A.G. Becker is where Moss met Friedberg, who was one of the firm’s senior executives. After living together for three years, they married in 1985, and by that point, Moss had extricated herself from the banking business. The previous year, when the firm was bought by Merrill Lynch, she strategized her exit, writing a business plan and spending her bonus on an antiques buying trip to England. Although she had no formal training in interior design, Moss had read every book on Billy Baldwin and David Hicks that she could get a hold of. She also had connections: Among her first clients were Susan and Michael Bloomberg, who hired her to redo the bedrooms of their daughters, Emma and Georgina. “I had the luck of timing,” says Moss. “The country was booming economically, and the English style was on fire.”
It was also a time when decorating was a newly voguish profession for society wives, and she still gets huffy thinking about the people who labeled her “some investment banker’s wife who quit her ‘real’ job.” Says Moss, “You know, I can’t tell you how many people think that if you’re a blond decorator on the Upper East Side, your IQ is less than average and you just make pretty pillows and curtains. I still have people say things to me like, ‘Does your business make money?’ That’s ignorance.”
These days anyone who knows Moss well is aware that she’s not only smart as a whip, but also dead serious about her bottom line. “She has the business shrewdness of a Wall Street person but has managed to preserve the perfect manners of a Southern belle,” says antiques dealer Louis Bofferding. “This has opened every door.”
That’s not to say that there haven’t been a few hiccups along the way. In 2001 she and David Easton, another of New York’s most highly sought-after society decorators, merged their businesses, an unusual move for a pair of big names. The partnership lasted only two years and, insiders say, ended acrimoniously. “We just had different philosophies,” Moss says today.
Rucci, a close friend of Moss’s, describes her as “enormously warm and kind, with an unerring eye.” Nevertheless, he notes, “she doesn’t want to waste any time” with anyone who has crossed her. “She does not make a scene or fly off the handle. She conducts herself like a lady.” But once Moss writes you off, he says, “you’re out.”
“I am strong-willed,” Moss admits. For instance, when it comes to her design clients, she says, “I am not a waffler. I am decisive. And I believe I have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure somebody isn’t throwing money away.” And if a client persists in pushing a bad idea, says Moss, she’s not afraid to walk away. “There are some marriages that work, and others that don’t,” she says. “In my view, sayonara.”
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