A (Very Late) Christmas Dinner

Good morning. I finally had my Christmas dinner last week, deep in the Maine woods, together with family for the first time in months. It was a supermarket feast: Eric Kim’s recipe for root beer ham, alongside sautéed green beans and some scalloped potatoes made on the fly — thin-sliced baking potatoes layered with dots…

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Beholder of Beauty

There is a scene early in “The September Issue,” the 2009 documentary about the making of the year’s door-stopper Vogue magazine, that features a meeting between the designer Vera Wang, dressed down in a striped shirt and no makeup, and, like a character from an entirely different movie set, the editor André Leon Talley: very…

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André Leon Talley in His Own Words

André Leon Talley was the last of his kind: a fashion editor who operated without the filter of a corporate public relations apparatus. He made broad, extravagant declarations like, “We’re living in such a vulgar age!” He was the “pharaoh of fabulosity” who put himself on his own best-dressed lists and eviscerated celebrities whose red…

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André, by Bill

If the world of fabulous notables is divided between those who are famous mostly for what they do and those who are famous for who they are, André Leon Talley was difficult to define precisely because he was so much of both. He wrote well without fitting the conventional definition of a writer and styled…

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Oh, By the Way: I Had a Baby

On Nov. 25, Genesis Paras announced to her family and friends over Instagram that she had a new baby girl. “Everyone meet our little bat Harlow Phoenix Paras,” she wrote. All baby announcements are somewhat of a surprise; no one can ever be sure when a baby will be born. But this one was especially…

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