At some point between the opening of Balthazar and the closing of Moomba—events that bookended the Puff Daddy–and–dot-com froth of fin de siècle New York—I found myself between parties with an old social pro. “One day,” he said, “you’ll look back and say, ‘I was in New York during the boom-boom nineties.’ ”
Right he was. From 1996 to 2000, I was reporting for W’s Eye desk and Women’s Wear Daily, covering New York’s young flash-and-cash heiresses: Crown Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece (the decade’s best money-meets-title match), Lulu de Kwiatkowski (who once dressed for a costume party as 99 pounds of cocaine, because that’s how much she weighed), Rena Sindi (who reinvented the at-home theme party), and Marjorie Gubelmann (who, after one gala at the New York City Ballet, joined the boys for a gay bar crawl through Alphabet City dressed in her ball gown and emeralds).
Tory Burch led a somewhat more reserved social squad—Southampton types to the others’ Saint-Tropez—that included Gigi Mortimer, Marina Rust, Jennifer Creel, Aerin and Jane Lauder, and Serena and Samantha Boardman. At that point, Burch was simply a nice girl from a nice part of Philadelphia who had worked in fashion public relations before marrying the banker Chris Burch. To be honest, she was somewhat overshadowed by the glitzier young women who were born higher up the socioeconomic food chain; looking back, Burch describes herself as a “bystander” to the era. “I grew up in Pennsylvania, so New York was very different for me,” recalls the 46-year-old designer. “It seemed like a new generation of artists and designers was emerging. I was young, and it was fun.”
Both sets of Team Nineties loved to be in the press, even as they professed to hate the word “socialite.” Instead, these girls declared, they wanted to work. The Lauders took actual jobs in the family company, and others in their peer group started businesses, since well-funded entrepreneurialism offered the status of work without the rigid 9-to-5 grind. De Kwiatkowski went into fabrics; Marie-Chantal created a children’s clothing line; and Gubelmann distilled the essence of high-end merchandising into the name of her candle company, Vie Luxe. Perhaps the society entrepreneurs also wanted to capitalize on the decade’s fast-company-startup ethos. Money was loose in the age of Gucci, logos, and bling, and the papers were filled with news of Bernard Arnault and François Pinault spending furiously to build their respective luxury-goods empires. At the height of the frenzy, in December 2000, LVMH acquired Donna Karan in a deal valued at $645 million. What ambitious young socialite, already steeped in the lingo and lifestyle of luxury, wouldn’t have wanted to have her brand similarly snapped up?
