outdoor terraces. The galleries inside are airy, soaring, changeable spaces. Immerse yourself in the five floors and get a crash course on twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury American art and photography.

You’ll see many originals by Edward Hopper (painter of Nighthawks), works

by Thomas Hart Benton, and the colorful mobiles and intricate circus works of Alexander Calder. The collection also includes thirty works by Kara Walker, a young woman of color who focuses brilliantly on the history of slavery through images of women.

Should you start feeling hungry for more than the visual eye candy, there’s an easy answer in the Whitney’s lobby restaurant. It’s called, cleverly enough, Untitled, and it’s the newest offering from restaurateur Danny Meyer, who excels at hospitality and owns other beloved NYC foodie mainstays, including the Modern (down the block from MoMA), Gramercy Tavern, and the still-great Union Square Cafe. At Untitled, executive chef

Left: The Whitney Museum of American Art offers five floors of original art housed in an architecturally masterful building designed by Renzo Piano.

Photo by Ed Lederman Below: The Standard, adjacent to the High Line on Washington Street, is a luxurious place to rest your head or enjoy dining and drinks in one of the hotel’s many public spaces.

Photos courtesy of The Standard, High Line Opposite: The High Line is a popular linear park built on elevated train tracks in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District and Chelsea neighborhood.

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boldly flavored tapas-style dishes. Salinas has fantastic cocktails and wines that add to the buzzy scene, like great restaurants in this neighborhood are expected to do.

Suzanne Cupps produces a flamboyant, lively, overflowing version of farm-to-table cuisine. The dishes have snap and juice because they’re composed of such fresh ingredients. Try the fried chicken and griddled leeks (you’ll probably never otherwise become giddy over a plateful of leeks) and the golden tilefish with curried squash. There’s also a huge wine list and exquisite homemade desserts that are worth every indulgent spoonful.

Should you be looking for a meal that’s a little spicier, try Salinas, a hot spot in Chelsea serving food from Spain’s Mediterranean coast, the work of chef Luis Bollo. The space is a limestone grotto with a water wall and candlelit garden beneath a retractable roof. This is the place to order small plates—the best eats on the menu are the authentic, 104 | M A Y 2018

Craving a New York City pie? As you might know, there are hundreds, or even thousands, of great pizza places in the five boroughs. Ask an average New Yorker their favorite one, and you’ll get an amazing number of divergent answers, each backed up with a passion that could start a knife (or even a pizza cutter) fight.

But among the true cognoscenti, there is often only one answer: Roberta’s.

Let’s venture across the East River to Bushwick, part of Brooklyn that was rougher than Williamsburg (and farther from Manhattan) just a couple years ago but is now becoming equally cool.

Be prepared to go off the beaten path, as Roberta’s entrance is a little hard to find—it’s just a graffiti-covered metal door with a sign above it. Once inside, however, you feel as if you’ve entered a magical new world. The pizzeria is a giant room with a quirky, rustic vibe and fairy lights. You can also meander through to the back-patio tent where you’ll find a bar and picnic tables that somehow combine to look like a scene from a trendy music festival or fair. The restaurant also boasts a significant garden from which it plucks some of its fabulous toppings.

Above: Untitled, the Whitney’s lobby eatery, is run by master restaurateur Danny Meyer and features an urban twist on farm-to-table cuisine from executive chef Suzanne Cupps.

Photo by Tim Schenck Inset: Black bass, field peas, fennel, and preserved tomato at Untitled Photo by Christine Han

AT UNTITLED, EXECUTIVE CHEF SUZANNE CUPPS PRODUCES A FLAMBOYANT, LIVELY, OVERFLOWING VERSION OF FARM-TOTABLE CUISINE. Inside there are massive pizza ovens, and while everything on the menu is good, any sort of pie is always delicious. As with its furnishings, Roberta’s pizza is simple yet complex, traditional yet inventive, and one of a kind with unexpected toppings.

The menu choices change from lunch to brunch to dinner, but among the hilarious/ bad punny pie names are the Lil’ Stinker (three cheeses, garlic, onion, and pepperoncini), the ShroomsDay Device (featuring oyster mushrooms), the Boo Radley (radicchio, pancetta, scallions, and jalapeño), and the Axl Rosenberg (soppressata, jalapeño, garlic, and mushroom). Ask if you can go off-menu and order the Cheesus Christ.

Roberta’s also offers a delightful array of T-shirts that have become worldwide collector’s items. Browse but be prepared to fight off a German tourist for the one that catches your fancy.

Marlow & Sons is an inherently laid-back place that offers the comfort of a private clubhouse—perhaps because that’s how it started out. One of the first

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Photo by Julienne Shaer

INSIDE THERE ARE MASSIVE PIZZA OVENS, AND WHILE EVERYTHING ON THE MENU IS GOOD, ANY SORT OF PIE IS ALWAYS DELICIOUS. great restaurants in Williamsburg, Marlow & Sons opened when that part of Brooklyn was transitioning from crumbling warehouses to Brooklyn’s new trendy spot, but the restaurant has kept it real. The seasonal menu is reliably exceptional, and the wine list matches that excellence.

Now that Williamsburg has blown up with sophisticated residential glass towers and the pricey shops and amenities that go with them, Marlow & Sons is always packed with both locals and American and European tourists staying in nearby hotels and Airbnbs.

As for hotels, brilliant new places to stay pop up every day in Brooklyn, and they all belie that tough “attitude” for which the borough used to be known.

We’ll start with the new kid in Williamsburg, The William Vale, a futuristic Albo Liberis–designed architectural landmark that towers over the neighborhood, offering the best views in Brooklyn and a private terrace outside every room. The rooms are small but feature modern-luxe furniture and pops of color from 106 | M A Y 2018

Photo courtesy of Roberta’s

a rotating collection of local artwork. The hotel also has a sixty-foot pool, a great Italian restaurant called Leuca, and a romantic rooftop cocktail bar, Westlight.

All this comes with a standout level of service. There is a William Vale Lobby Ambassador who looks out for new arrivals and attends to their needs to make guests feel at home—he’s loaded with juicy conversation and tasteful recommendations, from theaters to wine bars to clothing stores.

Should you be experiencing a birthday during your stay, you’ll be welcomed to your room with a complimentary half dozen donuts from the famous Du’s Donuts nearby.

Left: The William Vale lobby boasts Mannahatta, a sculpture

by Brooklyn artist Marela Zacarias. Art is a special component at the property, and works by other local artists are featured throughout the rooms.

AA 26001879

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED A BOHEME DESIGN, LLC 2018 / © JEAN ALLSOPP

Any visit to Brooklyn begs for a stop at the Brooklyn Museum, the borough’s greatest art museum. The collection holds some 1.5 million works covering five thousand years of art history, starting from ancient Egypt and continuing through to the fantastic contemporary paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Within that collection are several famous pieces by Cézanne, Monet, and Degas to worship if you like the Impressionists.

Photo by Jody Kivort Opposite: Roberta’s in Brooklyn’s trendy Bushwick neighborhood is a must for those seeking the quintessential New York pizza experience.

Architecture desig n ed aroun d You an d the thin gs You love...

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BOHEME

DESIGN www.aboheme.com

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THE HOTEL ALSO HAS A SIXTY-FOOT POOL, A GREAT ITALIAN RESTAURANT CALLED LEUCA, AND A ROMANTIC ROOFTOP COCKTAIL BAR, WESTLIGHT. The Brooklyn Museum is also the permanent home of artist Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974– 1979), a celebrated icon of feminist art. Designed in the form of a huge triangular table, the installation has thirty-nine place settings, each representing a historically significant woman. “Guests” include Sojourner Truth, Virginia Woolf, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Each place setting bears porcelain plates personalized for the historical figure “seated” there (the details and insights are amazing), as well as individually embroidered tablecloths.

