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Piaget’s CEO on Powering Growth in a Challenging Watch Market

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Piaget’s CEO on Powering Growth in a Challenging Watch Market
The Richemont-owned jewellery and watch brand is enjoying newfound momentum after relaunching its Polo 79 timepiece — part of a broader programme to reactivate the glamour of its jet-set glory days. CEO Benjamin Comar shares his vision for how Swiss watchmakers can reach new clients in a tough market for hard luxury for The State of Fashion: Luxury.
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Leigh Bowery Arrives at Tate Modern, Without Labels

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Leigh Bowery Arrives at Tate Modern, Without Labels

“If you label me, you negate me,” the performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery said in 1993, one year before his death at age 33.

Maybe it is this resistance to easy categorization that has meant Bowery never quite became a household name. His cultural influence, though, is beyond question: His provocative performances led him to work with artists including Lucian Freud and Marina Abramovic. His extreme fashions are still referenced on runways, by designers including Rick Owens and John Galliano. And his status as a queer culture icon is cemented by regular invocations at L.G.B.T.Q. club nights and on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

But during his short, colorful and often shocking life, nobody knew what box to put Bowery in. Three decades after his death, they still don’t.

A new exhibition called “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern in London will bring his work to a much broader audience. The show, which opens Feb. 27 and runs through Aug. 31, charts Bowery’s journey from suburban Australia to the heart of London’s alternative gay club scene in the ’80s, and his transformation into a figure that Boy George once described as “modern art on legs.”

George later went on to play Bowery in the 2003 Broadway run of the biographical musical “Taboo,” for which George also wrote the lyrics. The musical is named after an infamous club night that Bowery hosted, which opened in 1985 on a dingy corner of London’s Leicester Square.

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Every Thursday, the party attracted artists, models, designers and celebrities including George Michael, Sade and Bryan Ferry — but also drag queens and heroin users. Each week, Bowery arrived with a wild new outfit that challenged conventional notions of taste, gender and decorum. He described his role at the club as “a local cabaret act,” explaining: “If people see me behaving in such an outrageous manner, they won’t feel inhibited themselves.”

Fashion was the chief concern at Taboo, which operated by the mantra: “Dress as if your life depends on it, or don’t bother.” The doorman would flash a mirror in the face of aspiring entrants and ask, “Would you let yourself in?” The exclusivity was not just to generate mystique: It also created a space where people on society’s margins felt like they belonged.

“I remember Leigh in this insane Bart Simpson mask on roller skates, just bumping into everyone and screaming,” Boy George said in an email. “He brought such anarchy and energy to every club or party.”

Taboo closed after just one year when a tabloid newspaper ran an article about drug use in the club — but just like Bowery himself, the short run only served to cement the legend.

Bowery grew up in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where he felt stifled by the conventions of his surroundings and would gaze longingly at magazine photos of Britain’s New Wave and punk scenes. When he turned 18, he moved to London, adopted a British accent and set about infiltrating the city’s gay party circuit.

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Though he started out making clothes for others, Bowery soon realized that he preferred to design for himself alone.

“Directing his own performance and being the star was a better fit for what he wanted to do,” his sister, Bronwyn Bowery, said recently by phone. While he didn’t consider himself a drag queen, he was inspired by drag, combining high camp with high fashion. His huge figure — heavy set and a towering 6-foot-3 — only accentuated the impact of his outlandish looks.

One of his design collaborators was the sequin expert Nicola Rainbird, who was Bowery’s close friend and eventual wife. Though he was gay and, according to one biography, a lifelong devotee of anonymous public sex, Bowery married Rainbird a year before his death, in a ceremony he called “a little private art performance.”

For Bowery, makeup and clothing were not just cosmetic decoration, but tools for reinvention — and he reinvented himself often.

He made outfits from whatever he could lay his hands on, including bobby pins, tennis balls, tuna tins and even meringues. Some of his best-remembered looks include colored glue dribbled down his bald head like a splattered egg, and giant polka dots covering not only his clothes, but also his face.

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Others on display in the Tate Modern show include a pink leather harness that secures flashing lightbulbs over the ears, and a sculptural white jacket that also obscures the wearer’s face with a puffball of orange tulle.

Fashion designers continue to reference Bowery today. In a 2015 show, Rick Owens sent models down the runway carrying other models in harnesses, which Owens admitted was “totally ripped off” from a Bowery concept. A 2009 Alexander McQueen show painted models with Bowery’s signature oversized lips. Gareth Pugh, Charles Jeffrey and Maison Margiela have all nodded to him in collections.

