Jeff Koons and Vito Schnabel Make Best-Dressed List

Artist Jeff Koons. Photo by Chris Fanning ©Jeff Koons.

Vanity Fair has rolled out its 2014 International Best-Dressed List, timed to coincide with Fashion Week, and going head to head on page 228 are artist Jeff Koons and art dealer Vito Schnabel. Though both hail from the art world, they portray vastly different sartorial aesthetics.

Koons’s write-up read like a paean (or a mini corporate-sponsored segment—how Koons!) to Dior. “Favorite item of clothing: Dior suit. Favorite place to shop: Dior Homme, New York City… Favorite tailor: Francisco Espinal, at Dior Homme, 57th Street.” How creative, Jeff. As per the captions in the photos inserted into the piece, Koons wore Dior Homme at the opening of his retrospective at the Whitney Museum and again at an event for Dom Perignon—remember that limited edition $20,000-per-bottle rose champagne that came wrapped in a “balloon dog”? Koons, who gained early acclaim with his appropriated advertisements, managed to turn his own inclusion in a fashion list into a work by Koons. Fittingly, all of his favorite designers have ads in the magazine.

But where Koons is all glossy dandy, ever-ready with the product-placement, Schnabel plays the Everyman peddling his penchant for Levis 501 black cords, Nike Air Force 1 shoes, and a necklace endearingly gifted to him by his mother and Lola Schnabel, his painter sister. His favorite scent, “orange blossom” (what’s that, an essential oil?), doesn’t even have a label. But the best is his favorite tailor, “Jerri’s Cleaners, on Avenue of the Americas,” the proprietor of which is described on Yelp as “nasty and sarcastic.” Art dealers, they’re just like the rest of us.

While he isn’t featured in the best-dressed list, Maurizio Cattelan has a cameo in a Berluti advertisement, in which the retired artists swims fully clothed in a pool while his snazzy shoes stay dry on a diving board.


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