Elsie de wolfe biography of michael jackson
•
Archives Directory champion the Scenery of Grouping in America
Photograph Collections
Photograph Collections
Photograph Collections
10 East 71st Street
Victor Construction, Suite
Albert suggest Shirley Little Special Collections Library
Victor Building, Set
10 Puff up 71st Street
Victor Building, Following
Manuscript, Archives, humbling Rare Unqualified Library
•
Wearstler, who likes her rooms “edgy,” in her raph by Jeff Minton
Kelly Wearstler, the presiding grande dame of West Coast interior design, is a celebrity decorator, in that she herself is a celebrity. She is forty-two, petite and beautiful, with lynxlike green eyes and long chestnut-colored hair, and an outré fashion sense that accommodates the wearing of crinolines, beehive hairdos, and fingerless gloves. To a party that Wearstler (pronounced “Worst-ler”) co-hosted at Chateau Marmont in June, she wore a vintage dress with sea-green polka dots, backward. Her movements are chronicled exhaustively on real-estate and fashion blogs, where she is known as the “hair crimping queen,” “kooky Los Angeles interior designer extraordinaire,” or, simply, “the Wearst.” In and , she served as a judge on “Top Design,” a reality show on Bravo (tagline: “See ya later, decorator”); most people, including her fellow-judge Jonathan Adler, say they watched just for Wearstler’s getups. After an episode in the second season when she appeared, like a California Raisin, in a thigh-grazing purple ruffled dress and a green silk turban, with purple ankle socks and green pumps, one of the authors of the fashion-watchdog blog Go Fug Yourself posted, “I kept expecting her to grab someone’s palm and be
•
Sure, you can pick a Kelly Wearstler–designed room out of a decorating lineup and could tell your friends if Estee Stanley, Miles Redd, or Mary McDonald would be their dream designer. But do you know the people who inspired them? These seven interiors icons are the most influential masters of the 20th century—the true founders of the profession today—and they’re the names every lover of design should know.
Elsie de Wolfe
Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, SeptemberElsie de Wolfe
Known as “America’s first decorator,” De Wolfe boasted a lifestyle as glamorous as her decor. Born in New York City in , her history reads not just as one wild romance and adventure novel, but several different ones. In her youth, she was educated in Scotland and was presented at court to Queen Victoria, but soon after returned to the U.S. and became a professional actress. By around she shared a “Boston marriage” (a term for two single women living together, attributed to Henry James’s The Bostonians) with successful literary agent Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury. And later in life, she even gained the title of Lady when she married British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl, at the age of
But early on in De Wolfe’s life, it was her onstage style and wardrobe—couture ensembles from Paris—that ca