Image: SocialiteRank.com
The queen is dead; long live the tiara. Socialite Rank, the adorably ungrammatical Website that chronicled, lampooned, and at times brought to tears the new generation of charity-circuit women, announced today that after a year’s effort it will publish no more. SR’s creators, tenaciously anonymous even at the height of their fame, now plan to publish a book, The Year of the Rank. The faceless bloggers promise insider tales of the Tinsley set, “behind-the-scenes triumphs, power struggles, love affairs,” as they wrote in their farewell note, and — here’s the must-have fillip — “more unpublished ‘Palermo’ letters.”
Those are letters purported to be from Olivia Palermo, the ringlet-haired New School student who attracted the eye of photographer Patrick McMullan a year ago. Olivia’s rise to digital-photo fame — and, allegedly, her concomitant feeling of unwelcome in the social world — finally led the site to print an obsequious letter of apology, from her to 70 prominent girls. Olivia denied penning the letter, and since then there have been headlines, denials, counter-denials, theories, guesses, rumors, spin. There may also be lawyers on the case, attempting to discover who is behind the Website, and perhaps even private eyes. It was fun — for observers, if not for the girls — while it lasted. Now we’re left with Park Avenue Peerage, a Wordpress-based SR rival that regularly receives tips from the girls themselves, signed “XOXO.” Farewell, Socialite Rank. XOXO. —Isaiah Wilner
Socialite Rank [Official site]
