Flying Markham

Beryl Markham was a British-born Kenyan aviatrix, adventurer, and racehorse trainer. During the pioneer days of aviation, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. She is the author of the memoir West with the Night.

When Beryl was four years old, her father moved the family to Kenya, which was then British East Africa, purchasing a farm in Njoro near the Great Rift Valley. She spent an adventurous childhood learning, playing and hunting with the natives.

Beryl is not as well know as Danish writer Karen Blixen, whom Beryl befriended during the years that Blixen was managing her family's coffee farm in the Ngong hills outside Nairobi. When Blixen's romantic connection with the hunter and pilot Denys Finch Hatton was winding down, Markham started an affair with him herself.

Largely inspired by the British pilot Tom Campbell Black, with whom she had a long-term affair, she took up flying. She worked for some time as a bush pilot. She also mingled with the notorious Happy Valley set, but was never a full-fledged "member" of that decadent crowd.

Venezia, Visconti, and Karl

Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel, is the very definition of sumptuous: the costumes and sets, the special geography of Venice, and the breathtaking cinematography combine to form a heady experience. At the center of this gorgeousness is Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a meticulous performance), a controlled intellectual who unexpectedly finds himself obsessed by the vision of Tadzio, a 14-year-old boy, while on a convalescent vacation in 1911. Karl Lagerfeld showed his 2010 Chanel Cruise collection in Venice, at the same beach setting as the film. The collection included a few men’s looks borrowed straight from Tadzio’s wardrobe, and shown on Karl’s own obsessions, Brad Kroenig and Baptiste Giabiconi.

The Mad Marchesa

For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the fabled Marchesa Luisa Casati triumphed as the brightest star in European society. The early deaths of her parents made Luisa and her elder sister, Francesca, the wealthiest heiresses in Italy at the time. Under the care of a guardian uncle, Luisa became engaged to and married the Marchese Camillo Casati, a young Milanese nobleman, in 1900.

She was tall and thin. A thick blaze of flame-coloured hair crowned her pale, almost cadaverously white face with its sensually vermilioned lips. Above all, however, the Marchesa’s large green eyes cast the strongest spell of her unique beauty. She exaggerated these further still with immense false lashes and surrounding rings of black kohl.

A celebrity and femme fatale, the marchesa's famous eccentricities dominated and delighted European society for nearly three decades. She captivated artists and literati figures such as Robert de Montesquiou, Erté, Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton, and Augustus John. She had a long term affair with the author Gabriele D'Annunzio.

John Galliano based the 1998 Spring/Summer Christian Dior collection on her. She is the namesake of the Marchesa fashion house. And Karl Lagerfeld debuted his 2010 Cruise-wear collection fittingly on the Lido in Venice, for which Casati was once again a major muse. As the concept of dandy was expanded in the 20th century to include women, the Marchesa Casati fitted the utmost female example by saying: "I want to be a living work of art".

Art and Peggy in Venice

Peggy Guggenheim was known for her heroic dedication to modern art, her somewhat wacky fashion sense, and her museum in Venice. She met and befriended many of the artists that she collected, including Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Fernand Léger, and Max Ernst, who become her second husband. Her gallery in New York showed young American artists such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the ‘star’ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943.

In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, and soon after bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she lived until her death. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.

In 1969, Peggy decided to donate her house and art collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York, which had been created by her uncle Solomon. The Guggenheim Foundation converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.

I Am Belle de Jour

In Luis Buñuel’s1967 Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, a beautiful young women married to a doctor. She loves her husband, but cannot bring herself to be physically intimate with him, his caresses failing to satisfy her psychic need for brutal degradation. She indulges instead in vivid, kinky, erotic fantasies to entertain her sexual desires. Eventually she becomes a prostitute, working in a brothel in the afternoons from two to five, the mystery of her matinée schedule causing her to be christened Belle de jour.

Deneuve’s wardrobe for the movie was designed by then 29 year old Yves Saint-Laurent. He and Deneuve developed a lifelong friendship on the set of the film, the designer calling her his “muse.”

The Perfect Mrs. Paley

"Babe Paley had only one flaw: she was perfect. Other than that, she was perfect", said Truman Capote about the woman he adored for almost 25 years.

Born Barbara Cushing, Babe as she was known to friends and admirers, was the daughter of Harvey Cushing, both a renowned neurosurgeon and Pulitzer Prize winning author. Though not of society, from an early age her mother encouraged and groomed her 3 daughters to marry wealthy men. Babe’s sister, Betsey, was married to James Roosevelt, FDR's son, and later married Jock Whitney. Their oldest sister Minnie married Vincent Astor. Babe's first husband was Stanley Mortimer, of the Standard Oil family. After a brief marriage and subsequent divorce, she married William S. Paley, chairman of CBS. Though his family background and religion, he was Jewish, made him less of a social catch than her first husband, Mr. Paley embodied all of the qualities Babe found wonderful in a man: he was rich and powerful, and worshipped her absolutely.

For most of the 50s, 60s and 70s, Babe remained a fixture at the top of the Best Dressed List. A photograph of Babe with a scarf tied to her handbag, for example, created a trendy tidal wave that millions of women emulated. She often mixed extravagant jewelry with cheap costume pieces, and embraced letting her hair go gray instead of camouflaging it with dye. In a stroke of modernism, she made pantsuits chic. Her good friend Slim Keith referred to her style as "perfection in an era of casual convenience". Vogue called it "effortless chic achieved at great effort"

The Perfect Guest

C. Z. Guest was one of the monarchs of New York society, who was a perennial selection on the best-dressed list, a noted horsewoman and an authority on gardening. As a young girl her name was Lucy, but she soon became C. Z. when her brother, Alexander, could not pronounce ''sister.''

When she was married in 1947 to Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, an international polo star, heir to the Phipps steel fortune and a second cousin of Winston Churchill, the ceremony was held at the home of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, with Hemingway serving as best man.

With her pale skin, blue eyes, ash-blond hair and trim figure, C. Z. was cut from the same cool, silky cloth as Grace Kelly. She had a patrician beauty that is indigenous to socially registered enclaves like Palm Beach and Southampton, a sporty, outdoorsy look that eschews makeup, hair spray and anything trendy.

Her motto was "The most important thing is to enjoy yourself and have a good time."