Yes, it’s a great look for those inclined to spend more than $10K on a brunch outfit. 
Suede top is $5,285; the boots, $1945. Tax and a bag not included. Is it me? Or am I just too old to understand spending money this way?
The graphic guys roughed it up a lot and added tenements for depressing effect, but the real Don Draper
house is a lovely 1877 L.A. Victorian located in Angelino Heights. Zillow estimates the house to be worth $800,000.
If Burlesque wasn’t dead, this would kill
it. Seems that the Cougar Poster Girl and UES exhibitionist, Sonja Morgan, is planning a racy Las Vegas review starring (who else)…Sonja Morgan. Co-conspirator is Steve Wynn.
“Steve told me I can come out when I want to perform,” she’s quoted as telling the Post. “I would love to take this whole show to Broadway or off-Broadyway.”–Sonja Morgan
Via Bravo blog:
“Las Vegas may never be the same: Sonja Morgan says she’s planning a burlesque act in Sin City.
The Real Housewives of New York star told The New York Post that she is looking to launch a saucy show with the help of her friend, casino mogul Steve Wynn, and his wife, Andrea Hissom.
“Steve told me I can come out when I want to perform,” she’s quoted as telling the Post. “I would love to take this whole show to Broadway or off-Broadyway.”
Sonja gave a preview of what’s to come for a benefit in the Hamptons recently. According to the Post, the act featured 40 backup dancers, white ostrich-feather fans, a feather headdress, as well as a “bustier and tiny underwear.” She also poked fun at her failed marriage to J.P. Morgan heir John Adams Morgan, whom she divorced. (She’s most recently been linked to 23-year-old real estate developer Benjamin Benalloul.)
“Just because I married JPM, you thought this pucker was lined with gold and I’d be left holding the bag, but this bankd is closed,” she’s quoted as saying.
So where does she get inspiration from for her show? The Internet, hip-hop…and the Roaring Twenties! “I look up 1920s words on Wikipedia, then I write them down and make them rhyme,” she told the Post. “I’m like a rapper. I took out my phone and recorded it all in 20 minutes…like, ‘I wanna leave a juice joint at 2 and wake up with a 10, not wake up at 10 with a two.”
Wow!!!! The Catherine Zeta-Jones looks
don’t hurt, either. She was discovered by Quincy Jones, not an over-hyped TV talent competition. And she does not wrap herself in roast beef for attention.
The social media verdict has been swift and certain: George Zimmer is a popular guy. It seems that consumers don’t like the way this looks and are guaranteeing Men’s Warehouse knows about it. Add this to the retail hit parade that includes J. C. Penney’s disastrous attempt to also “skew younger and hipper”.
Via Yahoo:
“Companies can fire a founder. But they can’t fire his brand.
That’s the dilemma Men’s Wearhouse is left with after dumping its founder and spokesman, George Zimmer, a decision announced Wednesday. Mr. Zimmer had starred in the suit retailer’s commercials for almost 30 years, guaranteeing men that “you’re going to like the way you look.”
On Thursday, a day after the company’s terse announcement, reaction on social media continued to be fast and furious, indicating that Mr. Zimmer had made the jump from business executive to cultural icon. “George Zimmer” was one of the top searches on Google on Wednesday, and news of the firing made the gossip sites TMZ and Gawker.
And the Men’s Wearhouse Facebook page had more than 200 comments criticizing the company for ousting Mr. Zimmer, with sentiments like “If George Zimmer isn’t coming back, neither am I!” and riffs on Mr. Zimmer’s signature ad closer like “You’re going to miss the way I shopped. I guarantee it.”
Men’s Wearhouse has not said whether it will continue running the television commercials featuring Mr. Zimmer; the company had recently been evaluating their effectiveness, Richard Jaffe, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, said.”–Via Yahoo
Ouch!!!! This hurts. But I betcha the 
landlords are river-dancing down Fifth Ave. in glee:
Via NY Observer:
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. On Thursday night, the Rent Guidelines Board voted to jack up the rent approve rent increases of 4 percent for one-year leases and 7.75-percent for a two-year leases, as reported by The New York Times. The decision will mean increases of $40 a month, or $480 a year for a $1,000-a-month apartment, or $960 for a $2,000-a-month apartment, twice the amount of the 2012 increases, which were capped at 2 and 4 percent respectively.”
