Good morning, everyone.
Derek C. Blasberg invited me to a screening of Ron Howard’s new documentary, Avedon, at The Paris Theater. I first heard the name Richard Avedon in my FIT dorm room freshman year. My roommate, a photographer named Sophia, interned at the Richard Avedon Foundation, and I have a fuzzy memory of visiting her once in the chilly building. (She now runs a very special restaurant in London called Polentina.)
In one of the first scenes of the film, the legendary photographer’s shooting style is compared to the instinct of a hunter. Larry Gagosian talks about Avedon’s intentionality, saying he once had a luxurious brunch of simply hard-boiled eggs and champagne. Another scene shows Tina Brown assembling issues of The New Yorker, where she hired Avedon as a photographer. This morning, I read this 1999 WWD interview with Brown where she likens herself to Avedon. “He always feels it’s his last good picture and that he’ll just be yesterday’s lunch,” she says. “I know that Calvin Klein is like that too. Every great actor is like that. I admire that and identify with it.”
My dinner was a very glamorous handful of peanut M&M’s in the theater, and some tiny tuna tartare cones passed out at the afterparty on the shoe floor of Bergdorf Goodman. My friend Gaby described being in the department store after-hours as a very Night at the Museum experience. It was the first time I noticed how comfortable the couches and chairs were in that area, which probably results in a much better Manolo shopping experience. In the car home, I kept thinking about the scenes of Tina assembling her magazine on a storyboard, and Richard spending time in studios full of people who he ideated with, and how small so many of our splashy new media projects are with teams of one or four or ten.
Today’s newsletter includes: The agency that represents Leandra Medine Cohen and Casey Lewis (and me) has been acquired, Vox is now selling ads for the top politics Substack, there’s a mini-boom in magazine shops, men who wear $9,000 leather jackets probably think about cheating on their wives, The Gentlewoman’s editor of 17 years is leaving her role (and looking for a replacement), New York Magazine’s “Shows” department, Kendall Jenner and Jacob Elordi explore Nassau County, and I desperately need to get a drink with the Park Slope mom seeking a single yellow American Spirit cigarette.
