In case you missed it, here’s what was on the blog this week.
- Monday, November 13: Boy, was my sister surprised to see me on Inside Edition! Also, I have something to say about Saturday Night Live’s stunning lack of diversity.
- Tuesday, November 14: Tiffany Haddish and Tami Roman agree with me. If you invest money in good clothes, you should wear that shit forever.
- Wednesday, November 15: I’ve got plenty of purses that are 10 years and older.
- Thursday, November 16: My dresses for the Committee to Protect Journalists dinners, from 2007 to 2017. This year’s was my least successful! Bummer.
In other news, we recently bade farewell to legendary gossip columnist Liz Smith, who died at age 94 last Sunday. She did a great interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2015, which is worth reading. Other Liz Smith stories I recommend:
- An interview with Interview Magazine, also in 2015.
- Two years later — this past July — she spoke to the New York Times thoughtfully about life at 94: “I am in search of Liz Smith,” she said softly, musing at the thought. “After a lifetime of fun and excitement and money and feeling important and being in the thick of it, I am just shocked every day that I’m not the same person. I think that happens to all old people. They’re searching for a glimmer of what they call their real self. They’re boring, mostly. I’m always thinking falsely, expending what little energy I have, believing every day I may just rediscover that person. I try to be all of the things I was, but it inevitably fails. I don’t feel like myself at all.”
- “Liz Smith’s Complicated Relationship With the Closet,” from the New York Times this week.
- Vanity Fair’s obituary.
- In 2008, New York Magazine called Liz “the original Gossip Girl.”
- The New York Times shared a “never before seen” video interview with Smith.
- The New Yorker published, “Liz Smith’s Trump Memories,” in its September 5, 2016, issue. Liz totally owned the Trump-Ivana divorce story in 1990. (For a good non-Liz story on Trump, Ivana, and Marla Maples — read Marie Brenner’s 1990 Vanity Fair story.)
More shocking than Smith’s death was yesterday’s news that fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa had died of heart failure, supposedly at age 77. (The New York Times obituary, however, reports that he was 82. That reminds me of someone I knew personally who shaved a few years off her age.) Unlike Smith, he was still very active — in the midst of plans to open his first stand-alone London store, for instance. (He already had two of his own stores in Paris, and and his clothes were sold at various chic retailers.) The tiny Tunisian was widely adored for his kindness — supermodel Naomi Campbell called him “Papa” — in addition to his signature, flattering knit styles. He didn’t abide by the increasingly demanding fashion-show schedule that has lately driven talented creatives out of the business. He showed when he felt inspired.
I wrote about Alaïa in 2012, when I got fed up with cheap-looking of the “bandage” dresses that Alaïa — once known as “the King of Cling” — and his rival, Herve Leger, made famous in the 1980s. Coincidentally, Leger (who lost the rights to his name and became known as Herve Leroux) also died unexpectedly, aged only 60, this October. The end of an era!