Latest news with #CenturionNewYork
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Victoria Beckham's Very Posh Takeover in an NYC Skyscraper: It's a 'Little Sanctuary in the Clouds'
Photo: Adrian Gaut Former Spice Girl turned fashion designer Victoria Beckham has long been bedazzled by the 'bright lights, big city' vibe of New York. 'It's where I launched my clothing brand back in 2008 during NYFW, and where my clean beauty brand is based, so it has always held a special place in my heart,' the British designer explains. Thus it made sense that for the first time presenting a pre-collection in New York, the location should embrace 'the energy, the skyline, the pace' of Manhattan. From today, Beckham is collaborating with American Express Centurion to treat the city's leading fashionistas, tastemakers, and glitterati to a private preview of her pre-spring-summer 2026 collection at Centurion New York. Designed by Yabu Pushelberg, the club is the global finance company's first luxury destination in the US which opened two years ago on the 55th floor of One Vanderbilt (one of the world's tallest buildings, designed by New York–based architects Kohn Pedersen Fox). It is a place where Centurion members can exclusively relax, meet, dine (from menus overseen by Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud), and this week, thanks to Beckham's showcase, shop ahead of the crowd. Beckham knew the minute she saw the space that it was the right fit for showing her sharp, clean lined approach to tailoring modern female silhouettes. 'I love the contrast between the sweeping views and the intimacy of the space. It feels like a little sanctuary in the clouds,' she says. Alongside the designer's curation of chubby, clubby armchairs and curvaceous sofas, all bouclé-clad in snowy white, sculptural coffee and side tables in either dark stained wood or creamy veined stone, and an abundance of floral arrangements by the French-born, NY-based floral artist Caroline Bailly, Beckham's forthcoming collection of long flowing dresses and urban pant suits pops in block shades of lipstick red, classic black or white, and flattering khaki. 'I didn't want to compete with the space, but to respond to it in a way that felt organic,' she says. 'We wanted to create a quiet sense of drama that would let both the clothes and the setting breathe.' Surrounded by the panoramic views of the glittering Hudson River and some of the city's most famous skyscrapers—from the Art Deco beauty of the Chrysler building all the way down to One World Trade Center, with its towering spire, in Lower Manhattan—Beckham has created a series of spaces punctuated with dressed mannequins, huge light boxes and marble cubes displaying the designer's popular accessories. Usually, Beckham would present her pre-collections digitally, 'so this felt like a great opportunity to create something immersive and special,' she continues. The enfilade of spaces, drenched in sunlight and enveloped by blue sky, make for a powerful yet harmonious atmosphere. 'I was drawn to Centurion New York's dialogue between light and material: velvet against brass, stone against skyline. It speaks to my own love of contrasting and balancing masculine and feminine energies in my collections,' she explains. Even the art on the walls, all part of Centurion New York's impressive collection curated by Hanabi: Art & Artists—including the likes of Nan Goldin, Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus and Robert Motherwell—fits with Beckham's contemporary spirit. Indeed, Beckham has always sought inspiration from art and architecture. 'I've always seen fashion as part of a broader conversation,' the designer says. A decade ago, she commissioned Iranian-British architect Farshid Moussavi to create her London store's breathtaking interior, set respectfully within its Georgian framework yet a dynamic testament to the modernity of concrete, soaring ceilings, and display cases inspired by Donald Judd. Celebrity Real Estate Victoria and David Beckham Embrace the Sunshine State With New $80 Million Mansion The Beckhams are reportedly buying a waterfront Miami Beach spec estate 'When I opened on Dover Street, I didn't want a traditional retail space, I wanted somewhere you could exhale—somewhere that felt as welcoming as a home but could also double up as a space in which to showcase and celebrate other incredible talents,' she says, citing an ongoing partnership with Sotheby's to curate exhibitions instore featuring seminal contemporary artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yoshitomo Nara, and George Condo. It has become a passion for both the designer and her husband, former footballer David, after being first introduced to collecting by Sir Elton John. 'Art sharpens my eye and teaches me to see differently.' A trio of evening gowns in this year's fall-winter collection have been informed by the Olii works of 20th century Argentinian artist and sculptor Lucio Fontana (a favorite in Beckham's own modern art collection). 