Bowery’s outré style has also influenced the high-concept looks of pop stars like Lady Gaga and a vast swath of contemporary drag queens — though George said something had been lost in the transition to the mainstream. “When you see drag queens referencing Leigh on ‘Drag Race,’ it’s gorgeous, but too polished,” George said. “Leigh was very rough around the edges and he had the build of a rugby player — and was not dainty or fey.”

That legacy also still plays out in many L.G.B.T.Q. clubs, which present the dance floor as not just a space for hedonism, but also for presenting elaborate looks, experimenting with gender and blurring the lines between performance and partying.

It was nightlife impresario Susanne Bartsch who introduced Bowery to New York, inviting him to contribute clothes to a fashion show displaying the latest London fashions in 1983. (She also took him to Tokyo, where she said that he startled the prime minister of Japan by baring his bottom on the runway.)

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“When he came in his look, everything stopped,” Bartsch said. “You just wanted to see it again and again. His charisma, even when you couldn’t see his face, oozed through all the pieces that he made.”

Polaroid portrait of Leigh Bowery in 1986.Credit…Peter Paul Hartnett/Camera Press

Bowery would later return to New York as a performer, hosting Bartsch’s 1991 Love Ball, which raised money for AIDS research, and influencing New York club kids like Michael Alig, Amanda Lepore and James St James.

“Leigh had a very special relationship with New York,” said the choreographer Michael Clark, “he was particularly celebrated there. There was a whole gang of people ready for him there and he was embraced with open arms.”

Clark first met Bowery in 1984, when he was bewitched by one of Bowery’s outfits and followed him into a club bathroom to invite him to collaborate. Before long, Bowery was making provocative costumes, playing piano and dancing for Clark’s contemporary dance company, until he and Clark fell out in 1992.

By this time, Bowery was increasingly turning toward performance. In 1988, he presented himself as a living art installation at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London for five days, posing behind a two-way mirror on a chaise longue in a series of his best-known looks. He also worked with the performance artist Marina Abramovic on a piece using 400 live rats titled “Delusional,” which she has called “the most insane work I have made to this day.”

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The Tate will show a video of Bowery’s notorious “Birthing” act, which he performed many times, including at the 1993 Wigstock drag festival in New York. There, he wore a bulging costume from which Rainbird, his wife, burst out like a newborn, covered in red gunk and with links of sausages as an umbilical cord.

Bowery loved to provoke outrage, commenting after one particularly extreme show involving an onstage enema: “If I have to ask, ‘Is this idea too sick?’ I know I am on the right track.”

Bowery’s sister said that his desire to shock was partly a response to his conservative upbringing in Australia. “My parents encouraged us immensely to conform,” she said, “but at the same time, we were told to stand out, so we were pretty confused. When someone wants you to conform because they don’t accept who you are, you have a choice: You conform and you lose yourself, or you react.”

“Flesh is the most fabulous fabric,” Bowery once said, and the body’s expressive potential is a through line in his work. Even for an artist strongly associated with clothing, some of Bowery’s most enduring images show him completely nude.

He began sitting for a series of portraits with the painter Lucian Freud in 1990, often posing for seven hours a day. When a show of Freud’s work prominently featuring these paintings opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, it represented the beginnings of a legitimacy in the fine art world that Bowery had long been seeking.

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Though Bowery was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1988, he only told Rainbird and his friend Sue Tilley, instructing them to explain his absence once he was gone with a characteristic quip: “Tell them I’ve gone to Papua New Guinea.” He died on Dec. 31, 1994, of AIDS-related meningitis and pneumonia.

“Leigh Bowery” by Lucian Freud (1991)Credit…The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2024

In a biography of Bowery that Tilley published in 1998, she describes his final moments lying in hospital under an oxygen mask, hooked up to a tangle of tubes. “It really was a fantastic look,” she writes, “and if he had seen someone else with it, we were sure that he would have soon been wearing it to nightclubs.”

Freud paid for Bowery’s body to be sent back to Australia, where he was buried next to his mother. At the funeral, the grave had to be widened to fit his plus-size coffin. As in life, there was no conventional space big enough to accommodate Bowery.

In a song about Bowery released the year after his death, Boy George lauded him as a “disco monster terrorist, hanging in the Tate with Turner and van Gogh.” Three decades later, the Tate Modern show is placing Bowery in the artistic canon.

