Town & Country February 2022

Why is there now always a line to get into Bemelmans? Why can’t you get a reservation at Musso & Frank? Why are they bringing Six Feet Under back to life? After two years of feeling stuck in time, it seems the only way we know how to start again is with the familiar. Nostalgia, as you’ll read in a brilliant portfolio of essays—edited by Danielle Stein Chizzik and Erik Maza and Adam Rathe, and designed by Kristin Fitzpatrick—is the new cool. Looking back, as those essays point out, is sometimes the only way forward, but is nostalgia the enemy of the new? This issue asks that question—and provides an antidote, with introductions to superstar talents like cover star Julia Garner, whom you may recognize from Ozark but who you will…

WHAT’S VERY T&C? The history: It’s a question that comes up often enough after the second martini: What would you do if you could do anything? Move to Italy? Go back to school? Take up goldsmithing (see page 38)? For Deborah Needleman, the answer was basketweaving. The former editor wove this cachepot after watching a documentary from the 1970s on traditional Irish crafts, and then committing herself to the nearly lost practice of rush-weaving. The fans: Every well-appointed home in the world has a basket or two. Bunny Mellon devoted a whole room to them. The news: Founded by the late Southern writer Julia Reed and Keith Smythe Meacham, home decor site Reed Smythe & Company opened its brick-and-mortar in Nashville last year, and this spring it is the first to carry Needleman’s…

100 YEARS OF SCIONTOLOGY / POOR LITTLE RICH GIRLS, QUEEN BEES & INFLUENCERS / INHERITANCE? THAT’S HOT When model and artist Ivy Getty got married in November, it did not go unnoticed. The ceremony was widely covered, and a not-so-friendly internet parsed the optics of having as her offciant Nancy Pelosi, the good fortune of her sweater-wearing rescue dog, and her bridal gown, which, designed from a shattered mirror by John Galliano for Maison Margiela, looked as if it could bring at least seven years of bad luck. Also noted: her surname. As the scion of one of the most important oil families from America’s robber baron past, Getty is a throwback to an era of loopy, over-the-top, fashion-embracing heiresses. The public’s obsession with the Nancy Cunards and Gloria Vanderbilts of the…

BOARDING SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL / RENOVATING DAISY BUCHANAN / NO SPAIN, NO GAIN SO WHAT’S NEW? “She’s a firecracker,” Joaquina Kalukango says of Nelly O’Brien, the character she plays in “She’s Paradise Square, a new Civil War–era musical bowing on Broadway this month. “She’s able to see people’s true hearts.” Nelly is a free Black woman and New York City bar owner who presides over the collision of Black and Irish-American cultures—and the birth of tap dance—in the notorious lower Manhattan neighborhood that was then known as the Five Points. “This is a story about people who manage to overcome their differences and create something beautiful in the face of fear and danger,” Kalukango says. If Nelly has a magnetism that draws people into her orbit, so does Kalukango. The 32-year-old has appeared on screens…

SO WHAT’S NEW? Just the mention of F. Scott Fitzgerald conjures images of Jazz Age romps through the French Riviera, Long Island’s Gold Coast, or Roaring ’20s Manhattan. Yet it was Lake Forest, Illinois, a suburb just north of Chicago, that the writer considered the most glamorous place in the world. It was one girl who made the town wondrous for him. Ginevra King, the eldest daughter of stockbroker Charles Garfield King, was the It girl of Lake Forest. Known for her dark, curly hair and deep voice, Ginevra was part of a group of debutantes called the “Big Four” that included the golfer Edith Cummings, one of America’s first superstar female athletes. Ginevra was definitely out of Fitzgerald’s league. The pair had a short relationship, meeting first at a party in Fitzgerald’s…

SO WHAT’S NEW? At this point we all know what to fear. A weekend at a country manor? Regrets! A trip aboard the Orient Express? We’ll fly. So how did The Afterparty, a new eight-part series airing now on Apple TV+, find a fresh approach to the classic murder mystery? To begin with, it didn’t. The series—like genre greats Clue or The Last of Sheila—focuses on a murder and its aftermath, all of which take place in one location. In this case it’s the mansion of pop star Xavier (Dave Franco), where a group gathers for post–high school reunion frivolity before their host is offed. Each of the guests (a rogues gallery of possible killers played by Sam Richardson, Ilana Glazer, and Genevieve Angelson, among others) has a motive, and they’re all…