Town & Country October 2023

CREATIVE ARISTOCRACY ’23 Introducing the Kings and Queens of Culture Now A SNOB’S GUIDE TO… Provence, Hawaii, London & Chicago College Admissions CHAOS How to Keep Calm and Common App On Our Coats, OURSELVES Uptown Swindler SYNDROME A True—and All Too Common—Tale of Art and Betrayal Let’s All Just Move in With RALPH Hair by Danielle Priano for SexyHair. Makeup by Hung Vanngo at the Wall Group. Nails by Kayo Higuchi for Chanel Beauty. Production by Area1202. Shot on location at the Plaza Hotel in NYC…

CAPOTE’S SWANS “All literature is gossip,” Truman Capote told a magazine in response to the fury unleashed after the 1975 publication, in Esquire, of an excerpt (“La Côte Basque, 1965”) from the roman à clef he would never finish, Answered Prayers. His swans disagreed. For more than a decade, the empresses of New York’s haut monde, led by the T&C fixtures on this page (clockwise from top left, C.Z. Guest, Slim Keith, Lee Radziwill, and Babe Paley, all photographed for this magazine), had welcomed Capote into their rarefied circles and swaddled him in the warm glow of their wealth and beauty, pedigree and charm. They had unwittingly armed him, too, with their dirtiest secrets, which he would expose in the fateful story that would spell his swift social demise. The…

I was an intern at Ralph Lauren Home in my junior year of college. My first day there coincided with the opening of the Ralph Lauren offices at 650 Madison Avenue. My very generous boss invited me to join the festivities. Did it all begin for me that day? In a way it did. I remember standing on the landing looking down at the mahogany, tartan, and burnished leather, the heaping bowls of M&Ms on those perfectly tableaued tables, and thinking I liked where this was headed. Thirty years later I was back in the reading room at 650 to see early galleys of Ralph Lauren: A Way of Living (Rizzoli), a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Ralph Lauren Home and, really, of the universe Mr. Lauren has created.…

WHERE ARE WE GOING? The 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s birth has been celebrated all year at museums around the world. (Did you see his cypresses at the Met? His suburban landscapes at Chicago’s Art Institute?) This month a new show at the Musée d’Orsay brings together more than 50 works the artist completed during the last two months of his life, which he spent in a village outside Paris. OPENS OCTOBER 3, MUSEE-ORSAY.FR WHAT ARE WE WEARING? When Blancpain introduced the Ladybird in the 1950s, it was a feat of innovation, made for women and—this is important—by a woman. It’s still as technologically impressive as it is unapologetically feminine. See: the curves of those Roman numerals, available now in colors like lilac and turquoise, and all those diamonds…

What makes for a good dinner party? It isn’t flowers or tablescapes, or even food. Seasoned hosts know that a party is a success when those who weren’t invited talk about it—whether out of admiration or envy. Nobody knows this better than Judy Chicago, the artist who forged The Dinner Party, an anatomically inspired installation featuring 39 place settings laid out on a triangular table for historical (and some mythical) women, from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Georgia O’Keeffe. Following the debut of the piece at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, the art world was swift to label Chicago a feminist and political firebrand. “People only considered it political because it challenged the prevailing paradigm,” Chicago says now. And she’s been challenging it ever since. In the…

“They’re filthy rich. They have no real idea of what money means,” production designer Suzie Davies says of the characters in the new film Saltburn. “But it doesn’t mean they don’t have taste.” That much is apparent. Saltburn, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, who made Promising Young Woman and played Camilla Parker Bowles in the third and fourth seasons of The Crown, is a dazzling new addition to the tradition of films about terrible things happening in grand estates. Saltburn follows an Oxford outcast named Oliver Quick (a brilliant Barry Keoghan), who befriends his rich, dashing classmate Felix Catton (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi) and finds himself spending a long, enchanting, and exceedingly unforgettable summer at the aristocratic Catton family’s sprawling estate. And while the cast includes a rogue’s gallery of…