Try to get to the Brooklyn Museum before July 15, 2018, when the David Bowie is show ends its run there. It has already traveled around the world and has been heralded as one of the most engaging and exciting exhibitions ever created—even if you’re not much of a Bowie fan. The show includes stereo headphones that automatically change what you hear based on your exact location in the space— mixing music, narration by Bowie himself, archival material, news footage, and more. The visual contents include video installations, gorgeous examples of his custom-designed original performance costumes, Bowie family historical materials, handwritten notes, posters, personal correspondence, and a movie-theater-size auditorium playing footage from Bowie’s sold-out 1970s concerts in NYC and rare scenes from the legendary Diamond Dogs tour.

Later in his life, Bowie became a proud New Yorker, and his love for the city—with all of its quirks, stains, and growing pains—shows. And New York sure loved him back.

This is but a tiny taste of what the Big Apple has to offer, but it’s a good start for any New York newbie looking to explore some of the unique spots in a few of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods.

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Barbara Lippert writes about media, politics, ads, and women. Currently, she’s a columnist for Ad Age; previously she wrote Mad Blog for MediaPost. com, which started out as an episode-by-episode deconstruction of Mad Men. For many years she was an award-winning ad critic for Adweek and has also written for New York magazine, Vogue, Glamour, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She lives in New York City.

Left: The William Vale’s duplex penthouse suite, the Vale Garden Residence, has its very own open-air Jacuzzi and is perfect for those looking for a lavish stay with fabulous views of NYC. The impressive space is also available to rent for private events.

Above: Guests staying in any one of the hotel’s 183 rooms experience floor-to-ceiling windows and a private balcony that provide direct views of New York City and its boroughs. The Gotham King (shown here) has 245 square feet of living space.

Photos by Jody Kivort

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Devoción, a local favorite in the heart of Williamsburg, offers visitors a unique experience with an exquisite custom bar and beautiful leather couches in the center of the café.

Photo courtesy of Devoción

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If sleep takes up a third of our lives, cafés take up at least a sixth of mine.

For years, I’ve spent many hours per day exploring cafés, always searching for that magical cup of coffee that’ll better my life or inspire me to make some revolutionary decision. For many people, cafés provide a second home and a place of work.

It’s where we get a dose of local culture every morning, build our careers during the day, and socialize in the evening. As a writer, I’ve typed all over the world, but there’s something about the selection of New York City coffee shops that is utterly captivating.

I started out in the West Village of Manhattan and stumbled upon Ad Hoc Collective. Ad Hoc is like no café I’ve ever seen. It has a bit of a Mad Men vibe when you first walk in and brush past the fancy umbrella rack and the luxury socks, fashionable ties, and chic handbags for sale on the wall. It looks a bit like the interior of a well-furnished apartment that might belong in the pages of your favorite home-furnishings magazine. Feel free to sit at the marble kitchen

New York offers roughly nine hundred independent cafés to visit, and while it proved to be impossible to drink nine hundred cups of espresso (after cup number seven I was twitching), I did attempt to get to as many as I could. It didn’t take me long to realize that there is one trait that most cafés in NYC do have in common, and that’s serving great coffee. Of course, this is not true for every café, but there’s certainly no shortage of quality around the five boroughs. So, when it comes to cafés in NYC, it’s not about the taste of the cappuccino, but rather where you’re drinking it. It’s the atmosphere that varies widely. For that reason, rather than building a thorough Yelp-like review based on a myriad of categories, I thought it essential to focus on what is arguably the most important originality factor, and that is ambience and location. Who stands out in this jungle and where do I find them? That’s the question I set out to answer.

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“

I t didn’t take me long to realize that there is one trait that most cafés in NYC do have in common,

and that’s serving great coffee.

Right and opposite left: Project Cozy in SoHo is a unique, upscale café offering delicious drinks and juices. Be sure to snap a picture at their Instagram selfie wall.

Photo Courtesy of Project Cozy Opposite top: Gossip Coffee is a retro-style cafe offering delicious pastries and a large bar-like backyard.

When in Astoria, be sure to check out this spot!

Photo courtesy of Gossip Coffee Opposite bottom: The Kávé has a friendly neighborhood vibe and represents quintessential Brooklyn.

Photo courtesy of Kávé Brooklyn

counter, at one of the rustic desks, or in a vintage chair. Everything is styled. The best part is that it’s all for sale. That couch you’re sitting on? Just ask how much it costs! The classic socks, man-bags, ties, blankets, ceramic espresso cups, and even the guitar against that wall over there? Negotiate away! There is nothing to dislike about this café.

Then I took the subway about thirty minutes to the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood known for its underground accomplishments. I was about to give up, as I honestly couldn’t find anything I liked. That’s when I stopped into Kávé Espresso Bar just to grab a coffee before getting back on the train. Lo and behold, I found it. Kávé is hidden away in the industrial maze of large warehouses converted into chic retail storefronts and quasi-decent apartment complexes that make up Bushwick. The neighborhood used to be a bit rough around the edges, but it’s now an artist haven, supporting the lives of expats from all over. Like many Bushwick businesses, this café is extremely hard to find, tucked behind a discreet green-painted door on the side of an old apartment building off a not-so-major street. To enter this nook, you’ll have to keep an attentive eye so you don’t walk past it. Inside you’ll find a relaxing, spacious, and cozy hangout with a very homey feel. The friendly neighborhood vibe, full of MacBook Pros, trendy baristas, and colorful hairstyles, might catch you off guard given the stark contrast of the somewhat bland exterior. If there’s one café that screams underground Brooklyn, it’s Kávé.

I then hopped in my car and drove up and down Northern Boulevard looking for

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something unique on the outskirts of Queens.

That’s when I stopped in Bayside at a café that has become my all-time favorite: Bean Square. Now, it is a bit out-there, but it’s also very Queens. There’s always a plethora of young professionals wheeling and dealing in there, so it has that big-city sharedworkspace feel to it. But most importantly, they’re open late—until 11:00 p.m. on weekends and 10:30 p.m. on weekdays, which is surprisingly hard to find, even in this city. Bean Square is far enough from Manhattan that you’ll have to take a bus from the last stop on the subway to get there but close enough that you won’t be wondering where all the people are. It’s still coated with a thick layer of NYC. There’s plenty of seating—a rare commodity nowadays—so you always know you’ll have a spot when you show up. The patio also has more than a few tables outside the front of the café so you can people watch, have a smoke break, and stretch your legs all at the same wooden table. But one of my favorite qualities about this joint is that the Wi-Fi passwords are always supercreative; they’ll give you a pleasant chuckle before you get to work.

Back to the city I went, and I thought looking around the Midtown East section of Manhattan would be fruitless, but boy was I wrong. Ground Central has been my go-to spot since I discovered it. I had no idea anything like that existed in Manhattan, let alone in Midtown. It’s one of the

only places I know where you can experience real peace and quiet. They somehow, someway figured out how to make you feel like you’re not even in the city. You’d think you were working in a basement library in upstate New York until you go outside and realize you are still on East Fifty-Second Street. But if you’re not into the darkly lit cave of books with cozy chairs and plush couches and spare ottomans, there’s also a large community table beside the coffee bar. The clientele is eclectic and very New York, with investment bankers giving financial counsel on one couch, Broadway actors discussing wardrobe on the other, and filmmakers, writers, and dating-app dates scattered throughout the remaining chairs.

(So, you’re bound to overhear some of the best conversations in the city.) There’s no better secret in Midtown that I’ve come across.

