What happened to Jared Paul Stern's blog post for the Times? Earlier this month, Stern got his byline back into the well-groomed paper for the first time since he was accused of trying to extort money from billionaire Ron Burkle while working as a Post gossip hound. His piece for style blog the Moment, on the old-money clothing of William F. Buckley, was linked from Gawker March 9 and gone from the Times servers by March 12. The piece was a bit substantive by the Moment's fluffy standards but not, to my memory, remotely offensive. Does anyone have the faintest clue why it was removed? Did the Times get cold feet about working with Stern? Stern said he has no idea what happened, and the Times did not respond to two requests for comment over the past five days. Tips to ryan@gawker.com would be greatly appreciated. After the jump, an excerpt from Stern's Moment post:

Buckley was "anti-fashion in the original sense of the term," says designer and style expert Alan Flusser, author of "Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion." "He came from an era and background where if you looked like you spent too much time thinking about clothes, then everything else was suspect. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those Shetland sweaters actually had holes in them." At social functions, men of Buckley's era and class were content to serve merely as backdrops for their wives. By contrast, Buckley's wife Pat, who died last year, was almost a caricature, one of William Hamilton's New Yorker cartoon WASPs come to life.



In the end, beyond a general notion of the preppy staples that have been replicated by everyone from Ralph Lauren to the latest designer-of-the-hour since Buckley's Millbrook days, it's hard to remember exactly what he wore during his many years in the public eye. Which was precisely the point.