25 More Design Luminaries - New York Magazine

George Beylerian

Beylerian founded Material ConneXion, a research library that helps innovators meet designers. The result: Steelcase’s new office chair, Nike’s new sneaker, and so on.

Courtesy of Material Connexion

Ivan Chermayeff

The logomeister: NBC, Mobil, PBS, MoMA, Chase Manhattan Bank, Showtime, and Barneys New York, among others, owe Chermayeff & Geismar their instant recognition.

Courtesy of Chermayeff & Geismar

Giorgio DeLuca and Jack Ceglic

The two remaining founders of Dean & DeLuca (Joel Dean died in 2004), the food retailer whose fetishization of exorbitantly priced, jewel-like produce ignited the foodie trend.

Courtesy of Dean & DeLuca

Francis Fleetwood

Architect Fleetwood built mansion-size “cottages” for new Hamptons money, and helped turn shingle-siding and the pursuit of “authentic” grandeur into national housing trends.

Photograph by Frances Fleetwood

Margot Gayle

A tireless foe of Robert Moses’s plan to pave through Soho, historian Gayle helped save cast-iron architecture; loft districts in cities everywhere can thank her.

Photograph by Michael Moran/Getty Images

Richard Gluckman

With his many stark, clean galleries—Dia on 22nd Street, Larry Gagosian’s old Wooster Street space—Gluckman set the white-box stage for the theater that is today’s art world.

Photograph by Eduard Hueber/Archphoto

Albert Hadley

For decades, Hadley, the hands-down master of quiet, blue-blooded elegance (Brooke Astor’s famed library), has done more than any other designer to codify the elusive quality of good taste.

Sketch by Albert Hadley/Courtesy of Rizzoli

Marc Jacobs

He recognizes that his customers craved the wit and personality of vintage clothes but wanted them done in eight-ply cashmere and kid leather.

Photograph by Firstview

Knopf Book Design Department

Since the late eighties, the book designers at Alfred A. Knopf (Chip Kidd among them) brought jacket design back from the grave and made books desirable objects again.

Courtesy of Chip Kidd

Ralph Lauren

Lauren’s persuasive, romantic, multi-billion-dollar vision of America that’s consistent across every polo shirt, perfectly aged quilt, and cologne that bears his name.

Photograph by Bruce Weber/Courtesy of Rizzoli New York

Richard Meier

With his design for the relentlessly hyped Perry Street towers, Ur-starchitect Meier turned New Yorkers’ real-estate desires from prewar to modern day.

Photograph by Scott Frances/Esto

Murray Moss

He found obscure, sometimes incomprehensible, expensive European designers, displayed them with “please do not touch” signs, and created a craving we didn’t know we had.

Courtesy of Moss

Irving Penn

His fifties Vogue covers are legendary, but it’s Penn’s lush still lifes that have made us see beauty even in cigarette butts.

Gaetano Pesce

While other designers were pushing crisp and clean, Pesce embraced gloppy, messy shapes made from toxic-colored plastics and resins long before anyone imagined ugly could be beautiful.

Courtesy of Pesce Ltd.

Karim Rashid

One of the few designers who delivers on the high-design at a low-price promise; see his ubiquitous aerodynamic translucent-plastic wastepaper basket.

Courtesy of Karim Rashid

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Rogers was the first president of the privately funded Central Park Conservancy. It rescued the park from deep neglect and created a template for similar projects.

Courtesy of Central Park Conservancy

Barbara Sallick

The Waterworks co-founder made bathrooms just as luxurious and design-rich as any other room of the house.

Courtesy of Waterworks

Ian Schrager

A kind of latter-day urban-design patron, he saw early on that high design could transform even the most mundane space, and make it cool to hang out in a hotel lobby.

Robert A.M. Stern

His scholarly, accessible architectural history instigated a new kind of appreciation for old New York.

Courtesy of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, LLP

Tucker Viemeister

As one of the founders of Smart Design, Viemeister brought real design and real function together with OXO’s Good Grips line of housewares.

Courtesy of OXO International

Robin Wagner

His black-box designs for A Chorus Line (1975) and Dreamgirls (1981) (done with director Michael Bennett) brought cinema drama and Off Broadway rawness to Broadway.

Photograph by Martha Swope

Bruce Weber

In his 30-plus years shooting graphically masculine images for GQ, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Versace, and Abercrombie & Fitch, Weber made men as erotically charged as women.

Courtesy of Calvin Klein, Inc.

Andrea Woodner

Her Design Trust for Public Space advocates for green-building guidelines and novel urban-renewal projects (thank her for the High Line).

Courtesy of Design Trust for Public Space

Deborah Wright

Now president of Carver Bancorp, Wright created a unique fund that started Harlem’s decrepit institutions renovating and helped the neighborhood restore itself in the process.

Courtesy of the New York Landmarks Conservancy

James Zemaitis

Zemaitis jump-started the 20th-century-design department at Phillips de Pury in 2001, then did the same for Sotheby’s; there, he’s fueled mid-century design’s skyrocketing prices and status.

Courtesy of Sotheby’s