I didn’t want to spend too much time looking around Manhattan since most working professionals live in Brooklyn or Queens, so, I headed out to the Astoria neighborhood of Queens and fell in love with Gossip Coffee before I even tasted the pastries. It felt majestic. Astoria is like the Williamsburg

of Queens, with ethnic eateries, hookah lounges, and nightlife all over. Gossip Coffee is so tastefully designed that it’s hard to even care about the coffee. The retro decor is mesmerizing. Plus, there’s a ton of space to spread out and work on larger projects or invite more people to join your afternoon. They even have a sizeable bar-like backyard if you want to tan during the summer. Even though Astoria is right over the East River and only a couple express subway stops from Manhattan, it feels like you hopped in a van and drove fifty miles to find this place. It’s a great escape from the nonstop energy of the city without having to go too far.

There are so many choices in the SoHo part of Manhattan that I almost didn’t even go into Project Cozy, but I’m so glad that I did. It took me a little while to fall in love with it, given the chaos, but as soon as I gave it a moment, it quickly became my favorite café in town. It’s very SoHo; the neighborhood is known for its upscale shopping and all the beautiful visitors the trendy boutiques attract, as is reflected in the café. They even have an Instagram selfie background: a teal-colored wall with the words “COZY AS FCK” highlighting the back booth in neon lighting.

You’re really in the thick of it all, which is one of the character traits I love most about New York: you never feel alone. Project Cozy is the type of joint where you buy a coffee so that you can hang out there and observe the fast-paced lifestyle of V I E MAGAZ INE . COM | 113

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“

D evoción is a wellknown spot by the Brooklyn waterfront.

There’s no denying that this place is incredible.

New Yorkers. It makes a great stop-off when you’re window shopping with no intention of spending your life savings. Warning: you’ll want to look your best when sipping there since you never know when the most attractive person in the world might walk in.

Even though I wanted to find some new places that nobody had heard of yet, I couldn’t resist going to the heart of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. My destination: Devoción, a well-known spot by the Brooklyn waterfront. There’s no denying that this place is incredible. If you’re in town, this is one of the more interesting and unique cafés (and neighborhoods) of the city. Everything in Williamsburg is art. Even the dentist seems fun, given that the name “Dental Arts” is displayed outside the office. Devoción’s black brick building looks like it could be a music venue—and a cool music venue at that. The first thing to notice is that the entrance and exit are separate to keep the flow of the café inside moving with synergy. Then, the interior is like feng shui heaven— vast space, high ceilings, and a plethora of small pub-style tables surrounding a VIP-like section of couches in the center. An enormous skylight nearly the size of the ceiling lights the room naturally, and the back wall is dressed head-to-toe with bushy green plants. The coffee bar is an impressive display of reclaimed wooden cabinetry. The entire café is an incredible piece of art. You might have to stand for a few minutes before a table opens up, but it’s worth the wait to get the full experience.

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Above: The exterior of Devoción features two entrances to keep traffic moving on busy days—we promise, it’s worth the wait!

Photo courtesy of Devoción

wrong when you show up. What in the world are you going to do when your five colleagues arrive if there’s a ten-minute wait for a table for two? And you certainly don’t want to meet your first date at a really quiet café where every person within a twentyfoot radius will hear every word of your first-date awkward conversation (or maybe you do). The point is, not all the cafés are multipurpose, but hopefully this selection will give you at least one café for any occasion of the week—and make you look good in the process. Jeez, where did you find this place? That’s what this piece is all about. Ta-ta!

Greg Cayea is a Guinness World Record–holding traveler. He writes offensive short stories about his exploits, and then draws cartoons to illustrate them. Stay tuned at ScrambledGregs.com for his next adventure.

Kitty Taylor, Broker, GRI, CRS, CIPS Catherine Ryland, Broker Associate “Grayton Girl Team” Selling Grayton and Beach Properties along 30A. 850.231.2886 | 850.585.5334 133 Defuniak Street, Grayton Beach, FL 32459 www.graytoncoastproperties.com

THE NEW CALIFORNIA

GOLD RUSH

The olives at the Mayacamas Estate are harvested each year to make premium extravirgin olive oils. The olive groves here are the oldest in Napa Valley.

Photo by Shea Evans for Long Meadow Ranch

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A QUEST FOR EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL

By T.S. Strickland

I

t was November, and I was sitting in the private dining room at Long Meadow Ranch in the heart of California’s Napa Valley. I swirled a cup of olive oil in my palm while my dinner mates—a well-heeled couple from New York—vented their frustration at the postal service, which kept delivering packages to their “summer home.”

The tableau is a decided departure from my last— and until then, only—California visit: one fevered night passed in a grimy Chinatown motel. That trip had been punctuated more by gunfire and suspicious glances than by glib conversation and grenache.

I’d been only eighteen then, had just quit my job at an all-night diner in Florida, and was in the process of spending a month—and my entire life savings—circumnavigating the country by train. It was one last adventure before I embarked on the equally questionable endeavor of obtaining a degree in journalism.

I’d read too much Kerouac, clearly. If it weren’t for that beatific old fool, I might still have savings—and might now be grumbling about summer homes instead of feverishly scribbling notes on a napkin.

These are the thoughts one thinks after a full day spent touring vineyards and ignoring spittoons.

Levity—and bitterness—aside, we were all lucky to be there. It was only weeks since fires had engulfed Northern California. As coverage of that disaster swept the headlines, many feared that Napa, with its famous vineyards and lavish estates, would be reduced to charred rubble.

But the bulk of the damage—tragically including lost lives—took place farther west. In Napa Valley, the business of winemaking carries on as usual—as evidenced by the many fine glasses of wine that darkened my lips over my weeklong trip last fall.

It was olive oil I was tasting at Long Meadow Ranch, though, not wine; and— stained lips aside—it was this preoccupation that brought me to California a second time. I was not alone in my pursuit, either. The last two decades have seen a surge of interest in so-called “olive oil tourism.”

Olive oil consumption in the United States has tripled since the early 1990s—driven at least in part by growing consumer awareness of the health benefits offered by a Mediterranean diet. Globally, the industry is valued at more than $11 billion, and retail prices for extra-virgin oil can top a hundred dollars per gallon, compared with four or six dollars per gallon for generic vegetable oil.

Perhaps because of how lucrative the oil trade can be, the industry has seen its fair share of scandal in recent years, with high-profile cases of fraud and mislabeling leading many consumers to trust domestic producers more than imported brands.

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ll of this has been good news for California, which produces 99 percent of the extra-virgin oil in the United States and 4 percent in the world.

Many artisanal labels are within a few hours’ drive of Napa and have recently opened their estates to the public.

That’s why I went. Well, that and the wine.

MYSTERY IN THE MAYACAMAS Several hours before doubting my life choices over dinner, I’d clambered into a tour van at Long Meadow Farmstead, located on Napa’s famed Highway 128, and we climbed the thin gravel road that snakes up to the ranch’s Mayacamas Estate.

There in the mountains, high above the Rutherford Bench, the Hall family produces cabernet sauvignon, merlot, sangiovese, and cabernet franc. The Halls own two other wine estates, as well as a ranch in nearby Tomales Station where they raise Highland cattle.

Below: The Chef’s Table at Long Meadow Ranch is an elegant dining experience with each course prepared using the best of what’s in season from the farm and ranch.

Photo by Shea Evans for Long Meadow Ranch

Their wine, olive oil, grass-fed beef, and estate-grown vegetables can be found on the menu at the Farmstead restaurant, back on the highway. In addition to all this, the Halls have another distinction: they own the oldest olive grove in Napa, planted on their Mayacamas Estate in the 1870s.

The story of these olives is fascinating.

President Ulysses S. Grant deeded the 640 acres to E.J. Church, a Civil War veteran, during Reconstruction. The property thrived through the turn of the

The sunset, all deep shades of violet and grapefruit pink, could have been ripped from one of the Warhol artworks that adorn the walls of the tasting room. century with vineyards, apple orchards, olive groves, hay fields, and a goat milk dairy, but it fell dormant during Prohibition. It then was swallowed up by forest and forgotten—until the Halls bought the place in 1989.

One day, Ted Hall and his son Chris were surveying their new property on horseback when they stumbled onto the olive grove. It was overgrown and barren, but the Halls pruned and nursed it back to health.