D & G
going to jail is an even bigger pesce out of water story than Martha Stewart or Sophia Loren going to jail . (Both women actually served time behind bars.) Luckily for the designers, who are partners in life and in business, the judge gave them a suspended sentence.
Via Reuters
(Reuters) – “Fashion design duo Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana were on Wednesday handed a suspended prison sentence of one year and eight months for hiding hundreds of millions of euros from the tax authorities.
The designers, who are nearly as famous as the stars they dress, were not present in court in Milan and have denied the charges. Given the complexity and length of the appeals process, they are unlikely to spend any time in jail.
Public prosecutor Gaetano Ruta had asked for two and a half years. The judge gave them a suspended sentence.
A company spokesman declined to make an immediate comment.
The success of Dolce and Gabbana’s sexy corset dresses and sharply tailored suits favored by celebrities like Kylie Minogue, Kate Moss and Bryan Ferry have earned them a glamorous lifestyle.
They hosted friend and client Madonna for her birthday in 2009 at their villa perched above the chic boating resort of Portofino.
The case dates back to an investigation that began in 2008, when authorities unleashed a tax avoidance crackdown as the financial crisis began to bite. But the probe that ensnared the two designers is one of the few high-profile cases to come to trial so far.
The judge on Wednesday ruled that the pair sold their brand to Luxembourg-based holding company Gado in 2004 to avoid declaring taxes on royalties of about 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion).
The pair’s flamboyant designs are inspired by the sultry southern Italian island of Sicily, where Dolce was born in 1958. He met Gabbana, now 50, in the latter’s home town of Milan, where they showed their first collection in 1985. The brand took hold internationally in the 1990s and global revenues hit just under 1.5 billion euros in 2011.
The pair have always said they are innocent.
“Everyone knows that we haven’t done anything,” Gabbana tweeted in June 2012 after the trial was ordered.
But Gabbana’s only reaction so far on Wednesday was to tweet a close up photograph of the branch of a colorful citrus tree, just seconds after the verdict.”
“When Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy—graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur—for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga. He supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally) over his head. 
Most of his fans don’t really want to know who he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him). But they do want to follow his upward trajectory from the outlaw spraying—or, as the argot has it, “bombing”—walls in Bristol, England, during the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands of dollars in the auction houses of Britain and America. Today, he has bombed cities from Vienna to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and Detroit. And he has moved from graffiti on gritty urban walls to paint on canvas, conceptual sculpture and even film, with the guileful documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
Pest Control, the tongue-in-cheek-titled organization set up by the artist to authenticate the real Banksy artwork, also protects him from prying outsiders. Hiding behind a paper bag, or, more commonly, e-mail, Banksy relentlessly controls his own narrative. His last face-to-face interview took place in 2003.
While he may shelter behind a concealed identity, he advocates a direct connection between an artist and his constituency. “There’s a whole new audience out there, and it’s never been easier to sell [one’s art],” Banksy has maintained. “You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful, all you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.”
***
The Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of town. Very white—probably no more than three black families had somehow ended up there—working-class, run-down and unwelcoming to strangers. So when Banksy, who came from a much leafier part of town, decided to go make his first foray there, he was nervous. “My dad was badly beaten up there as a kid,” he told fellow graffiti artist and author Felix Braun. He was trying out names at the time, sometimes signing himself Robin Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy. The shortened moniker may have demonstrated less of the gangsters’ “robbing banks” cachet, but it was more memorable—and easier to write on a wall.
Around this time, he also settled on his distinctive stencil approach to graffiti. When he was 18, he once wrote, he was painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up and everyone ran. “The rest of my mates made it to the car,” Banksy recalled, “and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me. As I lay there listening to the cops on the tracks, I realized I had to cut my painting time in half or give it up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stenciled plate on the bottom of the fuel tank when I realized I could just copy that style and make each letter three feet high.” But he also told his friend, author Tristan Manco: “As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. I also like the political edge. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.”
The people—and the apes and rats—he drew in these early days have a strange, primitive feel to them. My favorite is a piece that greets you when you enter the Pierced Up tattoo parlor in Bristol. The wall painting depicts giant wasps (with television sets strapped on as additional weapons) divebombing a tempting bunch of flowers in a vase. Parlor manager Maryanne Kemp recalls Banksy’s marathon painting session: “It was an all-nighter.”
