MartiniKiss
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*Same SourceTHE CHARMED LIFE OF LAUREN SANTO DOMINGO
The supremely stylish Lauren Santo Domingo invites Town & Country into her spectacular Saint-German townhouse
BY KATE FINNIGAN 3 SEPTEMBER 2015
'I always think there are two types of people in the world. The sharers and the hoarders,' observes Lauren Santo Domingo. ‘You ask one girlfriend with amazing skin where she went and she tells you nothing, or says, “I’m just well rested. I drink a lot of water.” Meanwhile she has some snake-foetus serum hidden away. And then there’s another who’ll say, “Oh, you need to meet my dermatologist! Come with me next time,” and books the appointment. I’m the latter. I like to share. For me it’s not so much fun unless it’s shared.’
It’s the infectious enthusiasm for life and for sharing that has made Lauren Santo Domingo – businesswoman, fashion leader, mother of two – such a success. Yes, she’s the perfect model of a New England girl, well-educated, well-travelled and well-married, to Andrés Santo Domingo, the son of a Colombian billionaire business magnate. And yes, she has an haute couture blonde elegance that makes her a modern-day style icon in the vein of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. But that could all easily have come to nothing without her savvy mind and sparkling joie de vivre.
Santo Domingo – hailed by The New York Observer as one of the ‘100 most influential New Yorkers of the past 25 years’ – has turned her compulsion to share into a business in the form of Moda Operandi, a fashion-retail company that allows customers to buy designs direct from the catwalk. It’s the modern-day, tech version of the trunk show and has been a canny way to share her on-the-pulse fashion tips and to monetise all that insider know-how that she has been gathering over the past couple of decades, during her roles in the industry as a publicist, fashion editor and stylist.
Today, in the hushed, plush Belgravia mews house that is the headquarters of the London business, she is sipping a cappuccino and wearing one of her fashion discoveries: a full white cotton skirt and loose shirt with freehand painterly prints by the Russian designer Vika Gazinskaya. ‘I pre-ordered, obviously,’ she says. She is fresh from a morning visit to Masterpiece London; last week she was in Basel. The travel is frequent as she skips between London, Paris and New York, seeming to be at every important social occasion each city offers – fashion shows, art openings, those glamorous intimate dinners that people like to throw – always wearing some fabulous label.
‘I can get visually bored very easily so I always like to see new things and learn new things and read new things. And take everything in, I guess,’ she says in her speedy twang. ‘Books or trips or museums or galleries. Let’s go to lunch! To dinner! I want to...’ Consume? ‘Yes, I’m a consumer of everything!’