Curious about the grove’s origins, the family brought in a team of experts from UC Davis to test the trees’ DNA. What they found was unexpected: the plants didn’t match with any known olive varietals in the world. They were unique.

The Halls now produce a distinctive oil from those mysterious trees. It’s called Prato Lungo, Italian for “long meadow.”

SCIENCE AND SANGIOVESE By the time I arrived at the estate, the sun was setting, and it was too late to see the grove. Instead, I opted for a tasting in the wine cave, which overlooks the estate’s eponymous meadow and the valley beyond it.

The sunset, all deep shades of violet and grapefruit pink, could have been ripped from one of the Warhol artworks that adorn the walls of the tasting room. Before we made it there, though, the estate manager gave me a tour of the adjacent olive mill.

If you’ve never been inside a working mill, it’s quite the experience. Even when the machines lie dormant, the 118 | M A Y 2018

place is permeated by the scent of fresh olives. It will drive you mad for a crunchy, fresh-baked baguette.

Processing olives as quickly as possible after harvest is essential to producing high-quality oil. Unlike wine, olive oil doesn’t improve with age. It deteriorates. The Prato Lungo olives, which grow just a two-minute tractor ride from the mill, go straight from the trees into the machines, which crush them with large granite milling stones mined from the Italian Alps. The stones are an essential point. They don’t pulverize the olive skin, as some all-metal machines would. The gentle crushing of the olives keeps chlorophyll from being released and results in a softer, “grassier” flavor profile. It also releases fewer oxidation enzymes and retains more polyphenols— prized for their health-giving qualities.

If this feels like a chemistry lesson, and you’d rather be enjoying that crusty baguette dipped in some oil, you’re not alone.

After touring the mill, I was finally allowed to sample some of the Prato Lungo for myself. The oil retails for $45 a bottle and has a silky-smooth mouthfeel and extremely low acidity—a mark of quality. The international standard for extra-virgin olive oil is 0.8 percent acidity, while the very best oils hover between 0.25 and 0.33 percent. The Prato Lungo has an acidity level of 0.05 percent—twenty times below the standard—making it an ultrapremium oil.

Making olive oil is an exact science, it turns out, and tasting the stuff—though not quite so complicated—is an art all its own. To learn the proper technique, I’d traveled the prior day to a different estate—located about thirty minutes from Napa in a valley just outside the town of Petaluma.

HAPPY HOUR IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL A winding mountain highway leads from Petaluma down to McEvoy Ranch.

There’s a pull-off just before you reach the descent, and it’s worth pausing to consider the view.

Even in winter, the landscape is improbably green. The proximity of the farm to the coast means the place is blanketed each morning by thick fog. By early afternoon, the mist has burned off, and the ranch spreads out beneath you like an Ansel Adams photo. (Adams did, in fact, photograph this place—in 1951, when it was still a dairy farm.)

Bottom left: Farmers cultivate eight acres of olive trees and then propagate them to grow new ones to fill the historic grove.

Photo by Shea Evans for Long Meadow Ranch Above: The McEvoy Ranch offers a seated tasting flight of three wines, seasonal bites, and their awardwinning olive oil.

Photo courtesy of McEvoy Ranch

It would be four more decades before the McEvoys—and their olives—found the place.

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The Prato Lungo olives, which grow just a two-minute tractor ride from the mill, go straight from the trees into the machines, which crush them with large granite milling stones mined from the Italian Alps.

Nan McEvoy, the late heiress to the San Francisco Chronicle, bought the property in 1991 in the hope of having a rural retreat where she could spend time with her son and grandchildren. The property was zoned for agricultural use, so she knew she’d have to farm something.

John Calmeyer, the estate’s sales director, told me the rest of the story over several glasses of wine.

“Everyone told her to plant grapes,” Calmeyer recalls.

“She said, ‘Well, I love wine, but everybody’s making it. I want to do something different.’”

And that she did. McEvoy, who also loved olive oil, would become the first person in the state to plant Tuscan olive trees. “At that time, most California olive oil was made from the Mission olive,” Calmeyer explains. “Great oil, but very different in style.”

Mission oil is mild. Think missionary style. Tuscan is robust—spicy even—like a fiery Italian lover.

“We talk about one-cough, two-cough, or threecough oils,” Calmeyer said. “Ours is typically a two-cough oil. As a finishing oil, nothing beats it. Fresh peaches in the summer with just a little bit—it’s so good.”

Calmeyer poured a smidge of oil into his glass, then some into mine, and began to explain the proper way to taste it: “It’s similar in a way to tasting wine, in that you want to get the aromatics and the flavors.”

He cupped his glass in one palm while placing his other hand over the top. “You want to warm up the oil a little bit to get the aromatics going. Swirl it around a little bit, just like you would wine.” He placed his nose in the glass and breathed deeply before offering his observations. “You get a lot of cut green grass. That’s very typical. This is last year’s 120 | M A Y 2018

oil, so it’s mellowed a bit. There’s a fruitiness there, too—notes of white fruit: peach, pear.”

He sipped some, pursing his lips and drawing air in through his teeth with a hissing sound. I was struck by the fact that Calmeyer’s bald head and angular face could—with a sufficient amount of wine in one’s system—resemble that of a very kind, very pale snake.

You are Lucifer, I mused. I am Eve. This place is Paradise. And these olives—why, they must be the Fruit of Knowledge. God, I’m getting drunk.

ONE COUGH, TWO COUGH, THREE COUGH, FOUR “You’re just taking a little in your mouth and swirling air over it as you would with wine,” Calmeyer continues, unaware of my internal dialogue. “The viscosity of the oil is important. Did you get that pepper in the finish? That’s a Tuscan oil.”

Yes to the peppery finish. I coughed four times—not two, as promised—then polished off another glass of wine to wash the remaining spice from my throat.

Then, we turned to the grove.

The trees, located on the other side of an emerald-green lake, were laid out in neat rows, with mountains looming in the background and one enormous oak tree in the fore.

Above and opposite page: While exploring Napa Valley, be sure to take a walking tour of McEvoy Ranch to explore the vineyards, olive mill, gardens, and beautiful structures, and stay for a seasonal bite and glass of wine.

Photos courtesy of McEvoy Ranch

conserve more land. The olive trees also shade the grapevines, allowing the winemakers to exert more control over how much sugar the fruit accumulates as it ripens. “This is a very artisanal way of going about it,” Calmeyer says, “but it’s not very economical, so we’re among the only ones to do it in the States.”

LONG MEADOWS, TALL TALES

The McEvoys—like many California producers—take care to be good stewards of their land. The 550-acre ranch is fully organic. “We only have about seventy acres planted here,” Calmeyer says. “That’s because we want to preserve the soil.”

In 2010, McEvoy finally listened to her friends and began producing wine.

Today, the grapes and olives grow interspersed—a traditional method of viticulture pioneered by the Romans. The technique allows the farmers to

Back in the private dining room at Long Meadow, I was thankful for Calmeyer’s guidance. I raised my glass to my lips and drew some air in through my teeth—making a hissing sound loud enough to cut through my neighbors’ drunken chortling.

He’s no extra-virgin sipper, I imagined them thinking. He’s done this before.

I managed to cough only twice this time.

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Above and right: The McEvoy Ranch is located fifteen minutes away from downtown Petaluma. Be prepared to see exquisite landscapes and wildlife and experience delicious olive oil, wine, and farm-to-table food.

Photos courtesy of McEvoy Ranch

“Very smooth mouthfeel on this one,” I remarked. “Astonishingly low acidity, and that grassy finish—it’s nice, no?” I glanced wryly at my dinner mates—the postal-service haters—and felt a sense of smug satisfaction. Then—just for good measure—I explained how Prato Lungo is Italian for “long meadow.”

Ha. I showed them.

