Gossip Central

Rachel Lloyd, Tina Brown and Leymah Gbowee Honored at The New York Women’s Foundation Breakfast

A lot has happened since 2008 when a Sunday night premiere screening and dinner co-hosted by Gloria Steinem honored Leymah Gbowee, a charismatic social worker turned activist who, in the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, tells her compelling story about how women banded together to protest violence in Liberia, set their hideous dictator Charles Taylor on a journey of exile, to be put on trial for war crimes, and enabled a democratically elected woman to govern their country. Self-assured and instinctively political, Gbowee came off as a modern day Lysistrata, as in the ancient Greek satirist Aristophanes’ play, a character who organized women in a sex strike to protest the Peloponnesian War. Now a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Leymah Gbowee was honored on Thursday morning at the New York Women’s Foundation breakfast, along with Tina Brown, founder of Women of the World Foundation among her many media accomplishments, and Rachel Lloyd, founder of GEMS, Girls Educational & Mentoring Services, to help victims of domestic violence and human trafficking.

Ann Roth: Reluctant Honoree at the Hamptons International Film Festival

How do you pay tribute to a star in the film industry, playfully dubbed “The Meryl Streep of Costume Design?” That was the dilemma Nathan Lane faced in front of a crowd at the Hamptons International Film Festival that included Scott Rudin, Bruce Weber, and eh, Meryl Streep. “You have to say something nice,” said Lane by way of lauding Ann Roth’s genius. But Roth would have none of it. Horrified when director Mike Nichols announced that they’d worked together for 47 years, she seemed horrified that she was honored at all.

The Museum as Funhouse: Yayoi Kusama at the Whitney/ “Ghosts in the Machine” at the New Museum, “Century of the Child” at MoMA

The wow kicks in early at these exceptional shows at museums uptown and down. First at the Whitney: Polka dots, the signature pattern for the artist Yayoi Kusama now in her ‘80’s, are appropriated for fashion. Louis Vuitton is doing for her designs what the luxury line does collaborating with Takashi Murakami. The museum features a roomful of canvases in yellows and reds, a display of summer joy for an artist who retreated from the art world for awhile, suffering a mental breakdown. In July, a party of a press opening at the museum with champagne and hibiscus cocktails, smoked salmon and quiche, was followed by a ribbon cutting at the Louis Vuitton Fifth Avenue store, the dots and her image complete with orange wig in its windows. Compelling and sexy, the museum retrospective features soft sculpture, phalluses embedded in shoes, on a jacket, on furnishings. Old maybe, from the sixties, but newly fresh, and titillating.

St. Barth’s in the Hamptons: What Recession?

In case the Hamptons edenic sun and sand are not enough, you can always shop. That was the message at a deluxe event sponsored by Social Life Magazine and Rand Luxury at East Hamptons Studios last weekend. Bringing St. Barth’s to the Hamptons is not much of a stretch, as some of the promo materials pointed out. Surely you will need a Lord of the Rings pinball machine in your mini mansion, or Pac Man. For dining out you may accessorize with diamond jewels from Dannini and a suit with pin stripes woven in of 22 karat gold thread, starting price $30,000. If you want to spend money on something that moves, try a champagne leather lined Ferrari convertible. And while all of this may seem excessive to those of us who remember the times when you were overdressed at the beach if your jeans were clean, this lifestyle jump makes Tiffany’s in East Hampton look quaint.

Hugh Dancy Hits the Spot: Hysteria

The new movie Hysteria answers an age old question, what do women want most? Based on a historic moment in the 1880’s when a particular contraption for the alleviation of women’s non specific ailments (unhappiness, indigestion, the desire for equality, the right to vote, freedom) was invented, this romantic comedy features an early feminist Charlotte Dalrymple (Maggie Gyllenhaal), her conventional sister Emily (Felicity Jones), their provincial father (Jonathan Pryce), and a young progressive doctor Mortimer Granville played by Hugh Dancy with an easy touch. In the employ of Dr. Dalrymple, he learns to apply just the right manual pressure to give suffering women “paroxysms,” never to be confused with sexual pleasure. With the help of a nutty inventor (Rupert Everett), an electronic device was made available for home use. Despite the eh, explosive nature of this subject, this delightful movie is titillating, yet chaste.

Talk to Her: Schiaparelli and Prada at the Metropolitan Museum

The Costume Institute’s new exhibition is a happy collision of fashion titans. Decades apart, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada are joined in a conceit devised by Met curators, Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda: a filmed dialogue, directed by Baz Luhrman, inspired by Louis Malle’s two-hander, Dinner With Andre--only this is two women talking, both Italian and interested in clothes. Hence “Impossible Conversations:” Judy Davis is cast as Schiaparelli and Prada is, well, her self. Their discourse is projected, heard over the mannequins sporting their shoes, dresses, ensembles, and hats. Provocative pairings make for exhibition as theater.

