Last night’s Calvin Klein 40th Anniversary party was held in a John Pawson-designed, temporary structure on 10th Avenue and 30th Street built specifically for the event.

Adjacent to the space—fittingly, it seemed to be constructed from the same building material used to turn Manhattan living rooms into second bedrooms—was the new Highline Park, which guests were invited to tour during the party (the park is not yet open to the public).

Once inside, the place looked something like a very glamorous high school quad—a slate-colored staircase ran the width of the building, most of which was occupied by seated cliques of attendees sipping drinks and appraising the entryway.  read more »

If Gossip Girl didn't exist, it—or rather, She—would have to be invented. With barbarians at the crossings and cultural turpitude rotting the very Manhattan schist beneath our feet, She alone upholds Truth and Beauty and Order. In the postlapsarian moral universe of today's New York, God, and Wharton and Fitzgerald and Bradshaw, are dead; long live Gossip Girl.

Does this city deserve a muse and creator who imagines it better, stronger, nobler than it's been in untold generations, or ever? Unveiled last autumn, the first episode of the series opened with the return of Serena van der Woodsen—the once and future dauphine of Park Avenue; her surname, a plaintive lament for the town's old Dutch aristocracy, long ago suppressed by the arrival of vulgar Britons—after a semester abroad at a New England boarding school.  read more »

Spotted—also, striped, plaid, and fringed: all said looks were spied Sunday night in a display window at the Henri Bendel flagship on Fifth Avenue. The mannequins, as much as mannequins can be, were less silently bored than articulately, deliberately insouciant: the one on the far left held in her bent left hand a petite Sony Handycam; it was noticeably turned off, and angled at five o'clock, as if the spectators gathered on the sidewalk were obvi(ously) nothing worth committing to tape. Two places to her left, a blond had conjured the year's most fraught sartorial heresy: turquoise thigh-length stockings with color-matched open-toed pumps.  read more »

Last night at an after-party for a private screening of Step Brothers on the roof of the Empire Hotel, 38-year-old Matthew Settle, who plays the young Brooklyn Dad on Gossip Girl, wanted to bum a cigarette. (He was obliged.)

"Well, Rufus is probably going to run into some trouble with his daughter," he said when The Daily Transom asked him about the future of his character. "The show is about kids finding their identities, and she begins to find hers through her designing. She's going to have to choose between her trade and her schooling, for which Rufus has sacrificed so much."  read more »

Ooh, interesting.]]> http://www.observer.com/2008/style/jay-mcinerney-make-appearance-i-gossip-girl-i#comments O2 Jay McInerney Matthew Settle Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:14:25 -0400 Irina Aleksander 72220 at http://www.observer.com