In an interview, Rainbird reflected on how Bowery would feel about this moment: “He’d be absolutely over the moon,” she said. “He wanted to be famous and he knew he was a genius. He’d be very pleased that people were finally taking note.”

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Leigh Bowery!
Feb. 27 and through Aug. 31 at Tate Modern, in London; tate.org.uk.

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L.A. Affairs: I confessed I wanted babies soon after our first date. Would he stick around?

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L.A. Affairs: I confessed I wanted babies soon after our first date. Would he stick around?

When Mark told me on our first date that he co-owned a mortgage bank with his father, Wes, who had been to federal prison for fraud, I should have run away. After all, I’m a career prosecutor. I read rap sheets to dissect a person’s past and predict future behavior.

Mark, 30, was eight years my junior. He was handsome and polite, with an endearing Oklahoma twang. But my time to procreate was running out. Sitting in Il Farro over focaccia, with his vest over a T-shirt, he looked even more boyish.

Remarkably, he trusted his father. When investigators had closed in, Wes fled to his yacht in France. After extradition, he squandered his children’s trust funds and was convicted. After widespread publicity, Mark’s siblings chose to drop their father’s surname, but I noticed that Mark kept it.

I admired his loyalty, but after the first date, possibly in a bid to repel him with honesty, I said I needed to have babies soon.

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When he called again, I said, “Did you hear me about babies? Anyway, I’m heading to an ashram to meditate.” That should’ve turned him off! But on my way home after landing at Los Angeles International Airport, I heard the voicemail he’d left asking to see me.

Our differences multiplied. Mark was from the Bible Belt; my parents were Holocaust survivors. I dreamed of preparing sea urchins with a “sous chef” boyfriend; he didn’t cook, and his palate was from the kids menu. I fantasized about backpacking the world; a jaunt to Vegas satisfied his wanderlust. He didn’t read; I wanted to be a writer.

Previously, I’d been seduced by demonstrative courtship, but Mark wasn’t effusive, and when someone bursted into laughter with “She’s hysterical!” at one of my jokes, Mark looked bewildered.

Eventually, I met Wes, a slight man in too-large 1970s glasses. I was surprised to find him so naturally charming and gentle. By this point in my legal career, I had seen my share of criminals and couldn’t picture Wes in an orange jumpsuit. He was also quiet like Mark, as in painfully quiet. I filled noiseless spaces with nervous chatter.

When I brought it up to Mark, he nodded and said: “My parents took me to a shrink to figure out why I didn’t talk.” Quietness was just a trait in his family, I suppose. Unlike most attorneys, Mark didn’t talk to hear himself, and his lack of ego intrigued me.

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After making love, I noticed how Mark’s quiet side also meant he didn’t fill space with nervous energy, getting up to shower or checking his phone. He just was there with me, a parallel presence I’d never felt before. As I drifted to sleep, he said “I love you” so inaudibly, maybe I imagined it.

Still, as we say at work, the jury was out.

On a trip to Hawaii eight months in, I waited for the ring to come out over every mai tai at sunset. Didn’t I warn him I didn’t have time to waste?

At 11 months, we visited my old-fashioned parents. To them, bringing a man home was serious. At dinner, my dad prodded Mark in his heavy Polish accent. What were Mark’s intentions? Mark sat mute. I was furious. I thought about how Mark would not take his stepfather’s name, how no one could ever make him do anything he didn’t want — a stubborn mule. I was wasting time.

The next month at a local osteria, I sat sipping scarlet Brunello by candlelight; Mark looked at his menu, not me.

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“Hey,” I said. “I love you, but we’re on different pages.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “Do we have to have this conversation right now?” When I persisted, like a good prosecutor would, he tossed a ring box onto the table. Between us, we’d ruined his proposal.

There were more warning signs: The week of our wedding, I lost my voice. The day before our wedding, in my parents’ home, we had a massive flood. On our wedding day, it poured, forcing us all inside. After the ceremony, as we drove in the deluge to a celebration, we crashed into the car in front of us.

And on our honeymoon in Italy, we drove through Tuscany and again had another rear-ender. More portents, I was sure.

But our marriage wasn’t filled with disasters, and there were breaks in the clouds that evinced Mark’s unwavering endurance and depth. Shortly after the wedding, with no heartbeat in one pregnancy, Mark held me when I cried. With the welcome sound of a heartbeat in another pregnancy, he cried.

