They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (30 page)

The huge facade of the David Koch Theater was used by David Michalek in his video presentation titled “Portraits in Dramatic Time.”
© Nan Melville

“Meet me at the fountain” acquires a new luster.
© Nan Melville

The President’s Bridge.
© Joshua Bright

So, what was there not to like?

Just ask the Peters. Levy and Gelb.

Peter Levy was the relentless and shortsighted manager of Fashion Week for IMG, a high-powered firm representing important clients in sports, fashion, and media. Straight out of the Pulitzer Prize–winning David Mamet play
Glengarry Glen Ross
, Levy didn’t bargain or negotiate. He haggled over everything, even after a clear and quite detailed contract was signed, sealed, and fully acceptable to both parties.

Listening to his Cassandra-like cries, you would think the fashion business was disappearing at any moment, and with it, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week as an enterprise. Listening to him, you’d think that Lincoln Center had not negotiated a rental agreement with IMG at all, but rather that we were some kind of foundation, with IMG its largest grantee!

One of the most energetic and forceful advocates of Lincoln Center as a new home for Fashion Week was the first deputy mayor of the Bloomberg administration, Patti Harris. Apparently the city, together with IMG, had scoured Manhattan for alternative sites to Bryant Park, and Lincoln Center was deemed to be the best.

But in our meetings, I could sense tension and unhappiness everywhere. Between the Parks Department and IMG. Between the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), chaired by Diane von Furstenberg, the outfit that represented the interests of designers, and IMG.

To develop a better sense of what designers really felt about the impending move to Lincoln Center, I met individually with Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Leonard Lauder, and Jason Wu, among others. In marked contrast to the dour Peter Levy, each evinced excitement and enthusiasm for the change in locale, the manifest advantages it brought, and the power of the Lincoln Center brand, one fully compatible with fashion.

If fashion has a reigning priestess, surely it is Anna Wintour. I was somewhat uneasy about meeting her, but David Remnick, the editor of the
New Yorker
and a fellow Condé Nast employee, encouraged me to do so. “Fundamentally, Reynold, Anna is smart, she knows everyone in fashion. Don’t confuse her shyness with unapproachability. If you are genuine in seeking advice, you cannot repair to a better source.”

We met for breakfast in a private space in Condé Nast’s dining room on a hot August morning. Naturally, I paid more than the usual attention to what I was wearing. A neatly pressed and well-fitting, though quite inexpensive, cotton Haspel navy suit, a powder blue shirt, and a very light green silk tie with speckled yellow on it. Anna’s first words were memorable, and I have quoted them ever since. “Good morning, Reynold. It’s a pleasure to meet you. By the way, that color combination is not half bad.”

Now, that’s a compliment to take home. Anna Wintour liked what I was wearing!

Wintour provided a tutorial on the history of Fashion Week in New York City. What she liked was that it provided a center of energy, a fixed point around which many other shows of all kinds and all sizes inappropriate for the IMG tents could be spread throughout New York City. In European capitals, there was no such center of gravity. Fashion shows are highly decentralized. Publishers, bloggers, and buyers had to hustle from place to place all around a given city. Just getting to them through the traffic-clogged streets of London, Paris, and Milan was exhausting. Being so spread out is hardly conducive to community or to relaxed conversation between shows.

She also held forth on Bryant Park’s severe limitations as a site. No stately entrance. No easy place for black car pickup and drop-off. No orderly lines for entry and exit before and after shows. No place for attendees to conveniently dine or hang out while they waited for their first, second, or third show of the day. An inadequate number of poorly maintained bathroom facilities. Too small a footprint to accommodate designer needs, spanning from the world renowned to the new and the promising.

Lincoln Center would represent an improvement in every one of these dimensions. It also held out hope to accomplish something entirely new—namely, to capture the excitement and allure of these
shows for the trade by finding ways to invite the public to participate as well.

The deficiencies of the current arrangement were not simply physical. The former executive director of CFDA and the creative director of Fashion Week for IMG, Fern Mallis, was soon to depart the firm. That left Peter Levy, who was widely viewed as a guy too focused on costs and lacking an appreciation for value to be the key figure to relate to designers. Many of them were eager to collaborate with someone from IMG or elsewhere in crafting their shows. Levy could not be that someone.

He employed a technically proficient staff for building sets and for scheduling cheek by jowl eleven- to fifteen-minute shows with amazingly short load-in and load-out intervals. They also handled the some one hundred thousand people who attend one or another event in a compressed eight consecutive days with relative ease. By nature, Levy himself seemed quite shy and more than a little intimidated by the creative side of the fashion business. His BlackBerry was his escape mechanism. He stared at it or placed phone calls while the VIPs of the industry walked right by him.

So Anna asked me directly: Who will be Lincoln Center’s ambassador to the design community? Who will listen to the needs of insecure new designers and ambitious designers of prominence and help them organize their shows, presentations, and parties at Lincoln Center? And who might help Wintour herself plan a huge fashion show right on Josie Robertson Plaza that would be nationally broadcast and would help launch what would become a countrywide post–Labor Day shopping experience called Fashion’s Night Out?