By 1999, he was headed to London. He was also beginning to retreat into anonymity. Evading the authorities was one explanation—Banksy “has issues with the cops.” But he also discovered that anonymity created its own invaluable buzz. As his street art appeared in cities across Britain, comparisons to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring began circulating.
Banksy’s first London exhibition, so to speak, took place in Rivington Street in 2001, when he and fellow street artists convened in a tunnel near a pub. “We hung up some decorators’ signs nicked off a building site,” he later wrote, “and painted the walls white wearing overalls. We got the artwork up in 25 minutes and held an opening party later that week with beers and some hip-hop pumping out of the back of a Transit van. About 500 people turned up to an opening which had cost almost nothing to set up.”
In July 2003, Banksy mounted “Turf War,” his breakthrough exhibition. Staged in a former warehouse in Hackney, the show dazzled the London art scene with its carnival-atmosphere display, which featured a live heifer, its hide embellished with a portrait of Andy Warhol, as well as Queen Elizabeth II in the guise of a chimpanzee.
Late that year, a tall, bearded figure in a dark overcoat, scarf and floppy hat strolled into Tate Britain clutching a large paper bag. He made his way to Room 7 on the second level. He then dug out his own picture, an unsigned oil painting of a rural scene he had found in a London street market. Across the canvas, which he had titled Crimewatch UK Has Ruined the Countryside for All of Us, he had stenciled blue-and-white police crime-scene tape.
During the next 17 months, always in disguise, Banksy brought his own brand of prankster performance art to major museums, including the Louvre. There, he succeeded in installing an image of the Mona Lisa plastered with a smiley-face sticker. In New York City, he surreptitiously attached a small portrait of a woman (which he had found and modified to depict the subject wearing a gas mask) to a wall in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum took it in stride: “I think it’s fair to say,” spokeswoman Elyse Topalian told the New York Times, “it would take more than a piece of Scotch tape to get a work of art into the Met.”
Banksy became an international star in 2005. In August, he arrived in Israel, where he painted a series of images on the West Bank’s concrete wall, part of the barrier built to try to stop suicide bombers. Images of a girl clutching balloons as she is transported to the top of a wall; two stenciled children with bucket and spade dreaming of a beach; and a boy with a ladder propped against the wall were poignant meditations on the theme of escape.
Two months after returning from Israel, Banksy’s London exhibition “Crude Oils” took the art of the subversive mash-up to new heights—Claude Monet’s Water Lilies reworked to include trash and shopping carts floating among lily pads; a street hooligan smashing the window depicted in a reimagining of Edward Hopper’s Night Hawks. A signature Banksy touch included 164 rats—live rats—skittering around the gallery and testing critics’ mettle.
There was an inevitability to Banksy’s incursion into Los Angeles with the show “Barely Legal” in September 2006. “Hollywood,” he once said, “is a town where they honor their heroes by writing their names on the pavement to be walked on by fat people and peed on by dogs. It seemed like a great place to come and be ambitious.” Crowds of 30,000 or so, among them Brad Pitt, were in attendance. “[Banksy] does all this and he stays anonymous,” Pitt told the LA Times, almost wistfully. “I think that’s great.”
The exhibition centerpiece was an 8,000-pound live elephant, slathered in red paint and overlaid with a fleur-de-lis pattern. L.A.’s outspoken animal-rights advocates were incensed; the authorities ordered the paint to be washed off. Fliers distributed to the glittering crowd made the point that “There’s an elephant in the room…20 billion people live below the poverty line.”
In February 2008, seven months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, New York’s rich and famous gathered at Sotheby’s for a night of serious spending. The event, organized by Bono, artist Damien Hirst, Sotheby’s and the Gagosian Gallery, turned out to be the biggest charity art auction ever, raising $42.5 million to support AIDS programs in Africa.
Banksy’s Ruined Landscape, a pastoral scene with the slogan “This is not a photo opportunity” pasted across it, sold for $385,000. A Vandalized Phone Box, an actual British phone booth bent nearly 90 degrees and bleeding red paint where a pickax had pierced it, commanded $605,000. Three years later the buyer was revealed to be Mark Getty, grandson of J. Paul Getty.
