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those dandy ItBoy pics conceal his jock days on the high school swim team (I got pics of him in a Speedo), and when he was captain of the men's volleyball team. Oh yeah, and played the part of Dill in a moving production of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'.
^Indeed. He seems really sweet.A Talent to Amuse
EARLY ACCESS Mr. Blasberg with Naomi Campbell in South Beach in December. Models and socialites count on him to present their best face.
By ERIC WILSON
Published: April 14, 2010
WE are in a town car heading down Park Avenue from one party to another. Leigh Lezark, the Misshapes D.J., is pulling at the top of her slinky ivory pants in the back seat. Geordon Nicol, her partner, is riding shotgun. Squished on the middle hump, typing on a BlackBerry, is Derek Blasberg, a 27-year-old writer who looks, in a white one-button suit and bucks given to him by Burberry, as if he is wearing a Tom Wolfe costume, minus the hat. Talk is about work and travel and work-related travel.
“I’m going to Thailand on Thursday,” says Mr. Nicol, his eyes barely visible beneath a Peggy Moffitt haircut.
“But that’s for the operation,” says Mr. Blasberg, teasing him.
“Are you going to St.-Tropez?” Ms. Lezark asks.
“For Louis Vuitton?” Mr. Blasberg replies.
“Chanel,” she says.
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Blasberg says, excited, though his plans are not set. “Are they making you work?”
By work, he means to ask whether Ms. Lezark will be spinning for her supper next month at the runway show for Chanel’s annual resort collection, which is presented in a different port of call each year, or whether she is among the many fabulous people who are being hauled on Chanel’s dime to the French Riviera just to show up for the event. People like him, he means.
In simpler terms, work, for Mr. Blasberg, means what he is doing right now, which is being a part of a scene. What that scene is does not matter, so long as the same Very Important People are there being photographed, their dresses remarked upon and their names recorded in the party pages of a newspaper or magazine or whichever blog is in favor at the moment, like the one written by Mr. Blasberg for Style.com. He is very good at his part — witty, teddy-bear cute but no threat to anyone’s husband, an enthusiastic dancer and, to the consternation of many of his more journalistic peers, a chronicler who reports only that the dresses are gorgeous and the parties are hot, hot, hot. Even when they are not.
The car arrives in Chelsea, at the home of Lauren Santo Domingo, a contributing editor at Vogue who is serving dinner for 40 in honor of Mr. Blasberg’s first book, “Classy,” a primer on ladylike behavior. The writer melds into a scene that includes several fashion designers (Rachel Roy, Chris Benz, Jack McCollough, Lazaro Hernandez), models (Jessica Stam, Byrdie Bell) and socials (Claire Bernard, Marjorie Gubelmann, Barbara Bush). “I told him there will be a full tent party for his second book,” Ms. Santo Domingo says.
This reporter could go on describing who was there, but that is Mr. Blasberg’s job, and, really, he seems to enjoy it so much — the parties and the free trips and the clothes and the lifestyle. Last year, he was flown to events in Rio de Janeiro for Fashion Rocks; Moscow for the opening of a Diane Von Furstenberg exhibition; London for the Frieze Art Fair; Vienna for the Life Ball; and Venice, twice, for the Biennale and another Chanel show.
He was in Tokyo last month for its Fashion Week, courtesy of a Japanese trade group. His nerdy-chic pairing of bow ties with sneakers inspired the look of the male characters on “Gossip Girl.” And he was the second most photographed guest at fashion parties for the year, according to a ranking by Style.com, a list on which he outranked Karl Lagerfeld and Lorenzo Martone and was bested only by Lindsay Lohan.
“Liza Minnelli told me that the only way to get people to leave a party is to have a plan for later,” he said over breakfast at Balthazar last Friday. He had had some late nights that week, including his own party on April 6 and then a New Yorkers for Children benefit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on April 8, from which he had filed his report only a few hours earlier. He joked that his job is to rewrite last year’s party coverage, changing only the names.
Since his arrival on the scene a decade ago, when he was a freshman at New York University, Mr. Blasberg has gone unrivaled in making connections with boldface names, connections so tight that he himself has become a person whose name is more often on the invitation than the envelope. Ms. Santo Domingo, along with Chloë Sevigny, the actress, and Dasha Zhukova, the Russian heiress, were hosts of a party at Barneys last week for his book. Ms. Sevigny and Karlie Kloss, the model of the moment, will accompany him to St. Louis, his hometown, on April 17 for a Contemporary Art Museum gala, for which they are chairs. Ms. Bush, the former first daughter, will toast him in Dallas later this month.
And yet Mr. Blasberg, who describes himself as a fashion and arts writer, is reluctant to carry the other mantle usually assigned to him: “It boy.” (Early in our correspondence, he said he was hoping for an article that would not include those words because he thought they devalued his hard work as a writer.)
“I am aware that most 27-year-old writers do not co-host galas in their hometowns,” he said. “But there is a difference between hosting a benefit for a museum that you believe in and putting your name on every store opening on the Upper East Side.”
Nevertheless, his ascent through Manhattan’s complicated social strata has come with a price, which is that he is held to the same scrutiny as his subjects, and by those who do not always see things as positively as he does. During his brief career, Mr. Blasberg has been described as a “high-society boy toy” (The New York Post), a “sharp-tongued party boy” (New York magazine), a “scribe and general gadfly” (The Daily News), and a “fashion-writer/socialite-walker hybrid,” a “male socialite” and an “annoying writer-socialite” (all by The New York Observer). To people outside his world, it has never been clear whether Mr. Blasberg aspired to be the Truman Capote of his generation, or the Carrie Bradshaw.