Four courses—and six glasses of wine—later, we were all friends, and I was starting to feel better about my own life choices: I might not have a summer home, but I do speak Italian—a little.

Our hostess for the evening passed around information on Long Meadow’s wine club. For $800 to $2,500, you can have your favorite varietals shipped straight to your door four times a year. Members also receive complimentary estate visits, access to special events at the ranch, and discounts on wine, dining, and lodging.

It’s quite the value—if your income exceeds that of a magazine writer. My dinner mates were ecstatic. They filled out the form and returned it to the hostess.

I, meanwhile, stared blankly at the sheet—slightly inebriated but sober enough to recognize my predicament.

“The postal service keeps delivering packages to my summer home,” I continued. “I need to sort that out before I order my first shipment.”

My neighbors nodded approvingly, and I buried my nose in my glass of wine.

“I’m going to have to think about this,” I announced to the table.

Ha. I showed them.

A pause. How am I going to get out of this?

Then, inspiration.

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Plan your trip at V IS ITC A LIFOR NIA .COM .

WANT TO GO?

Here are some top picks for a memorable tour of California’s olive oil country.

Carneros Resort

S TAY The Napa River Inn is a converted nineteenth-century mill in downtown Napa’s bustling Riverfront District. The hotel—one of the highest rated in Napa—is an easy stroll from dozens of specialty shops, tasting rooms, and gourmet restaurants. Guests even start each morning with breakfast in bed from nearby Sweetie Pies bakery.

NapaRiverInn.com Napa River Inn

E X P L O R E

TORC Photo by Andy Berry

Both McEvoy and Long Meadow Ranches offer estate tours, as well as tastings and special events throughout the year. McEvoy offers tours for groups of four or more by appointment only from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday for $95 per person. Tours of Long Meadow’s Mayacamas Estate depart daily at 10 a.m. The cost is $75 per person.

McEvoyRanch.com; LongMeadowRanch.com

E AT TORC, in downtown Napa, serves an eclectic menu of contemporary American cuisine. Chef Sean O’Toole rotates dishes often and features local producers whenever possible. My favorites included his Japanese hamachi crudo—served with winter citrus, yuzu kosho, coriander, and forbidden rice—and the akaushi beef short rib—served with winter root vegetables, potato boulangère, and horseradish.

TORCnapa.com

U N W I N D If you’re looking for a more relaxing experience, head to Carneros Resort and Spa, which offers an hour-long olive oil cleanse. The treatment utilizes Swedish and lymphatic massage techniques along with organic botanicals to support liver function, tone and strengthen vascular tissue, and boost circulation.

CarnerosResort.com

Carneros Resort

Carneros Resort

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Introspections THINK DEEPER

Interconnect by Amy Guidry Acrylic on canvas, six by six inches AmyGuidry.com

Artist Amy Guidry’s work closely connects nature and the human psyche on a detailed, often surreal canvas plane. Of her latest collection, In Our Veins, Guidry says “Through a psychological, and sometimes visceral, approach, this series investigates our relationship to the natural world, as well as our role in the life cycle.

Concepts such as life and death, survival and exploitation, and the interdependence of living and nonliving organisms are illustrated throughout.” Look for more from this award-winning Louisiana artist in VIE’s upcoming Animal Issue.

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Critic's review by Barbara Lippert Photography Courtesy of Amazon Prime

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rom the start, we know just how key the Mrs. part is to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the seductively designed, beautifully acted, compulsively bingeable thirteen-episode series now streaming on Amazon Prime.

The show opens with a wedding, at which the twenty-one-year-old “good girl” bride steps up and offers a charming toast.

A quirky, dark-haired, model-attractive, fast-talker type, Miriam “Midge” Maisel is exactly the kind of loveable but complex main character whom her much-worshipped TV creator, Amy ShermanPalladino, excels at developing.

As the pop-cultural savant behind Gilmore Girls (more alliteration), Sherman-Palladino is known for her enchantingly clever, rat-a-tat-tat dialogue for women. She tends to flawlessly deliver on tone, mood, and the interaction between mothers and daughters; she also sparks amusing banter between the sexes.

Gilmore Girls, a 2001 cult classic so popular that it keeps coming back, featured Lorelai Gilmore (played

by Lauren Graham) in real time, as, yes, a quirky, dark-haired, model-attractive fast-talker-type in Stars Hollow, Connecticut.

Midge Maisel takes the stage in Amazon Prime’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, starring Rachel Brosnahan and Marin Hinkle (right).

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ilmore defies her old-money Waspy family’s sense of propriety by having her baby, Rory, at the tender age of sixteen and moving out to make her own humble way in the world. Go back to 1958 and substitute an upper-class Jewish family for a Waspy one, and the expansive “classic six” apartments in the prewar doorman buildings of New York City’s Upper West Side for that starchy Connecticut manor, and you get the Maisel milieu.

The searingly smart Mrs. M. is played by the beaming Rachel Brosnahan, who is flat-out terrific in the role.

Midge takes a journey from picture-perfect wife and mother (right) to discovering her knack for stand-up comedy when she delivers homemade brisket (below) to bribe a Greenwich Village club into giving her husband a better time slot on stage. Later, she takes performance advice from the reproachful Sophie Lennon, played by Jane Lynch (opposite).

Unlike Lorelai, however, Midge intends, with every fiber of her being, to live the life of a perfect wife and mother that her appearance-obsessed Jewish parents demand of her. She certainly conforms: as was the norm, she gets her (more-important) “Mrs.” degree directly after getting her BA. Five years later, she now resides in a surprisingly ritzy apartment (in her parents’ building) and, as if on command, has two perfect children.

But something in the story line had to give, I guess, and it was the time with, or character development

of, the children. Thus, we mostly see the back of Midge’s four-year-old son’s head as he watches Howdy Doody on television or scoots ahead of the carriage that she wheels into her parents’ apartment to dump the pair there.

But the baby girl’s large “Yalta forehead” (which might make her “look like Winston Churchill”) is a concern to Midge’s mom (played by Marin Hinkle) and, therefore, to Midge too, who often measures it.

That’s just one part of her mom’s rigid perfectionism.

Having been brought up by such a neurotic, Midge keeps herself in tip-top military shape, often tapemeasuring her own perfect calves, ankles, and thighs and recording the numbers in her diary. Midge has so internalized the need to be feminine and perfect that she rises before dawn to do her hair and put on her face before her husband awakens.

It’s an exhausting ruse to keep up. Above all, she’s supposed to show absolute wifely devotion to her husband, Joel Maisel, who, from the beginning, seems like a loser. He does something vague in his uncle’s business, which looks like a Mad Men–style office in Midtown, but he dreams of being a comedian.

So, Midge supplies everything he needs, boosting his ego and editing his work. She even trades her brisket (the Jewish stuff gets a tad stereotyped) for Joel to have a better time slot onstage at the Gaslight Cafe, an actual comic and folk venue that opened in 1958, also known as the Village Gaslight. The name takes on a literal meaning for the people who get shut out or bomb there.

And bomb Joel does, on what turns out to be stolen material.

The set proves so humiliating to his ego that Mr. Maisel goes home, packs a suitcase, and leaves Midge for his secretary, a woman so dumb she can’t even sharpen a pencil. “It’s electric!” Joel says, defending her.

Thus, Midge is left to unpack her entire life. A divorced woman defying the cultural, social, and family norms of 1958 provides an infinitely rich setup.

Midge, too, harbors a secret: those downtown trips dragging a brisket gave her a taste for what she knows is her calling as a comic.

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Her parents blame her and demand that she get her husband back. Even being with a lying, cheating loser is better than being single, the thinking goes.

Midge and her kids end up moving in with her parents, and she regresses to her teenaged status: begging for a TV for her pink, virginal bedroom and having a curfew.