'Transposing his way of treating canvas as fabric, the material of the gowns is ruched around wired holes placed at the neckline or abdomen as if it were paint, creating an intense and erotic perforated effect,' she explains. Last winter, Beckham invited the British interior designer Rose Uniacke to reimagine the store's interiors to spectacular effect. Against walls swathed in a rich forest green (custom colored in a vegetable-resin paint by Uniacke for the designer), clothing and accessories jostled alongside extraordinary works like a tapestry woven from stainless steel by Simone Prouvé, a 19th-century gilded console, and a midcentury Italian walnut desk designed by Gio Ponti. 'Rose has an extraordinary eye,' enthuses Beckham. 'Her ability to balance restraint and richness is so rare. That deep green we used felt almost like a fabric in itself; it cocooned the pieces and gave them a new energy. Pairing that with antiques, sculptural furniture, and layered lighting gave the collection a more intimate, storied context.' It was a reminder, Beckham says, that clothes don't live in a vacuum. 'They come to life through space, atmosphere, and the people that live in them.' Victoria Beckham's pre-SS 2026 residency at Centurion New York runs from May 21 through May 23, 2025. Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest More Great Celebrity Style Stories From AD Sinners' Production Designer Takes AD Inside the Making of Ryan Coogler's Vampire Thriller Lola Kirke's Colorful Guide to Nashville Jeff Bezos's Yacht: Everything You Ever Wondered About Koru Cowboy Carter Tour: My Experience at Beyoncé's Kaleidoscopic Rodeo of Black Americana
New York Times
16-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The 1980s Are Back, and Not in a Good Way
When I was 7, I sent a birthday card to President Ronald Reagan. It was the 1980s. I lived in rural Alabama, and pretty much all the adults around me were loudly on board with what was then the Reagan revolution, which had swept Jimmy Carter and his timid liberal apologists for America's greatness out of power and made the presidency, especially to my young eyes, a glamorous exemplar of everything good about the country. I remember the seductive appeal of the story he told about America as a global superpower, a 'shining city on a hill' where anyone could be successful with enough elbow grease, so long as those meddlesome big-government liberals didn't get in the way. Being young and preppy and rich back then looked cool to me. Within a few years I had a crush on Alex P. Keaton on 'Family Ties,' who horrified his ex-hippie parents with his love of heartless capitalism and harebrained business schemes. I didn't see that the show was making fun of him, too. The young conservatives of the '80s were all molded in his image (and he in theirs). Now, in 2025, some young people (who were not yet born in the age of Reagan) are renouncing the progressive politics of their millennial elders and acting like it's the '80s again. There was a marked shift toward Donald Trump by voters under 30 according to exit polling in last November's election, so maybe they are just dressing the part. But when I read about a group of younger MAGA supporters reveling in their victory at the member's only Centurion New York (declaring, as one 27-year-old in attendance did, that Trump 'is making it sexy to be Republican again. He's making it glamorous to be a Republican again') or see photos or watch videos of MAGA youth at, say, Turning Point USA events run by Charlie Kirk, a preppy right-wing influencer whose organization recruits high schoolers and college students to be soldiers in the culture war, or in Brock Colyar's New York magazine cover story about the young right-wing elite at various inauguration parties — I get a very distinct feeling of déjà vu. It's laced with nostalgia but grounded in dread. These young right-wingers have a slightly modernized late '80s look. I doubt they use Aqua Net or Drakkar Noir, but I imagine their parties have the feel of a Brat Pack movie where almost everyone is or aspires to be a WASPy James Spader villain. Few of the people I'm talking about were even alive in the 1980s, and so they can't understand what it means for Mr. Trump to be so stuck in that time, still fighting its battles. Now, instead of renouncing hippie counterculture, they've turned against whatever their generation considers to be woke. The incumbent liberal they detested was Joe Biden instead of Jimmy Carter. Instead of junk bonds, many of them plan to get rich by investing in crypto and trust that this administration will pursue or exceed Reagan levels of deregulation to facilitate it. After all, Project 2025 mentions Reagan 71 times. Mr. Trump's '80s were, until now, his glory years, when he built Trump Tower, published 'The Art of the Deal' and called the tabloids on himself using a made-up name, John Barron. He was routinely flattered in the tabloids thanks to the excellent public relations skills of Mr. Barron, popped up regularly on TV