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When I was flattened by postpartum depression and had a terrifying health misdiagnosis, Mark was there with me; his aligned presence was like a pillar holding me upright. Love became more and more about the choice to stay, bolstered by Mark’s unwavering endurance and depth, and less dependent on words.

Mark’s dad, meanwhile, was at the births of our children. He brought saltines and Gatorade when we had the stomach flu, and he helped us install a washer on a weekend. At Sunday dinners, he spoke of loyalty, tearing up about his devoted son who visited him in prison. I loved Wes.

Thirteen years had passed since my first date with Mark, and that’s when that initial red flag reared its ugly head. Over a verbal disagreement about investments, Wes punched Mark, and Mark left their business, never to speak to his dad again. Not long after, Wes took money from an innocent victim.

We found ourselves in financial trouble untangling Wes’ debts. I’d taken 10 years away from my work to raise our kids, but I begged my way back into the district attorney’s office. When everything is stripped away, you see who someone is. I saw how Mark was a survivor. This was an impulse I knew from my parents.

Mark scraped together our savings and bought a new business. In the first weeks at my new position in the county courtroom, I saw Wes’ name on my calendar; he’d been arrested. Humiliatingly, I had to tell my new boss I couldn’t appear on the case.

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As I look back on our 25 years of marriage, I see a relationship filled with warnings but profoundly offset by Mark’s highest value: loyalty. I had seen Mark’s fierce devotion to family, that he could make hard decisions like keeping his name and that he was resilient.

I used to think you could figure out compatibility from a distance and foresee how things would turn out like I look at a criminal history to judge whether someone will reoffend. But people surprise you. Why a relationship works is a mystery.

And the two car accidents? They did turn out to be omens. Mark now owns a driving school.

The author wrote a memoir, “Misjudged,” about the unlikely friendship she forged with a former gang member she prosecuted who was sentenced to life in prison. She’s on Instagram: @karenmckinneywriter

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

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San Vicente Bungalows Is Coming to NYC’s West Village

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San Vicente Bungalows Is Coming to NYC’s West Village

There was no image of Lady Gaga at 3 a.m., hanging near the wall with various members of Arcade Fire and Eddie Vedder. No images of Kevin Costner, single and ready to mingle by the bar. No images of Cher and Lauryn Hill over at the banquettes of the softly lit dining room. The owners of San Vicente West Village had made sure that no paparazzi could be found inside last Friday, despite the fact that some of the biggest names in music and Hollywood had come for a party after the Saturday Night Live 50th-anniversary concert at Radio City Music Hall.

Had any of those images been beamed across the internet, it might have built a sense that the first event at SVB, which officially opens in March, was a rager for the ages.

Perhaps that is the point: You had to be there.

Among New Yorkers who flock to power and crave exclusivity, the upcoming opening of Los Angeles’s best private club is being greeted with a sense of urgency that is second only to the future of democracy.

“Everyone in fashion has been talking about this club, whether to join, how to get on the list,” said Kendall Werts, a founder of the Jeffries, an agency at the intersection of branding and celebrity.

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San Vicente West Village is the brainchild of Jeff Klein, a businessman with a long track record in hospitality, who opened San Vicente Bungalows Los Angeles in 2018.

In the 1990s, Mr. Klein bet that hotels would be to that decade what nightclubs had been to the 1980s.

In 2004, Mr. Klein spent $18 million to buy the dilapidated Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles. It went on to become the town’s premier canteen for moguls and movie stars (think: Jennifer Aniston, Jeff Bezos, George Clooney) and, for several years, it was the site of Vanity Fair’s famous Oscars party.

Mr. Klein also teamed up with the magazine’s former editor, Graydon Carter, on the Monkey Bar, a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan.

But the real follow-up to the Sunset Tower was the San Vicente Bungalows, a members-only club that changed how celebrities could socialize.

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A cynic might say the idea was to create a safe space for the town’s best-known and best-connected people, one where they could gawk at and hit on one another without having those moments memorialized in a bad iPhone picture taken by a tourist. (The club requires all guests to cover their phone cameras with stickers for the duration of their stay.) The challenges associated with navigating Los Angeles’s sprawl also worked in the club’s favor. With fewer ways to run into people, they settled into picking one.

Dues ran around $4,000, not including initiation fees that ranged from $3,000 to $15,000, depending on age. Among those who joined were Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Tom Ford.