She takes a job behind a makeup counter at B. Altman. But, as with the duality theme in Mad Men (also a rich visual love letter to midcentury Manhattan), in which Don Draper changed his name and identity, Midge, too, harbors a secret: those downtown trips dragging a brisket gave her a taste for what she knows is her calling as a comic.

Thus, she begins an uptown/downtown divide: by day, she’s a proper uptown mother and daughter, and by night, she sneaks down to the club, where she lets loose (with booze and marijuana), gets arrested with Lenny Bruce, and increasingly feels at home on the stage. But she thinks telling her parents the truth would kill them.

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Opposite: Michael Zegen plays Joel Maisel, Midge’s rather boring husband who inadvertently launches her comedic career as she tries to help him with his own failing one.

Below: Rachel Brosnahan as Midge Maisel and Alex Borstein as her agent, Susie Myerson

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f you think about it, I Love Lucy was all about a ditzy housewife who was desperate for some limelight, to get out of the house, and to be part of a larger world, even if it meant lying to Ricky.

Midge’s period wardrobe is terrific and sometimes includes Lucy-like coats. The show is set about five years ahead of the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, a book that helped ignite the women’s movement, which started flourishing by the early 1970s. As a suburban wife and mother herself, Friedan famously said that she had to keep her book and magazine writing a secret from her

neighbors because, at that time, it was more acceptable for her to be a closet alcoholic than to pursue an outside profession.

That’s why all the ads of the time sent experts inside the house to help lonely housewives keep up the sparkle: a giant in your washer, a dove in your kitchen, the Ty-D-Bol Man in your toilet. Leaving home was a threat.

And just as with this column, some viewers might get a little frustrated with the slowness of the pace till they get to the point—like—“When is she gonna become a famous comedian already?”

All I can say is that it’s worth the wait. It becomes a running joke that Midge picks all sorts of awful fake stage names for herself in her on-and-off-again performances—an illustration of how hard it is to establish an identity.

To add another layer to the girdles and the irony: having established herself, can Midge be marvelous and still be married?

Sophie asks Midge what her “gimmick” is as a comedian. “You can’t go up there and be a woman,” she tells her. “You’ve got to be a thing.”

She also tells her that if she’s attractive and sexy, men will want to have sex with her, not laugh at her jokes.

Sadly, even some sixty years later, this is still a thing: just ask Amy Schumer or Mindy Kaling.

“Why do women have to pretend to be something that they’re not?” Midge asks at a career-killing (some might say self-sabotaging) gig in which she outs the hypocrisy of Sophie Lennon. “Why do we have to pretend to be stupid when we’re not stupid?

Why do we have to pretend to be helpless when we’re not helpless? Why do we have to pretend to be sorry when we have nothing to be sorry about?”

The last episode of the season is funny, rich, deeply satisfying, and ends with a coda to the opening wedding toast: Midge on stage at the Gaslight, where she finds her look, her name, and her flow. She is indeed marvelous, and it’s exhilarating to watch.

There are no easy answers to what’s ahead. Her ex, Joel, seems to be coming around. Will he accept her success?

Things really get interesting by episode seven, when through her agent, Susie (the fantastic Alex Borstein), Midge gets to meet the dean of women comics, Sophie Lennon, played by the always-excellent Jane Lynch.

An amalgam of many female comediennes from Sophie Tucker to Totie Fields, Phyllis Diller, and even Joan Rivers, Sophie plays the role of an old-fashioned, crude, zaftig housewife, making jokes about how fat and ugly she is. Both Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers had to walk a tightrope of self-deprecating jokes and have some sort of shock appeal—Diller in her wigs and outfits, Rivers with her mean mouth, calling out “tramps.”

Sophie invites Midge to visit her at home—a virtual museum of female duality.

It turns out that she lives in a mansion with uniformed servants and wears a fat suit to perform in. (Actually, Rivers lived like royalty, too, in a gilded palace on Fifth Avenue.)

To add another layer to the girdles and the irony: having established herself, can Midge be marvelous and still be married?

Stay tuned, fellow Maisel maniacs. Amazon has committed to the second season, and I bet it will be amazing.

Barbara Lippert writes about media, politics, ads, and women. Currently, she’s a columnist for Ad Age; previously she wrote Mad Blog for MediaPost. com, which started out as an episode-by-episode deconstruction of Mad Men. For many years she was an award-winning ad critic for Adweek and has also written for New York magazine, Vogue, Glamour, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She lives in New York City.

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Introspections

BY NICHOLAS S. RACHEOTES

Here’s an idea for your next party game. After the guests have been sufficiently hydrated, challenge everyone to quote song lyrics that mention clothing. The first one who fails must do something embarrassing. (That part of the game I leave to you.)

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ver the decades, fashion in song has reflected social norms in amusing and intriguing ways.

Clothes make the musical context and offer what pass as alluring statements of a given era. Let’s not get too intellectual about all this—let’s explore instead.

Beginning in 1919, not so very shy but somewhat demure lasses could hit the town in a “sweet little Alice blue gown.” They would fawn over their reflections in store windows and presumably catch the eye of every passing swain. By the 1930s, Fred Astaire was putting on his top hat, knotting up his white tie, and dusting off his tails. Personally, I’d have paid handsomely to see the intermingling of that getup with a sweet little Alice blue gown on the rumble seat of a Ford Roadster on a moonlit night. That would be an impression that would stave off the Depression, for sure.

By the 1950s, matters had turned decidedly worse.

Thousands of guys had thrown off their battle fatigues and dress blues. They were lamenting the fact that the current generation had sunken into juvenile delinquency and heart-rending loneliness. The fool who was the terror of Highway 101 sported black denim trousers (yes, trousers, not pants), motorcycle boots, and a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back.

Otherwise, when stood up by his date, you’d find him in a white sport coat (yes, sport coat) with a pink carnation (I’ll leave that alone), all dressed up for the big dance.

Footwear comes into plenty of songs, as well.

Cowboys wore jingling spurs. (Nobody ever asked the horse’s opinion of that fashion statement.)

You were country and a tramp according to Carla Thomas and Otis Redding if you wore brogan shoes. You were absolutely killing when strutting around in your high-heel sneakers with that wig hat on your head, though I can’t imagine how ladies walked in those things. If you could afford them, a pair of Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather” (they later became “shiny, shiny, shiny” when Velvet Underground penned “Venus in Furs”) would lift you in a folkie’s estimation.

“

By the 1930s, Fred Astaire was putting on his top hat, knotting up his white tie, and dusting off his tails.

The total makeover for those aristocratic patriots who owned yachts and helicopters and who wouldn’t be caught dead or alive in battle fatigues and dress blues was quite elaborate. Dodie (I wonder if she ever forgave her parents for that) Stevens had a boyfriend arrayed in tan shoes with pink shoelaces, a polka-dot vest, and a big Panama with a purple hat band (I wonder if he ever forgave his haberdasher for that).

Polka dots take me right to the beach. When a young woman whose modesty far exceeded her interest in keeping up with the style of the French Riviera showed up on the beach in an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini, she created quite a stir, not as you might think, but by hiding out and hiding it the best she could. The Beach Boys, in a display of all-American modesty, dressed their surfer guys in sandals and baggy shorts. Later, they would break down and dig a Hawaiian island doll in a French bikini by a palm tree in the sand.

To top things off, let’s consider hats. Bob Dylan again sang of a dame’s “leopard-skin pill-box hat,” which resembled a mattress perched on a bottle of wine. I confess never to have seen either. The Chad Mitchell Trio poignantly sang about busing to achieve school desegregation when an openminded white society lady addressed her African American maid: Which hat shall I wear, the red one or blue one?

Which hat shall I wear to the PTA? The red hat’s becoming; the blue one’s a new one Mary, come here. Tell me which do you say?

