"100 Headless Women," his exhibition at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in Chelsea featuring scores of unclothed women, their faces painted over (“to protect their anonymity,” he said), takes him into slightly less treacherous territory.
After all, Mr. Snow, 27, didn’t really have to do much besides scroll through the contact list on his iPhone to find attractive young women willing to pose for him.
Among those who said yes were his fiancée, Vanessa Traina; her sister Victoria; his sister, Caroline; his landlady; and a slew of models he met on fashion shoots, working for publications like Purple and V.
“Whenever I’d do a fashion shoot, I’d sort of work it into that,” Mr. Snow said on a recent afternoon at his 4,000-plus-square-foot loft in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He wore beat-up Helmut Lang jeans, crocodile cowboy boots he bought in El Paso, a bandana around his neck, a dark gray T-shirt he was wearing inside-out and long hair that was done in pigtails. (The ensemble could loosely be described as designer cowboy.)
“At the end, I’d say, ‘Hey, can you go up against that white wall?’ Sometimes they’d say yes, and sometimes they’d say no.”
Occasionally, it actually became tedious.
“I came home from work one day, and I was like, ‘I’m so tired, I had 10 naked women running around the studio drinking beer; it was exhausting.’ ” Mr. Snow said as he puffed on a Marlboro Red. “Nessy was like, ‘Oh, honey.’ ” He imitated Ms. Traina giving him a concerned, sympathetic look. “She’s the best. I don’t think there are very many people who would respond that way.”
So, Ms. Traina, 27 — who was perched on a chair nearby, wearing a black shirt from her boyfriend’s closet with a navy and black skirt and sky-high heels from Balenciaga — never worried about him doing a project like this?
“No,” she said, looking amused that anyone would ask her a question so bourgeois. “I work with naked girls, too.”
Indeed, Ms. Traina does. Over the last two years, she has become a well-known, dark-edged stylist who consults for designers like Joseph Altuzarra and does fashion shoots for magazines from Garage to T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
Together, Ms. Traina and Mr. Snow have become a glamour couple, two ambitious, very attractive people, both from dynasties, she the daughter of Danielle Steel and the vintner John Traina; he, a descendent on his mother’s side of the de Menil clan, which has given more money to the art world than practically anyone on the planet.
The couple are photographed frequently on the party circuit with high-flying fashion types like Olivier Zahm (of Purple Magazine), Stella Schnabel (daughter of the artist and film director Julian Schnabel) and James Kaliardos (of Visionaire).
This August, they will marry in San Francisco, at the house she grew up in.
Mr. Snow and Ms. Traina first met seven years ago, but “she never really spoke to me until a year and a half ago,” he said. “I thought she was uptight or something. And she had a long-term boyfriend.” (For a time, Mr. Snow was involved too, with Mary-Kate Olsen.)
Eventually, the stars aligned, and Mr. Snow and Ms. Traina went on their first date — to Omen, a Japanese restaurant in SoHo that’s popular with fashion types partly because it does not serve rice with the sashimi.
“She was a sucker for those big red bowls of sake,” Mr. Snow said, adding that afterward Ms. Traina “attacked” him in an elevator.
Saying this caused Mr. Snow’s fiancée to wince — “Off the record! Off the record!” she shouted — but any misgivings quickly melted away. Moments later, the two were stroking each other’s arms and looking almost giddily in love.