“When I’m in L.A., if I’m not eating at home, I’m at San Vicente. Before that, I was at Tower Bar,” Mr. Ford said by phone last week. “It’s like I’m at home. They know my favorite table and what I like. My Coca-Cola arrives before I ask for it. You feel Jeff’s presence in every way.”

After the coronavirus pandemic, an idea began to gnaw at Mr. Klein: Might he be able to bottle the magic in Los Angeles and bring it back to the city he’d left behind?

In short order, he decided to test his luck at the Jane Hotel, a red brick West Village landmark along the West Side Highway.

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The blowback and intrigue from New Yorkers began as soon as the first invitations to join were extended. A select group of current members were instructed to invite their friends or people who they thought should be members. In emails, those new insiders were given the rare opportunity to join without the formal review process that most members were subjected to. The membership is being vetted by Gabe Doppelt, a British magazine editor who cut her teeth as the assistant to Anna Wintour and Tina Brown. After going on to be the editor of Mademoiselle, she oversaw Hollywood coverage at W magazine and The Daily Beast.

People who did not get invites were angry about not being invited. People who did get invites were angry about the fees, especially the older ones and some of the most creative ones who were not high-net-worth individuals. Prospective invitees were asked to upload their drivers licenses so that their age-adjusted fees could be determined. No one liked that.

It so happens that San Vicente’s annual fees are in the same ballpark as those of other New York City private social clubs, such as Casa Cipriani and Chez Margaux. They’re considerably cheaper than the Core Club’s.

A fair amount of debate began about whether the city had enough juice left to create a lasting clubhouse full of people who were both creative enough and financially solvent enough to pay for membership. Power in New York City is often cultural as much as it is capital.

“Does real fabulousness even take place in public anymore? Isn’t it behind closed doors in other people’s homes?” said Jon Reinish, a well-connected political consultant who received an invitation to the club last month and had not yet joined. “I just don’t know that it exists in Manhattan anymore the way it did during the days of Michael’s the Grill Room and Mortimer’s, and it’s very hard to reverse-engineer it any kind of lasting way.”

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But for every person sniping, another was joining. Also helping ensure success: Mr. Klein’s unique popularity, according to Kevin Huvane, who, as the co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency, helps guide the careers of many San Vicente regulars, among them Ms. Aniston, Demi Moore and Jennifer Lopez. “People underestimate good will,” he said, before going on to liken Mr. Klein to Joe Allen, the impresario whose restaurants in the theater district established him as a king of Broadway.

The night after the star-studded S.N.L. party, Mr. Werts of the Jeffries was among roughly a thousand people who attended a hard-hat party celebrating the club’s upcoming opening.

Others in the crowd included the power literary agent David Kuhn, the television mogul Darren Starr, the actress Zooey Deschanel and the political pundit Molly Jong-Fast.

A magazine editor who earlier in the week had complained to me about having wasted several thousand dollars to join (largely because of FOMO) was now grousing about the long line for the coat check.

Even Mr. Klein appeared a little embarrassed by the size of the crowd. A few feet away, he talked to Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of Woody Allen.

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“It’s a good thing Woody didn’t come,” Mr. Klein said. “It’s too crowded.”

Officially, Mr. Klein was not participating with this piece. Last December, he gave an interview to The New York Times in connection with the opening of a San Vicente outpost in Santa Monica, Calif. After its publication, Jay-Z asked him why on earth he’d cooperated with it. After all, a central promise of the club is privacy for its members. (Some have been suspended for uploading pictures to Instagram.)

And Mr. Klein had to concede that Jay-Z had a point.

Still, he also knew that in a town of journalists, nothing about the weekend was going to be totally off the record. And with opening costs in the $130 million range, he was not going to be able to make that back without some press. (“Oof, that’s a lot of money,” said Mr. Huvane, when told the number.)

So Mr. Klein did not exactly shoo me away as he greeted Risa Heller, a crisis manager whose clients have included Jeff Zucker and Anthony Weiner.

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Waiters marched around the space serving crispy shrimp satays and cappuccino-flavored macaroons.

Ms. Jong-Fast and Ms. Deschanel went upstairs to see the movie theater, then checked out a few of the guest suites, where the hardwood floors had an amber hue and the bed linens were airy and white.

“This would be a great place to cheat on your spouse,” said Ms. Jong-Fast, stopping for a minute to admire a pumpkin-colored sofa with a Hudson County vibe. “Although maybe that’s more Casa Cipriani.”

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