When Joe Bennett and the Sparkletones burbled about their b-b-b-b-black slacks, they included a red bow tie and derby. They also confessed that girls sighed when they walked by, little wonder. Amy Grant made hats a metaphor for all the tasks she had to perform, but there was nothing metaphorical about Joe Cocker and Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” Maybe I should leave it there, but I’m yielding to temptation.

In music, at least in part, women have evolved. Some might say that they have been less “objectified.” I’m not that sure, but “the devil with the blue dress on” has given way to the “girl in a short skirt and a long jacket” who is “touring the facility” and “using a machete to cut through red tape.” She’s probably taking charge and not necessarily an angel who wants to wear anyone’s red shoes.

What a strange sartorial trip this has been, from the simple Alice blue gown to the anything-but-chaste “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” Let’s get back to the era of parlor games. No cheating now—without using any of the above, make your collective lists and imagine a suitable punishment for the person who can’t add a contribution. (Maybe they should have to wear a polka-dot vest to work for a week.)

Nick Racheotes is a product of Boston public schools, Brandeis University, and Boston College, from which he holds a PhD in history. Since he retired from teaching at Framingham State University, Nick and his wife, Pat, divide their time between Boston, Cape Cod, and the Western world.

She ends by awarding the maid, “the green silk with a tear” (after telling her to do the floors and windows).

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Introspections

BY S U Z A N N E P O L L A K

IT’S CHIC TO WEAR A FANTASTIC “SOMETHING” OVER AND OVER TO MAKE IT YOUR SIGNATURE. JUST AS SMART HOSTS COOK THEIR FAVORITE RECIPE AGAIN AND AGAIN-NO MATTER WHO COMES TO DINNER-BECAUSE THEY KNOW THEIR GUESTS LOOK FORWARD TO THEIR CULINARY SPECIALTY, THE CHICEST WOMEN THROUGHOUT HISTORY KNOW THE STYLE REPETITION SECRET.

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That something can be an accessory, a dress, a shoe. I learned from native and expatriate ladies swanning into my parents’ 1960s cocktail parties all over Africa.

Women wore cigarette pants for casual affairs and jewel-toned satin mini cocktail dresses at fancier parties. Along with real hairdos (coifs, updos), eyeliner flaring out just like Cleopatra’s, brilliant lips inhaling pearl or golden cigarette holders, and perhaps even a huge cocktail ring or elaborate earrings, none of these beauties boasted an expansive wardrobe with unlimited choices, but they had a cocktail uniform that took them anywhere. Once these vital decisions are made, brains are free to tackle life’s thornier problems: whom to invite to your party; which stranger to talk to first at someone else’s; how to grab attention, connect, ignite a fire, or tactfully end a conversation that’s headed nowhere.

As a teenager, I appropriated the tip immediately and forever. Deciding and simplifying what to wear is cheaper and quicker once you know what suits you. Dressing becomes a snap, so be loyal and stick with your style. Adding that something extra or taking it off can make the outfit appropriate for the particular party and place.

BECAUSE, OF COURSE, IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE WHERE THE COCKTAIL PARTY IS: Hollywood, California, or Hollywood, South Carolina? The ambassador’s residence or your neighbor’s garden? “When in Rome,” so the saying goes. You don’t want to be dramatically different from everyone else unless you can handle it. For example, a man does not wear a motorcycle jacket when he attends a soiree at Charleston’s Yacht Club.

Men there wear the proper uniform of khaki pants and a blue blazer. I once knew two young American beauties who visited the south of France and were assured that everyone, absolutely everyone, went topless to parties at a certain place. Perhaps a little naïve, they showed up appropriately undressed to a party filled with elegant, older, couture-covered guests. They are still embarrassed decades later!

DRESSING COMES DOWN TO THE FIRST IMPRESSION. What can a first impression tell us about someone we only met for a moment at a party? Of course, we all know human beings are complex and contradictory, but you don’t have to live with someone to sense if you want more of them or less. The package of you starts with eye contact, the smile, and what is draping your body. Identify what you want out of the engagement. Something—or nothing? Are you there to sip one bourbon, or to possibly meet your next business associate or romantic partner? You don’t want your clothes to get in the way. A woman does not want to be so flashy that others are distracted from her substance, but neither does she want to seem too dowdy.

fall and winter, for hosting ladies luncheons and gumbo dinner parties, with a Halloween costume, for a Thanksgiving feast and Christmas dinner, and even just for hanging out at home.

FINALLY, DON’T FORGET TO HAVE A “DRESSING DRINK.” One of my fondest memories is sitting with my father at home in Africa before another of our huge parties began. While my mother was still running around creating stress and possibly havoc, my father relaxed in the living room sipping his scotch. I always thought of this as his “dressing drink”—just finished dressing, enjoying the calm before the chaos, talking with his daughter.

Suzanne Pollak, a mentor and lecturer in the fields of home, hearth, and hospitality, is the founder and dean of the Charleston Academy of Domestic Pursuits. She is the coauthor of Entertaining for Dummies, The Pat Conroy Cookbook, and The Charleston Academy of Domestic Pursuits: A Handbook of Etiquette with Recipes. Born into a diplomatic family, Pollak was raised in Africa, where her parents hosted multiple parties every week. Her South Carolina homes have been featured in the Wall Street Journal “Mansion” section and Town & Country magazine.

THE WORLD’S BEST OLD-FASHIONED This is the perfect “dressing drink.” Instead of my dad’s scotch, I switched to bourbon—when in Rome!

Orange peel for garnish 1 Luxardo cherry for garnish Ice

FIGURE OUT YOUR PRIMARY ASSETSCLEAVAGE, NECK, ARMS, HAIR?-AND CHOOSE COCKTAIL ATTIRE ACCORDINGLY.

2 ounces bourbon or rye whiskey 1 thin slice of a sugar cube 2 dashes Angostura bitters 1 dash orange bitters

For your own party, you will need to move, sit, and stand. As a guest, you can swan around or sprawl on a sofa as you wish.

Put all the above in an old-fashioned glass filled with smallish ice cubes. Stir for precisely 35 seconds, then strain into another glass and add one or two big ice cubes. Cut a slice of orange peel and twist on top of the drink. Leave slice in the drink. Add one Luxardo cherry. Voila!

For reference, here is my summer cocktail uniform: Hart tassel earrings, a white blouse and cigarette pants from J.McLaughlin, and extra-pointy shoes to make my legs look longer. My favorite pair of Balenciaga mules calls to mind the time of Robin Hood! Because they are extravagant, they will be worn with jeans all

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Introspections

melodious

ALCHEMY

BY COLLEEN E. HINELY

THE 30A SONGWRITERS FESTIVAL, APPROACHING ITS TENTH ANNIVERSARY IN 2019, HAS MATURED INTO A MELODIOUS CONFECTION MADE UP OF HUNDREDS OF ACCOMPLISHED SINGER-SONGWRITERS AND INFUSED WITH THE SPIRIT OF THOUSANDS OF AVID MUSIC LOVERS.

T

hanks to the intimate ambience of the venues along Scenic Highway 30-A and Miramar Beach in South Walton County, Florida, chic locals and visitors, and the area’s famous coastlines, the 30A Songwriters Festival has been elevated onto a world-class stage.

The festival is set apart from other music events because, as producer Russell Carter (president of Russell Carter Artist Management) explains, “We only book songwriters who perform, which is the most creative element in the whole music realm, and we are not limited to one genre. It will be blues, rock and roll, R&B, country, alternative—we are looking for all styles of music.”

The vibe in the air is unmistakable. Thousands of ardent music lovers, unfazed by the sometimes frigid

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January temperatures, bring a palpable energy to the 30A Songwriters Festival.

They flock to picturesque South Walton County, eager to experience the music and the fellowship. Hundreds of festival partners, volunteers, production professionals, stage managers, and other personnel invest hundreds of hours preparing for this annual festival in support of the Cultural Arts Alliance of Walton County (CAA). The CAA, a private, nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, champions the arts in the county through advocacy, leadership, program funding, and education.