“I feel like I have been portrayed as if I was standing outside Cipriani hoping someone picks me as their plus-one,” he said.
BACK to that Barneys party: It was fairly obvious that Mr. Blasberg is greatly admired by socialites and fashion insiders, who are not exactly cuddly to people with notepads and pens in their hands. In addition to the usual suspects, like Tinsley Mortimer, of the reality-show Mortimers, there were esteemed industry professionals, like Pat McGrath, the makeup artist; Terry Richardson, the photographer; and Edward Enninful, the Vogue stylist; plus a contingent of cool kids from Europe, including Julia Restoin-Roitfeld and Giovanna Battaglia.
“He’s like a male Elsa Maxwell,” said Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys. “He is a social catalyst who can cut across all different levels, mixing society ladies with strippers.”
Off in a corner were Mr. Blasberg’s parents, Bill and Carol Blasberg, a retired controller and the managing editor of a journal on cardiothoracic surgery, who said they were both surprised in 2000 when their younger son told them he wanted to move to New York. “I had a friend in New York publishing who said he would never make it here,” his mother said. “We were worried.”
In the suburbs of St. Louis, he was a popular student and class salutatorian at Affton High School, and had written on his bedsheets, “New York or bust!” He loved to dance and was an excellent water-skier.
“He’s like a male Esther Williams,” Mr. Doonan interrupted.
At N.Y.U., Mr. Blasberg met a model who lived in his dorm and who introduced him to her agent at Elite, where he got a job writing bios of models. During a semester abroad in London, he did the same for Models 1, a top agency in Europe. During his junior year, he was an intern at W, and his senior year was spent at Vogue. All of those jobs enabled easy access to glamorous parties, where he befriended a group of hot young designers, including Mr. Hernandez and Mr. McCollough of the label Proenza Schouler. And he got a little big for his britches, he said, offending some Vogue colleagues by striving for greater jobs before he had paid his dues.
His departure from the magazine, after less than a year, would have been unremarkable, had it not coincided with a Page Six item in The Post that linked a romantic spat between the Proenza Schouler designers to an affair with a young Vogue staff member. (The staff member was unnamed in the original report, but the gossip column has since referred directly to Mr. Blasberg as its subject.) Though he denied its accuracy, Mr. Blasberg said the article was an embarrassment to the magazine. He said his experience there was the only regret of his career, since he can’t go back.
“Sometimes I wish that Anna Wintour didn’t know I existed,” he said. But the Proenza Schouler designers remain his friends.
As he began to make his way as a freelance writer, Mr. Blasberg found himself embroiled in a second scandal. In 2006, an anonymous blog called Socialite Rank appeared, skewering the gilded lilies with cruel taunts about their social-climbing ways. Many people guessed that its author was Mr. Blasberg because of his uncanny access. (It was later revealed to have been the work of Olga Rei and Valentine Uhovski, stepsiblings who shared a fascination with the social culture while working as fashion journalists.) Mr. Blasberg is still hurt when anyone mentions the blog. Having been unfairly accused, he said, he won’t write anything bad about anyone, which helps to explain why so many companies are eager to court his favor.
“I don’t have some sort of moral dilemma with coming as a guest to an event or a fashion show,” he said. “I don’t lie. I just try to find what was positive and only speak about that.”
Mr. Blasberg now works as a senior fashion news editor at V magazine and as editor at large at Style.com, in addition to freelance work for Harper’s Bazaar and Interview, where editors appreciate his connections.
“We’re not covering the White House or the Pentagon here,” said Dirk Standen, the editor in chief of Style.com. “We are trying to give people a sense of what it is like at these parties, and Derek brings a level of intimacy with the right people.” Mr. Standen cited a recent photo diary from Fashion Week, which included a candid image of Axl Rose taken very late into the night and one of Stefano Pilati’s dogs asleep on his couch.
Mr. Blasberg has interviewed Tom Ford and Emma Watson. He edited an earlier book, “Influence,” by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. “Classy,” the new advice book, is very wordy and frequently crassy, as when he describes why it is a bad idea to wear white jeans to a barbecue. “Answered Prayers” it is not. But then, few writers have penetrated the social world as deeply as Mr. Blasberg without knowing the fear that the party could end with the stroke of a pen.
“It would be easier to write that all the girls were smoking in the bathroom, or to say that everyone was bored or social climbing,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone wins from those kinds of stories.”
WE are in the nightclub on the 18th floor of the Standard Hotel, standing at a bar that smells like pool and hamburgers. The party is for the Art Production Fund. Jane Holzer walks by, and Mr. Blasberg, who is drinking vodka with ginger ale — “the Blasberg,” he says — notices she is wearing flip-flops. Everyone notices him: Yvonne Force Villareal, Diana Picasso, Amy Sacco, Will Cotton, Terence Koh, whose right hand is painted gold this evening as some sort of performance art, which Mr. Cotton promptly ruins by spilling a drink on it. André Balazs compliments Mr. Blasberg on his book. “I love the paper stock,” he says.
Mr. Blasberg is full of gossip: the designer who is rumored to be having a Sapphic affair; the guest whose back story involves Bill Clinton and an airplane. As Kembra Pfahler and her two band mates in the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black squeeze by, their bodies covered only in red paint and huge black wigs, he yells across the noise to Hope Atherton and Gavin Brown, “So that’s what a vagina looks like!” Another guest walks by in a too-tight corseted dress, and Mr. Blasberg looks stricken. “That must be special order,” he says, “because Dolce stopped making that years ago.”
Not a word of this, of course, will be repeated.
