Lunching and gossiping with a legend
Lunch was served on the tennis courts.
A pre-reception, simmering to a comfortable boil, had led us to a spectacularly soaring, impeccably pleated, stark-white tent erected — abracadabra — in the rear of the original Rogers family roost in Forest Hill. D-Day! The NE plus ultra Diane von Furstenberg, that is, slinking into Toronto last week, to be feted at what will go down, no doubt, as the year’s ultimate society nooner.
Drifts of conversation came as we mustered, chatted, digested: Prince Philip’s impending retirement from royal duties, day-drinking strategies, hashtag etiquette, Jessica Lange’s mesmerizing recent turn as Joan Crawford on TV’s Feud, the latest in the Meghan Markle-verse, that new Moroccan restaurant on Dupont, the French elections, the Jays.
Socialites with a distinct case of deja phew.
A quorum of do-gooders. A man in a turban. Lady Black. The gang was all out!
Peonies, ranunculus and hydrangeas: the floral playlist. The overall hue in the room, as crafted by event architect Jeff Roick: pinker-than-pink, like we’d been dunked in a vat of rosé. The settings, right down to the gold-trimmed cutlery: deserving of an A.
At table one, where the guest of honour was being her typically many-lives-lived self, DVF — as she’s often known — was making a driveby-mention about the fling she’d enjoyed with Richard Gere, right before his American Gigolo phase. Noted! A few seats away, André Leon Talley — a fashion landmark in his own right and all-around swami, who had accompanied the designer north of the border to grill her in a conversation planned post-lunch — was still dining out on morsels from the annual Met Gala, held only a few nights prior. There, in his usual arrivals videos for Vogue, Talley had had a chance to engage American royalty Caroline Kennedy, making the Met scene with her all-grownup son Jack (a dead-ringer for John F. Kennedy Jr., many approvingly murmured).
When I briefly intersected with Talley, meanwhile, I inquired about the sofa that he now owns that once graced Truman Capote’s legendary apartment in New York City and that Talley bought at auction. “It’s doing fabulous!” he confirmed.
Fabulosity, alas, begets fabulosity at shindigs such as this, but the apex of this sit-down for 164 possibly happened when the inexhaustible Suzanne Rogers — the town’s reigning hostess — got all too real during her time at the podium.
Welcoming guests to the latest in a series of fashion-tinged charity events she’s been doing ever since she brought the now-expired Oscar de la Renta to Toronto in 2010, Rogers — known for her up-to-thesecond looks from the runways of Milan and Paris — admitted that she, a child of struggling Hungarian immigrants, couldn’t afford a prom dress.
“I wore Goodwill clothes until I was 16 years old,” the woman now known as the wife of Ed Rogers went on, relaying the story of her father, who died in a mine, “trying to make a better life for his family,” when Suzanne was still quite young. It’s why, she said, in a near-Jackie O whisper, “I must give back.”
The beneficiaries of the afternoon’s charity aggregate, by the way? Both War Child and Covenant House. On to the onstage convo! Naturally, it didn’t take much to get DVF raring. The husky-voiced, Belgium-reared daughter of a Holo- caust survivor mother, who had gone on to marry a European prince, defined both the jet set and New York, launched a fashion line that landed her on the cover of Newsweek at all of 29, and invented a clothing item — the waist-tied, curves-enhancing wrap dress — that many put with the likes of the Eames chair as far as icons of 20thcentury style go.
Catlike as ever at 70 — feline is the word that comes to mind — she scooted around much of the material she covers in her recent memoir, The Woman I Wanted to Be. Some pearls. Some highs. Some lows. Some bon mots.
DVF: “I was making 25,000 dresses a week (in the mid-’70s). That’s 50,000 sleeves.”
DVF: “There are cockroaches at the Carlyle, too.”
DVF: “Andy Warhol (a friend) was doing social media before there was doing social media, and doing reality television before there was reality television.”
The energy in the room shifted perceptibly when Talley and DVF switched gears and started talking about the era of Studio 54, both of them having been at the legendary disco the night it opened. “It was the biggest pickup joint you’ve ever been to,” DVF added drolly on the subject.
Tales of Bianca Jagger and Halston followed, as did a name-check by Talley of our own Margaret Trudeau, who was a Studio 54 regular. Talley, however, mistakenly referred to her as the “late Margaret Trudeau,” which caused a ripple in the room. Justin’s mother, of course, lives on.
Veering to the subject of DVF’s “third act” — which includes her recently created role as “godmother” of the Statue of Liberty, as she and her husband, mogul Barry Diller, go about raising $100 million for the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation — the icon offered her most mesmerizing message to bookmark and take home.
“Everybody’s interesting,” she said. “Everybody’s life is a novel, if you pay attention.”