Out to Lunch with Charlize Theron

It is hard to feel sorry for Charlize Theron. The Academy Award winning actress, for the role of Aileen Wuomos in Monster when she famously puffed up and made up to emphasize the serial killer’s tough look, is in fact very pretty, like the most popular girl in your high school. The gorgeous blond of your fantasy who has everything, is exactly the role she plays as Mavis Gary, a writer of young adult fiction loosely based on her memories of teen glory in Mercury, Minnesota in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, script by Diablo Cody. And yet, her behavior trying to snatch back her happily married boyfriend is so unspeakable, you find her a pitiable, abject, lonely, delusional masochist and alcoholic who self-mutilates pulling out her hair. Ech!

Hamptons Journal: A Day at the Beach Minus the Beach

The Ross School gym was decked out as a lounge with plush sofas as “The Diva of Haiti,” Barbara Guillaume took the stage singing in jazzy Creole. The well-heeled crowd swayed enjoying quail eggs and grilled cheese washed down with fine champagne. Liev Schreiber, Fisher Stevens, and hosts Maria Bello and Mariska Hargitay shook hands and posed for photographs at this elegant fund-raiser brunch hosted by WeAdvance.org, GlobalDirt.org, and Plum Hamptons Magazine. “The Hamptons for Haiti Brunch” was dedicated to filling the enormous gap for medical aid, education, and other humanitarian causes for the people of Haiti. 

L'Amour Fou: The Fashion of Yves St. Laurent and Alexander McQueen

In a new documentary L'Amour Fou about the iconic Yves St. Laurent, it is hard to tell just what is the object of that besotted state: his work, his substantial art collection, his posh homes in Paris, Marrakech and Normandy, opulently decorated with antiques and woven fabrics. From the perspective of Pierre Berge, St. Laurent's lifelong companion, the film is perhaps an expression of the businessman's own mad devotion to the bespectacled designer who defined fashion in the mid century. In his view, YSL was an aloof workaholic, obsessed with sex and drugs, ambivalent to fame, and mainly depressed. Berge's own place in YSL's life comes off as more business than pleasure. This is not the ebullient Valentino and Giancarlo Giametti. 

Fashion Week: Night Out with The Blonds

Fashion shows are theater, and some are more theater than most. No Fashion Week is complete without the runway extravaganza presented by The Blonds. Last night at Milk Studios in the meatpacking, a pair of Chinese dancing dragons opened a show that featured the designers' signature corsets bespangled and beaded, sequined and jeweled, tube dresses, cat suits, cinchers and capelets; a black and white “poncho” would be fabulous on say, Liza Minelli. One model sported a gold pagoda headpiece to match her gold corset, a spectacle that is only matched by the attending audience who seize the occasion for theater of their own. 

Trends included faux fur headpieces complete with animal ears pointing up, and layers of eyelashes-mainly on men, as well as an array of thigh high platform boots. Kenny Kenny was perhaps the most demure I've ever seen him wearing hats piled on one another. “I couldn't get the right height,” he explained of the fedora styles that gave him extra brims as well. Amanda LaPorte is styled as Marilyn Monroe, except the deep dip of “her” red, sheer cocktail sheath revealed several inches of ass cleavage. You could see a lot of “work” was done. 

My favorite outfit was a total python look, boots, pants, corset, worn with great style by Andrea, a stockbroker by day, and a collector of the The Blonds' designs. Each piece is hand crafted, a one of a kind. Where could you wear such an ensemble? By day I wear business suits, she said. I wear this to clubs, to dinner with my husband on the weekends. I was delighted to see The Blonds' art so tastefully put together on a real woman, because it matched my own fashion fantasies. Corey Grant, an interior designer with partner Christopher who has a preppie look except for his necklace, big fans of the Blonds, explained, unlike the shows now in tents at Lincoln Center, “There's not one buyer in the room. This is uptown coming downtown.”  

Other fans included singer Kerri Hilson, Nigel Barker, Miss J, and Jay Manuel, stars of America's Next Top Models, as well as dandy Patrick MacDonald, and Larissa in her very own signature cheekbones. I caught up with Justin James, a long drink of water, elegantly attired in gunmetal silk suit and high heels. He had done the show's wigs, glittery head dresses inspired by Japanese anime. Show over by 8:15, he was outside grabbing a cigarette: “Now I can go home to bed.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura