Simon Doonan Is a Delicate FlowerThe Barneys creative director and author of ‘Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You’ answers those 21 questions we’re always asking.
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Ashley Alexandra Dupré Continues to Haunt New YorkReal celebrities are riled by sightings of Eliot’s lady friend; Simon Doonan gets his own TV show and pretty people buy expensive homes in our daily roundup of the news from New York’s best gossip columns.
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‘It Takes a Special Kind of Man to Want to Stick It in the Girl in the Philip Treacy Lobster Hat’We came across a copy of Simon Doonan’s upcoming book, Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You, and even though it’s not coming out until April, we are going to tell you a little bit about it now, because it is kind of awesome. In it, Doonan interviews the insanely fabulous and the fabulously insane — everyone from Dita Von Teese to Malcolm Gladwell — about their unique personal styles. The book is “intended as a wake-up call to the women of America to eschew the contemporary porno-chic trend and inject a little classy eccentricity into their fashion choices,” Doonan wrote in the Observer last summer, and it’s more a rumination on what glamour is than the style manual the title implies, but if you use it as such, you might be lucky enough to end up like Amy Fine Collins, who says her fashion choices cause her to get lots of attention from “homeless, gay, black street people.” How fun is that? Just don’t try and take them with you to the Waverly Inn.
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Fern Mallis and Simon Doonan’s Tips on TippingAttention shoppers! It’s that time of year. Yes, the Tipping Time, wherein you must give of your bounty unto all those little people who make your world go round (even if it makes you a little morally queasy). But what to give, and to whom? Well! We ran into Barneys creative director Simon Doonan and Fashion Week overlord Fern Mallis several weeks back at the launch for our New York Look fashion magazine (which, we might add, yet again, is pretty fucking fantastic), and asked them how they treat the help when the holidays come around. What we discovered was a highly detailed system of reward, based on equal parts anger, fear, and compassion, which we’ve made into a handy list, below.
1. If you subscribe to fashion magazines, be generous to your postal carriers.
As every girl or gay knows, September fashion magazines are heavy enough to be used as doorstops or murder weapons. You’ve seen your coffee table buckle under the weight. Now imagine the spinal discs of your poor postal carrier, forced to lug a 5,000-page Vogue to every apartment in your building. And then there’s Bazaar. And W. Oh, God, that W. Feel guilty yet? Doonan does. “Every postal worker who has ever delivered to my building has gone on sick leave with hernia from lifting magazines. It’s a really disastrous situation,” he says. His tipping solution: at least $25. “But I do raises, so [my postal carrier] is making a fortune now.”
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Video: Barneys’ Holiday Windows RevealedRight about now, Barneys will be unveiling their legendary Christmas windows, and our own Fabiola Beracasa traipsed uptown to get a sneak peek. This year’s theme is Give Good Green, and for it, Barneys creative director Simon Doonan invented “Rudolph the Recycling Reindeer.” “The only sort of iconic visual associated with [the environmental movement] is the drowning polar bear,” he told Fab. “Which wouldn’t be very festive!” No indeed. Click above to see the windows, and hear Doonan explain why his Barneys staffers were gathering bottle tops from bars in the East Village and buying bottles from homeless people.
Making Barneys’ Holiday Windows [NYM Video]
ByJonah Green
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‘Gorgeous’ Ben Affleck Skips His Own PremiereBen Affleck slipped out of the premiere of his Gone Baby Gone to go watch the Red Sox game. (Ben says he left because he gets nervous during his screenings. Cindy Adams thinks he’s getting “gorgeouser and gorgeouser”). Fifty of the world’s greatest chefs are having dinner tonight at Le Bernadin to celebrate the book My Last Supper. Le Cirque owner Sirio Maccioni shelled out $7,000 for a 1.1-pound Italian white truffle. Tim Robbins had his birthday party on Tuesday at the Beatrice Inn. Barneys creative director Simon Doonan thought Phillip Bloch had gone blind, though he was actually just preparing for a movie role.
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Blowin’ in the WindBobby Kennedy Jr. says he and his uncle Ted aren’t as opposed to the proposed Cape Cod wind farm as a book says they are. Liza Minnelli and Isle Werther are fighting over a dress. Barneys creative director Simon Doonan is happy to be a “card-carrying fag.” Boxing will go upscale when three Ford models replace the traditional ring girls at the upcoming welterweight championship at MSG. Former Justin Timberlake flame Cameron Diaz and current Justin Timberlake flame Jessica Biel will both be at the MTV Movie Awards, which may be awkward. Adam Carolla noted that Rosie O’Donnell is a fat female lesbian, and thus has “triple coverage as a minority.” President Bush’s chief domestic policy adviser, Karl Zinzmeister, reportedly said he’d never hire another woman because they “just get pregnant and leave.” Dean McDermott broke up with girlfriend Mary Jo Eustace via “Page Six.”
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Nutritious, Delicious Couture
What could be better than fashion and food? Yesterday we rushed to Vanderbilt Hall to catch Tim Gunn hosting the Wish-Bone Salad Show. Designers Richie Rich and Traver Rain compared the experience to summer camp, and the models looked bewildered. “There’s some lettuce going on there. Or maybe some other vegetables,” the Asian Salad said vaguely. Backstage, one model sported onion shorts while another counted the string beans on her dress. Gunn said he preferred to accessorize with food, but our favorite model embraced the whole aesthetic: “I am the carpaccio salad.”
Wish-Bone Salad Fashion Show by Heatherette [NYM]