Banksy took on the medium of film in Exit Through the Gift Shop, an antic, sideways 2010 documentary on the creation and marketing of street art. The New York Times described it as paralleling Banksy’s best work: “a trompe l’oeil: a film that looks like a documentary but feels like a monumental con.” It was short-listed for an Oscar in the 2010 documentary category.
When the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles put on its comprehensive survey of street art and graffiti in 2011, Banksy was well represented in the field of 50 artists. The show was a high-profile demonstration of the phenomenon that has come to be known as the “Banksy effect”—the artist’s astounding success in bringing urban, outsider art into the cultural, and increasingly profitable, mainstream.
It could be said that Banksy’s subversiveness diminishes as his prices rise. He may well have reached the tipping point where his success makes it impossible for him to remain rooted in the subculture he emerged from.
The riots in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol in spring 2011 offer a cautionary tale. The episode began after police raided protesters, who were opposed to the opening of a Tesco Metro supermarket and living as squatters in a nearby apartment. The authorities later said that they took action after receiving information that the group was making petrol bombs. Banksy’s response was to produce a £5 “commemorative souvenir poster” of a “Tesco Value Petrol Bomb,” its fuse alight. The proceeds, he stated on his website, were to go to the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, a neighborhood-revival organization. Banksy’s generosity was not universally welcomed. Critics denounced the artist as a “Champagne Socialist.”
He has countered this kind of charge repeatedly, for instance, telling the New Yorker by e-mail: “I give away thousands of paintings for free. I don’t think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and trouser all the cash.” (On his website, he provides high-resolution images of his work for free downloading.)
The irony, he added, that his anti-establishment art commands huge prices isn’t lost on him. “I love the way capitalism finds a place—even for its enemies. It’s definitely boom time in the discontent industry. I mean how many cakes does Michael Moore get through?”
While the value of his pieces soars, a poignancy attends some of Banksy’s creative output. A number of his works exist only in memory, or photographs. When I recently wandered in London, searching for 52 previously documented examples of Banksy’s street art, 40 works had disappeared altogether, whitewashed over or destroyed.
Fittingly, the latest chapter in the enigmatic Banksy’s saga involves an unsolved mystery. This summer, during the London Games, he posted two images of Olympic-themed pieces online—a javelin thrower lobbing a missile, and a pole vaulter soaring over a barbed-wire fence. Naturally, a Banksyan twist occurs: The locations of this street art remain undisclosed. Somewhere in London, a pair of new Banksys await discovery.”–The Smithsonian
What a delicious 
read this is. Part social history,part business bio, author
Lindy Woodward’s finely detailed tale of Harry Gordon Selfridge was the inspiration for the Masterpiece series on PBS.
Lady Lavery
He was a merchant showman who was drawn to spectacle and flamboyant 
mistresses, most notably the Dolly Sisters, twin gold diggers and compulsive gamblers whose reckless spending ultimately destroyed him. He died broke at 91, but it was a great and glamorous life that changed forever how we shop
. And yes, there really
was a Lady Lavery.
Geez. What a great example for Russain youth. It seems that VP stole New England Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft’s championship ring.
“George W. Bush called him and said it would be in the best interest of United States if he said he gave the ring to Putin as a present.”
Via NY Post:
Robert Kraft learned the hard way that it’s never a good idea to show Vladimir Putin shiny
objects, less you wish to lose them.
There’s a widely circulated story about Kraft presenting his Super Bowl XXXIX ring to Putin as a gift, but it turns out that the ring was stolen when Kraft and other prominent business men took a trip to Russia to meet with Putin in 2005. When Kraft tried to retrieve the ring, which is worth more than $25,000, the White House intervened to stop him.
“I took out the ring and showed it to (Putin), and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’ ” Kraft said at the Carnegie Hall Medal of Excellence Gala,as reported by the New York Post.“I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”
Kraft initially issued a statement saying he gave the ring to Putin as a gift, but that wasn’t true. Instead, what happened was that George W. Bush called him and said it would be in the best interest of United States if he said he gave the ring to Putin as a present.
“I had an emotional tie to the ring. It had my name on it,” Kraft said. “I didn’t want to see it on eBay. There was a pause on the other end of the line and the voice repeated, ‘It would really be in the best interest if you meant to give the ring as a present.’”
The New York Post reports that the ring is now displayed in the Kremlin library.
landlordrocknyc 