Town & Country features the latest in luxury, from beautiful homes, sumptuous dining to exotic locations. In 11 gorgeous annual issues, Town & Country covers the arts, fashion and culture, bringing the best of everything to America's trendsetters
1985 CINDY CRAWFORD “Even I don’t wake up looking like Cindy Crawford,” the supermodel has famously said, and in 1985 she got a little help from T&C. For an editorial dedicated to beauty and jewelry (a combination so winning we now devote an annual issue to it), we enlisted an elite crew: Claude Montana for wardrobe, Olivier Echaudemaison for makeup, and Victor Skrebneski to photograph. The jewels measured up too: Van Cleef & Arpels, David Webb, Cartier, Harry Winston, and, as seen on Crawford, Paloma Picasso for Tiffany. “Each age has championed a feminine silhouette that reflects its ideal of beauty,” we wrote. “Today’s woman is a culmination of all that has gone before, able to enjoy all the curves and muscles endowed upon her by nature.” Does this include jewelry?…
One of the first things you learn about jewelry is to always inspect the back of a piece; the really good stuff is beautiful from every angle. I thought about this and what it conveys about the value of beauty as I walked through the TEFAF Maastricht art fair earlier this year. The fair, known as the world’s best for fine art, antiques, and design, brings together “7,000 years of art history under one roof.” It’s a wonder to see the treasures in each booth: an early-17th-century solid gold enameled table fountain in the shape of a snail at Galerie Kugel; wood marquetry paintings and porphyry at Galleria Alessandra Di Castro; the imperial cameo (Roman, circa AD 37) at Galerie Chenel. It’s equally thrilling to watch so many people appreciate…
WHERE ARE WE GOING? We all have that friend, don’t we? The diehard F1 fan. The one who keeps tabs on driver stats the way Roger Goodell does on NFL stars. The one who plans holidays around the grand prix circuit. The one who has seen every season of Drive to Survive (#IYKYK). She will definitely be in Miami for the race this month. Why not join her? It’ll be a thrill. Plus, you can party at Carbone Beach afterward. MAY 3–5, F1MIAMIGP.COM WHAT ARE WE WEARING? In 1935, when Sir Malcolm Campbell became the first human to drive at 300 mph, he was wearing a Rolex. Decades later Paul Newman was as renowned for his impressive results at Le Mans as for his Rolex Cosmograph Daytona. The timepiece, born…
Deep in the throes of pandemic life, a Manhattan mother of two whom I’ll call Amy was flailing in a way many Manhattan, and American, mothers were at that time. “It was during Covid that I realized I could not parent,” she confesses. “I didn’t really have rules. I was yelling a lot. I didn’t know when to give in and when not to give in. I felt like I wasn’t doing a good job.” Friends began sending her Instagram reels of parenting experts like the ubiquitous Dr. Becky Kennedy and other proponents of positive parenting (or gentle parenting or respectful parenting or whatever term your favorite expert applies to the popular style of child-rearing that promotes validating your kids’ feelings, shunning the punishment/reward tactics of yore, and remaining comically…
The last time there was a show in America dedicated to Mary Cassatt, the year was 1999. Given her stature as a grande dame of Impressionism and one of the very few women to have reached a level of fame (and collectibility) comparable to that of Monet, Manet, et al., this should come as a surprise. “I mean, Cézanne is wonderful, but there have been exhibitions of his rocks,” says Jennifer Thompson, a curator of “Mary Cassatt at Work,” the first U.S. survey of the artist in 25 years, opening at the Philadelphia Museum on May 18. “We have gotten so granular in the way we think about the male artists, but we haven’t done that with the female artists.” The tide is turning across the country. Starting May 25…
As literary conflagrations go, not even Dido’s funeral pyre can compete with Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, the 1987 megawatt best-seller, which expanded the playing field for Wolfe, who until then had been best known as a journalist. Like Zola a century before, Wolfe treated the novel as a kind of social document, a reflection of an age. It would be 11 years before his second novel, A Man in Full, was published. The titular man is developer Charlie Croker, a Croesus of the cotton field whose life is in free fall. At nearly 800 pages, it’s an ambitious novel concerned with bedrocks of American life: history, morality, power, race, sex, and wealth. Think of it as a whiskey-tinged War and Peace, with Atlanta and its social strata…