Because 30A Songwriters Festival is the top annual fund-raiser for the CAA, its success is critical. “It is a complete benefit for the CAA,” Carter expounds. “One hundred percent of the net proceeds go to the CAA, which enables them to do all of the free events that they do. The CAA has the Foster Art Gallery and Arts Week, which is a part of ArtsQuest; they also provide grants, offer art classes, and support art in schools throughout the county—they do so many great things.”

One of the components contributing to the success of the 30A Songwriters Festival is the distinctiveness of its venues. The coffee shops, restaurant lounges, courtyards, meeting halls, and cozy bars of South Walton are transformed into intimate listening rooms. Each stage is adorned with funky original art by local

“ Rita Wilson Photo by Jim Clark

Emmylou Harris Photo by Jim Clark

THE 2018 FESTIVAL WAS A SOLD-OUT AFFAIR, BOASTING 185 METICULOUSLY CHOSEN SINGER-SONGWRITERS, INCLUDING COUNTLESS GRAMMY AWARD NOMINEES AND WINNERS. artists. The main stage at Grand Boulevard Town Center, outfitted with massive speakers and lined with pit crews, played host to the 2018 festival headliners: the Zombies, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Ann Wilson of Heart.

Ann Wilson Photo by Jim Clark

Michelle Malone Photo by Colleen E. Hinely

The 2018 festival was a sold-out affair, boasting 185 meticulously chosen singer-songwriters, including countless Grammy Award nominees and winners.

Among the impressive roster was the gritty and graceful Michelle Malone, a four-time festival participant. Malone was eager to talk about her experience, especially the camaraderie embodied by the annual event. “30A Songwriters Festival is special,” she explains. “I get to see my friends and hear their wonderful music. I get to make new friends and make music with all the writers I might not otherwise have connected with.”

Malone’s Friday evening performance alongside North Mississippi Allstars guitarist Luther Dickinson, tambourine goddess Trish Land, songsmith Johnny Irion, and Southern rock musician Tommy Talton was a collaboration of mighty, robust, and gritty rock and roll.

Gurufish Photo by Jim Clark

Following the show, Malone gushed, “It felt special, and it was inspiring. You could tell that we all love the same kind of music, so much so that it felt like we were all part of the same band.” The electricity of Malone’s concert was but a single example of the 225 performances available to festival guests, each a unique experience hosted in the distinctive gathering spots of South Walton.

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Introspections

The melodious alchemy of the 30A Songwriters Festival is the product of a perfectly balanced recipe: the idyllic domain of South Walton’s snow-white beaches, the ingenious festival organizers, the attentive audiences, and hundreds of great singersongwriters, all folded into the area’s diverse and hip venues. Comparable to music festivals in Austin or Nashville, the 30A Songwriters Festival has formed a new niche embraced by music fans and songwriting virtuosos alike. Speaking on behalf of her fellow festival performers, Malone says, “Music is so powerful, and we’re all just doing what we love.”

As the 30A Songwriters Festival embarks upon its tenth-anniversary event in January of 2019, singersongwriter fans continue to pledge allegiance to the artists who escape to the coast to create music and intimately inspire our souls.

Photo by Colleen E. Hinely

30ASONGWRITERSFESTIVAL.COM

ASHLEY LONGSHORE X BG

Linda Fargo and Ashley Longshore

It was an explosion of color and fashion as New Orleans pop artist Ashley Longshore celebrated the opening of her pop-up installation and window displays at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan on January 13.

Photography by Carlo Pieroni

Ashley Longshore and Cameron Silver 140 | M AY 2018

Addy Peyton, Rachel Brown, Nina Waring, Shannon Thomas, and Ali Rieger

Jason Allen

Jonathan Tisch, Ashley Longshore, and Lizzie Tisch Ty Hunter and Ashley Longshore

Susan Drewes

Debra Messing

Corbin Chamberlin and Carol Wilson June Ambrose and Ashley Longshore

Jordan Staggs, Lisa Burwell, Abigail Ryan, Ashley Longshore, Crystal Hamon, and Tracey Thomas

Cindy Dudley Longshore and Ashley Longshore

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La scène

Jamie Gummere and Ronna Davis Jim Richard, Rick Helfand, Emeril Lagasse, and Jim Shirley

TASTE OF THE RACE Each year, prior to the Seaside School Half Marathon and 5K in Seaside, Florida, local and visiting chefs, along with vintners from around the country, gather at the Seaside School Lyceum to present Taste of the Race, hosted by chef Emeril Lagasse. This year’s event, held on March 2, was a great success as guests enjoyed cooking demonstrations, music, and delicious fare.

Photos by Modus Photography

Participants from the Seaside Neighborhood School Student Kitchen

Alden and Emeril Lagasse 142 | M A Y 2018

Jim Shirley and Jim Richard

Mindy Morris and Hannah Martin

Cassie Miller

Lisa Miller, Zac Bingham, Mara Clark, and Ada Bowman

CRESCENDO! Crescendo! is a cultural extravaganza benefiting Sinfonia Gulf Coast and its music education and community engagement initiatives throughout Northwest Florida.

The main event on February 18 celebrated the cultural and culinary arts by showcasing world-class vintners, chefs, expert spirit purveyors, amazing auction items, and musical guest Nicholas Rodriguez.

Solange Jazayeri and Ewa Ruyan

Photography by Jim Clark

Dawn Lichorowic, Melissa Tusa, and Jennifer Jones

SuzyRodriguez Accola and Nicholas Susanperforms Faulkner

Nicholas Rodriguez, Lakin Castillo, Mara Clark, S. Bowman, ReneĂŠ Launiere, Ewa Ruyan, and Sandy Buckley Ken Johnson, Ashley Campbell, Andi Zack-Johnson, and Lisa Burwell

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La scène

Marsi Beck, Mike Riordan, and Steve and Mary Ellen Buffington

Photo by Brenna Kneiss

Photo by Bonjwing Lee/Ulterior Epicure

Photo by Brenna Kneiss

Photo by Bonjwing Lee/Ulterior Epicure

30A WINE FESTIVAL It was time to “wine down” as Alys Beach, Florida, hosted the annual 30A Wine Festival February 21–25. Events ranged from private wine dinners and seminars to the Bourbon, Beer & Butts barbecue, the Grand Tasting wine walkabout, and the Rosé & Croquet finale. Proceeds from the festival benefited Children’s Volunteer Health Network.

Suzy Accola and Susan Faulkner

Photo by Bonjwing Lee/Ulterior Epicure

Photo by Brenna Kneiss

Christy Winn and Ben Bricken Photo by Brenna Kneiss

Amy Giles, Brenna Kneiss, and Abigail Ryan Photo by Bonjwing Lee/ Ulterior Epicure 144 | M A Y 2018

Octavia Spencer and Tate Taylor Photo by Michael Baker/AMPAS

Camila Alves, Matthew McConaughey, and TimothĂŠe Chalamet

Emma Stone

Meryl Streep

ACADEMY AWARDS 2018 Celebrities and fans across the globe celebrated the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles on March 4.

Jimmy Kimmel hosted the evening as the Academy honored some of the best films and performances of 2017.

Photography by Todd Wawrychuk/AMPAS Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa

Leslie Mann and Judd Apatow

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June 4 - 29, 2017 A Summer Intensive For Dancers Entering the 4th Grade & Up

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Sometimes an outfit is just begging for a “wow” factor, and we’ve certainly found that in artist Heidi Lee’s custom-made Swarovski Endless Echo Hats.

Each headpiece is unique since it’s molded to the head of the buyer. Lee, a winner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Accessory Design Award, is based in New York City and has created pieces for films, national ad campaigns, fashion shoots, and more. Some of her clients include Lady Gaga, Madonna, Ashley Longshore, Missy Elliott, Anne Hathaway, G-Dragon, and Lauryn Hill.

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