I was having a lot of fun regaling female trustees like Ann Ziff, Anna Nikolayevsky, and Katherine Farley of Lincoln Center with lines like, “Did you know that Dennis Basso was no longer working so much with fur?” “Have you caught up with Francisco Costa’s new line (it is fabulous)?” “Do you plan on seeing Jason Wu’s show at the St. Regis (the buzz is that it will be sensational)?” “Aren’t Oscar De La Renta and Carolina Herrera unbelievably inventive? What a track record of consistently beautiful and alluring clothing.” “If you check out the latest from Rag and Bone, Theory, Rick Owens, and Prabal Gurung, you won’t be sorry.”

But truth to tell, my knowledge of fashion ran, as Dorothy Parker would have put it, from A to B. And besides, I had no time to be
that fashion ambassador. Done properly, it was more than a full-time post.

By now, Anna Wintour’s reputation was as outsized as the September issue of
Vogue
, so laden with advertisements that the Equinox Sports Club could package two or three issues, tie them together, and use them for weight training. The documentary
The September Issue
had just been released to movie theaters, to excellent notices. And only two years before, Meryl Streep had played an Anna-like character with style and aplomb in
The Devil Wears Prada
. Anne Hathaway portrayed her harried, omnicompetent assistant, and Hathaway’s career had flourished ever since.

Wintour’s recommendation to assume that role of ambassador was a case of life imitating art. Her name was Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, and she was as close as one can come to the Hathaway character in real life. Having worked for Wintour for the better part of a decade, the strikingly beautiful, six foot one, former Fordham University basketball standout was credited with executing the annual event dreamed up by Wintour: the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute gala.

The highlight of the New York social season, no event matches it for glamour, glitterati, and paparazzi. Many a marquee movie and television star and others from the worlds of journalism, sports, theater, opera, and of course fashion, gather together to enjoy each other’s company. It sets the standard for fund-raising in high fashion, not only in New York City but around the world.

Apparently Wolkoff also handled many other special events for Anna and did so with poise, polish, and painstaking attention to detail. After a couple of meetings between us, she was retained as Lincoln Center’s director of fashion, and she took our place by storm. Suddenly, spaces that had never before been utilized for fashion shows, or presentations, or parties were transformed into perfect venues. Such results required verbal dexterity, problem solving, creativity, inexhaustible energy, and not a little forceful charm. When one of our senior staff members was caught having committed some seating errors at an event Wolkoff was planning, she became so angry that he expressed concern about the possibility of being subjected to “death by stiletto.”

Tommy Hilfiger held his twenty-fifth anniversary celebration at the Metropolitan Opera House. Avery Fisher Hall and the David H. Koch
Theater became venues for Lagerfeld and Valentino as successive award winners of the Fashion Institute of Technology’s annual prize for career achievement. Fashion shows sprang up outdoors in Hearst Plaza and around the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace; in the new restaurant, Lincoln; at a white box space in the Library for the Performing Arts; in various locales of Alice Tully Hall; and in the Kaplan Penthouse. The CFDA Fashion Awards; photo shoots by
GQ
and Michael Kors; presentations by
Harper’s Bazaar
, Rachel Roy, and Derek Lam; a book party for Eleanor Lambert; a blogger conference by Decoded Fashion; and a Barbie’s Dream Closet installation in the David Rubenstein Atrium numbered among dozens more such attractions.

Serving as the intermediary between high-strung, ego-laden designers unaccustomed to new spaces and uptight facility managers at Lincoln Center, who were far more comfortable with concert artists than with famous models (and their handlers), wasn’t easy. When Wintour chose the word
ambassador
, I soon learned that she meant that the height of diplomacy would be required. In recommending Wolkoff, she knew who would best fit that bill.

Wolkoff was part of the Harry Winston jeweler family, a mother of three, and married to a very accomplished and successful real estate developer. In terms of status and net wealth, she was more like a trustee than a staffer. Her employees took their vacations at home. She took hers at exotic destinations. But for her own impeccable sense of style in clothing and accoutrements (over some two years, I do not recall ever seeing her wear the same item of clothing more than once), you would never know her economic status. She was as hardworking and unspoiled as anyone employed by Lincoln Center.

Eventually, the incessant feuding with IMG and the reality of Lincoln Center as first and foremost a performing arts institution wore her down. I could intervene on her behalf and ask staff to bend and flex to accommodate the whims of fashion designers not known for advance planning, by which I mean next week or even day after next. But I could not insist that staff treat fashion designer needs as the be-all and end-all of their working days while neglecting other key responsibilities. After a couple of years, Stephanie took her leave of Lincoln Center, but not before she had successfully identified the world’s strongest brand in the performing arts with fashion. No small accomplishment.

When Lincoln Center took the high road and engaged designers in genuine dialogue, it was they who demanded to use our ancillary spaces. No corporate suit from IMG could cite any obscure provision in a legal agreement to get in the way. Peter Levy attempted to use an embargo clause in our contract, which would have prohibited any fashion event in Lincoln Center public spaces or private facilities ninety days before a February or September Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. It was effectively neutralized. Ultimately, the success of IMG ownership of Fashion Week depends on the cooperation of talented designers, famous models, and influential publishers. By cultivating them directly, Lincoln Center largely checkmated Peter Levy.