Designer Marc Jacobs has it all. If by "all" you mean a tattoo that says "Perfect" (almost as good as "Authenticity"), a hernia from overexercising, and two remarkably similar deeply ambivalent articles, one in the Times Thursday Styles section by Eric Wilson and one in New York Look by Amy Larocca. Lucky guy! [NYT, Photo: Out]
At the Bowery Hotel last night, there was a fire in the fireplace and Fatboy Slim's Brimful of Asha on the stereo. Adam Moss, editor of New York, was wearing a blazer. Models were scattered through the crowd. Ally Hilfiger was there wearing tartan and Daily News gossip-auntie named Ben Widdicombe talked to a cute boy near the bar. What could have occasioned such a convocation of minds? Why, only the launch of Look, "a new magazine fresh off the runways," of course! Nikola Tamindzic was there to chronicle what everything and everybody looked like.
Book parties tend to be circle jerk affairs: sordid Chardonnay-and-canapé-fueled minuets of self-congratulation. Last night's New York mag Look Book book party at Bergdorf Goodman, however, was amazingly a creative act. Characters who'd otherwise only rub shoulders when on adjoining pages were actually in the same room with each other and in some cases even talked! This was great! And Nikola Tamindzic found that these people were eager and comfortable photographic subjects.
To our office came a gleaming new copy of New York magazine's Look Book book. It's 255 pages of pictures of those New Yorkers whose "taste, or courage, or both," as editor Adam Moss writes in the desultory introduction, "you can't help but admire." Or maybe you can! All of our old friends are there: Mica De Jesus, the befreckled gypsy; Alex Kennedy-Grant, the guitar virtuoso; Kay Goldberg, the ninth grader who graces the cover; and of course Lisa Falcone, the writer, topless model and mere terrible of Liliana and Carolina.
New York magazine's fashion-on-the-street feature, the Look Book, set up shop around the corner from our office today. Who was Amy Larocca, the arbiter of taste, destroyer of men and maker of heroes? We wanted to know. Finding her was easy. The Look Book Squad had set up a massive white backdrop on the corner. Like a spider awaiting its prey, Larocca lurked nearby for sartorial ridiculants. But like a sunglassed snow leopard, she proved elusive, sliding out of the camera's field of vision. After minutes of being nice (the longest I've ever gone), she agreed to be interviewed. Why? She's got a book to plug! It's coming out on Sept. 3!