and wrestling promotions and started making movie cameos. Urban elites looked down on him — Spy magazine called him a 'short-fingered vulgarian' — but he embodied what many people who weren't rich thought rich people looked like, lived like, and, in his shamelessness and selfishness, acted like. More important for us now, his formative understanding of politics seems to have been shaped by that era, when America, humbled by the Vietnam War, Watergate, crime and the oil crisis, was stuck with a cardigan-wearing president who suggested that we all turn down our thermostats for the collective good. Reagan told us to turn the thermostat way up, live large and swagger again. Hippies became yuppies, at least in the media's imagination. Many people who watched Oliver Stone's morality tale 'Wall Street' missed the satire in the 'greed is good' speech and moved to New York hoping to become the next Gordon Gekko, or at least live like him. At the time, the real-life Wall Street executive Michael Milken, who would later go to prison for securities fraud, was a national celebrity. (Trump pardoned Mr. Milken in 2020.) The takeaway for young people was easy: Any kind of moralism around moneymaking was regarded as uncool, or possibly even un-American. Mr. Trump embodied this archetype. He told a story about himself that in typical Trump fashion laundered his history as a beneficiary of nepotism who began his career with a few million dollars of help from Dad and often suggested that he had made it in New York City with the pluck and determination of Dolly Parton in '9 to 5.' Yes, there was talk at the time of Trump running for president. But it came across mostly as an exercise in brand-building. Certainly, no one imagined that he would be seriously proposing that America annex Greenland and Canada. But if you understand that his worldview is permanently frozen in the '80s it explains, in addition to his fondness for Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Village People, that many of his foreign policy notions were largely formulated through the lens of the Cold War, in which two superpowers negotiated a state of peace via mutual deterrence. The opposing power is no longer Russia, however; it's China. Like Reagan, Mr. Trump is championing a 'Star Wars'-like missile shield project, an Iron Dome, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is in charge of putting together. The slogan that Mr. Trump cribbed directly from Reagan, 'Make America Great Again,' speaks to a longing for a revival. Reagan was mad at many of the same things Mr. Trump is — affirmative action, regulation, big government, high taxes, the Panama Canal, the Department of Education — but this time Mr. Trump, abetted by Elon Musk's squad of former interns, some still not old enough to legally drink, is doing more damage to those institutions and policies more quickly than Reagan ever did. Reagan, just like Mr. Trump, was often callous about people he did not see as important: To use one notorious example, members of his administration joked about the AIDS epidemic and abetted its destruction by initially refusing to do anything about it, stigmatizing it as a disease its victims deserved. (Mr. Trump's move against the United States Agency for International Development, among many other things, has already halted treatments for H.I.V. patients in poor countries.) It's easy for someone my age to look back on the glamour of the Reagan years with nostalgia for the aesthetics and excesses of the '80s, which I then misunderstood as a kind of abundance. As a Christian conservative, I never experienced many of its cruelties firsthand. After Reagan's second term, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it felt like America had won something. But I know now that for much of the world, the shining city on a hill appeared more like the distant compound of a Bond villain. Nancy Reagan's antidrug campaign seemed virtuous when my fifth-grade teacher made our class memorize all the street names for PCP in case we ever encountered it in rural Alabama. I later understood the war on drugs as a prosecutorial cover for persecuting and incarcerating Black people. My isolation in a small, culturally monolithic community rendered these things invisible to me as a child, when the Reagan years were all glitter, big hair and fun. As an adult progressive, I can now recognize that there's a cruelty underneath the glitter, an appeal to would-be elites who want to build a world for themselves while putting everyone else in their place. Reagan was an early architect of Mr. Trump's policies and ideas, but in pursing them he didn't try to burn down everything in his path. (He also won by a far more decisive margin.) The MAGA kids, perhaps not understanding the way Mr. Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the Constitution, or caring what that means, are entranced by some of the same things I was at a much younger age. It all feels oddly familiar, like we've been here before — but not in a good way.
