The Man of Design Renaissance Rediscovered
“When a Banana Republic catalog starts to look like the trendy, vacuous pages of Wallpaper, and Club Monaco is indistinguishable from Prada,” “you know it’s time for high style to move on.” — Amy Spindler, Director of Style, The New York Times Magazine, 1999
Tony Duquette, the brilliant and eccentric California designer of interiors, stage sets and jewelry, this season is rediscovered as the inspiration in Wednesday unveiled New York Fifth Avenue luxurious Christmas windows at Bergdoff Goodman retailer and his vision rendered in scenarios that are part Elsie de Wolfe and part Brothers Grimm. With the arrival next month of “Tony Duquette” , a hefty lavish monograph on the late designer, the style world may be getting a kind of gilt-edged Post-it note, an overdue reminder to a market dominated by monotonous status goods that nothing is quite so luxurious as an individual eye.“There is way too much out there that feels corporately and central-office driven,” said Linda Fargo, the fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman. “Tony always said he was about beauty and not luxury, if you’re going to define luxury by cost,” Ms. Fargo said.
Enthusiastic about raiding the storehouses of the past for his projects, Duquette was also audacious in his use of shoestring effects to set off important antiques. “He was Rumpelstiltskin spinning gold from straw,” said Ms. Fargo, echoing Tom Ford’s observation that only Mr. Duquette could see a piece of junk and imagine a pagoda.
“Duquette’s work was either haute Bohemian or Bohemian masquerading as haute,” Mr. Bofferding said. “You did not necessarily want to see in by the light of day.” Still, he added: “the vision was informed and full of historical reference. And he looked at things as an artist does,” with an emphasis on color and texture and aesthetics instead of price tags.
“When I interviewed Dominick Dunne,” Ms. Goodman said, “he said, ‘Tony always made me gasp.’” Imagine, as Mr. Dunne remarks in the new book, going to dinner at Duquette’s studio in white tie and finding Garbo and Diana Vreeland and the actor Gardner McKay with his pet cheetah on a leash.Imagine curtains parting to reveal the stage on which Duquette’s dinner parties were mounted and there is a Balinese gamelan orchestra at his house that he and his wife called Dawnridge “Stars now save it for the red carpet and the cameras,” Ms. Goodman said, paraphrasing Mr. Dunne. “They don’t do it at home.
People visiting Dawnridge would tell Duquette, “This house is nice, but I couldn’t live here myself.” To which Tony would reply, “Well I didn’t build it for you to live here.”
This season then, you might reconsider what you have always wanted to wear, and how you wanted to live but you were afraid to ask…
Don’t worry, Tony Duquette presence is brilliantly back as a holiday gift, and has the answers you need in the new book. Check it out and dare!
This post is dedicated to designers Michele Safra and my good friend Joao Mansur that together are enjoying creating with their charming clients some of the greatest homes in the city of New York.
…May Tony Duquette immortal essence be the source of their inspiration when he once said :
” Decorating is not a surface performance, ” It’s a spiritual impulse, inborn and primordial.”
Joelle’s Picks:
Sources: In Luxurious Detail, Guy Trebay The New York Times
The Book: Tony Duquette by Wendy Goodman, Hutton Wilkinson, Dominique Dunne( Foreword)
The Store: Bergdoff Goodman 754 5th Avenue (58th Street)(212) 753-7300
The Music: The Gamelan Music From Bali
Petter Hegre's
