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Vanity Fair’s Best-Dressed List Is Full of Art-World Power Players This Year. Here’s Who They Are
It probably has something to do with jurors Thelma Golden and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.
It probably has something to do with jurors Thelma Golden and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.
Sarah Cascone ShareShare This Article
Vanity Fair has released its annual best-dressed list and, while it includes standard celebrity suspects such as Miuccia Prada, Jay-Z, and Meghan Markle, there was also a surprisingly large contingent from the art world this year. This is thanks, no doubt, to the jury’s inclusion of Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum Harlem, art entrepreneur Alexander Gilkes, and New York gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.
Here are the art world figures who were recognized for their fashion savvy by the magazine.
A director at Gagosian since 2006, Neri has also worked as a magazine editor and curator. Asked to pick her favorite designers, Neri named Duro Olowu (who happens to be Golden’s husband), Phoebe Philo, Stefano Pilati, and Junya Watanabe.
Adjaye, the go-to architect to art stars, was recently tapped to design the new Princeton University Art Museum, reported that his favorite designers are Virgil Abloh and Carlo Brandelli, and that his favorite accessory is beads from Ghana, where he was born.
The chairman of the board of the Dia Art Foundation got the nod from New York dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who noted that “with her exquisite jewelry collection, de Gunzburg is an unusual colorist of gem tones.”
The eccentric Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, unmissable in her neon red wigs and polka-dotted outfits, “is the embodiment of her artistic style—a walking spotty canvas,” said Gilkes of the 89-year-old artist.
The Mumbai-born Jhaveri, an assistant curator of South Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum, tells the magazine that his favorite wardrobe item is “white cotton pajamas made by my tailor in India, a version of which I have been wearing since I was two.”
Sozzani has led a glamorous life, from working at Vogue Italia to founding an eponymous art gallery and the fashion complex 10 Corso Como in Milan. “Carla and [her late sister Franca], the blonde Italians, broke the mold—very chic, more Italian bohemian,” said jury member and jewelry designer Lisa Eisner.
Olowu, a fashion designer, is married to Thelma Golden—no wonder he made the list!—and the art world also apparently has a big influence on his style. He told Vanity Fair that his biggest style icon is artist David Hammons. His favorite item in his closet, meanwhile, is his “vintage French workman’s jackets.” (How very Bill Cunningham of him!)