New York Times
13-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
For These 20-Somethings, Trump ‘Is Making It Sexy' to Be Republican
Amid a surge of youthful Republicanism in New York and nationwide, there has been an element of social cachet that has often proved elusive: In blunt terms, the word is 'cool.' Indeed, hamstrung by political beliefs that are often in opposition to those of major cultural figures, conservatives have frequently groused about the depiction of them as squares, including President Trump, whose hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center this week was seemingly led by a desire to make the venerable institution 'hot.' 'We made the presidency hot,' Mr. Trump said, speaking to the newly formed board, according to an audio recording obtained by Jake Tapper of CNN. 'So this should be easy.' It was in that spirit that a clutch of Mr. Trump's younger supporters assembled on Wednesday night at Centurion New York, a members-only club on the 55th floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan, to celebrate the nascent Republican administration, and assert their fashionableness — and their fealty to the new president. 'POTUS is making it sexy to be Republican again,' said Max Castroparedes, 27, a self-described 'international, globe-trotting consultant,' who was using the acronym for 'president of the United States.' 'He's making it glamorous to be a Republican again. He's making it great to be Republican again.' Mr. Castroparedes, a former special assistant at the Department of Homeland Security during Mr. Trump's first term, now works for Montfort, a company based in Palm Beach, Fla., that calls itself 'a specialized strategic advisory firm.' He had invited a dozen or so friends to assemble in a glass-walled room of Centurion, framed by sweeping views of the skyline, a soaring wall of wines and an imposing black chandelier. Men wore ties, women toted vintage Dior purses, and the playlist — said to be imported from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump's estate in Palm Beach — ran from classic rock ('Don't Stop Believin'') to classic Broadway ('Do You Hear the People Sing?' from 'Les Miserables') to something called 'The Trump Song,' a salsa-style number with a chorus of 'Oh my God, I will vote/I will vote, for Donald Trump.' (Mr. Castroparedes often asked the wait staff to turn the music up.) Exclusively under the age of 30 the group also, of course, came to drink and meet people, including one attendee who quietly admitted to being a Kamala Harris voter. That guest, a young gay man in his 20s, said he had noticed a rightward political drift in his social circle, but believed it was 'about proximity to power versus ideological conviction.' Of perhaps 100 friends, he said he would describe 'maybe a dozen as Trumpy.' The group is not alone in trying to make it cool to be a youthful G.O.P. fan: The New York Young Republican Club has been an increasingly visible presence on the cocktail circuit, complete with famous — and occasionally formerly incarcerated — guests like Stephen K. Bannon, the podcasting firebrand who was a headliner at a December gala for the group just weeks after being released from federal prison. The group also has less pricey celebrations, like a 'champagne, caviar and cocktails' event planned for later this month at a Prohibition-age speakeasy on the Lower East Side. 'But don't worry,' that invite read. 'We conservatives have nothing to hide!' That said, in the case of Mr. Castroparedes's party, which he had described as a gathering of 'MAGA Youth,' some of the guests were shy, asking a reporter and a photographer to avoid identifying them, and demurring when asked why they were there. One who would speak was Jairo Gonzalez Ward, 28, a consultant whose resemblance to the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau might unsettle some in the Trump administration. But even Mr. Ward, whose company, Allume Consulting, had helped provide the rented aerie at the Centurion, said he was uncertain whether he would identify as a conservative or even as 'entirely political.' 'And I think this would apply to most people in the room,' Mr. Ward said. 'I don't think this room's a monolith. And I don't think the quote-unquote, conservative movement today is a monolith.' Still, Mr. Ward added, 'from a business perspective, what's happening right now is very interesting.' 'If there is a common denominator of people in the room and a sort of fundamental aspect of the administration, it's that there's a strict aversion to inertia,' he said. 'And that I appreciate.' Others were less equivocal in their beliefs, including a 29-year-old man, who asked not to be named because of professional concerns but said Mr. Trump was an idol of his. 'I loved him for many, many years,' the young man said, suggesting that he be described as 'an affluent Republican.' Much has been said of the recent inroads made by Republicans with young men — and 'bros,' that amorphous, often macho cadre populating 'the manoverse' — and the president did far better with young voters in 2024 compared with his loss in 2020. Bearing out that trend, one 23-year-old woman who attended the dinner said she had two friends back home in dependably Democratic California who had voted for Biden in 2020 and then switched to Trump in 2024. 'In 2020, it was considered cool to be a liberal,' she said, mentioning events like the Black Lives Matter protests. 'It was cool to be socially woke. And I feel like now people are so sick of it and they've seen the repercussions and they don't like the policies.' For his part, Mr. Castroparedes, who mentioned a desire to run for the U.S. Senate in his native Texas someday, said he wanted to replicate his dinners in other locations, as a kind of 'roadshow' of young Republican dining, in hopes of 'making elites comfortable' being openly conservative, which he simultaneously described as 'edgy' and 'the common-sense thing to do.' 'I think having more young people in politics is a good thing,' he said, gesturing at guests around a table and ticking off their credentials — two journalists, a health care expert, the scion of a famous Hollywood producer. 'They don't have to be political hacks like in Washington.'
