Kaitlin Phillips’s UNEDITED, UNABRIDGED Christmas Gift Guide
You know the rules: If you buy something, Venmo @Kaitlin-Phillips. How much? $7-$499. Enough money for a bottle of wine. Even if it’s a bottle of wine in France. If I don’t make any money, I promise never to do it again.
E-mail me with comments, suggestions, and complaints: kaitlinephillips@gmail.com.
My friends voted “no photos” this year. If you miss the photos, let me know. It’s true that on an iphone, the photos don’t look right. Maybe next time I’ll make a “desktop version.”
“I accidentally burned a friend’s house to the ground once.” That’s the first line of “British Columbia — 1972,” a story by Cookie Mueller. That’s the whole story. By which I mean, it’s a story about what Cookie Mueller — who is high on cocaine, who has just tied her toddler to a plum tree outside a burning building—runs back in to save.
Cookie, and her friend Howard, must make the value selections themselves. Their friends are out of town. Oops! “Howard and I hysterically grabbed a huge plastic container with a lid on it. We carried it out carefully, whatever it was; we would risk our lives saving it. Later we found out it was garbage.” Slipshod though their methods, they manage to carry out a Victorian blue velvet couch, Tiffany lamp, radio, mahogany rocker, selected crystal stemware…and three bottles of whiskey, for a well-deserved nightcap on the lawn.
Only then do they remember the paintings. “We went into instant art panic. It was getting dangerously late to be in the house, the roof was about to fall.” For some time, they stand in the burning building fighting about which artwork to save. “THIS ARTIST IS MORE FAMOUS! Howard yanked a painting off the wall. BUT THIS ONE’S WORTH MORE! I grabbed another. We hadn’t much time. NO TAKE THIS ONE! IT’S OLDER!... BUT LOOK AT THESE BRUSHSTROKES.” A curatorial spat mid-Apocalypse. Howard loops the picture wires over his head. Easy to imagine the paintings slapping against his chest as he runs out of the house, neck pulsating. (Cookie never says if they lost any good paintings in the fire. I imagine her to be, even under duress, a fairly deft curator.)
It’s a story I think about every holiday season. You must admit that the bulk of gifts that you give and receive are not worth saving in a house fire, and that this is your fault: You are not inspiring people to give you radical things. You yourself can spend more, and if not more, better. (Don’t just try to move someone with your generosity. Embarrass them with it. Gifts, as a rule, should be impossible to reciprocate.)
I can think of quite a few gifts I’d save in a fire. Not coincidentally, most of them are on my walls: The small portrait of a cow—not grazing, a passive cow—painted by Sam McKinniss, which he gave me for Christmas last year. A cowgirl AI painting by Walter Robinson, that he gifted me as a reward for coming to visit his studio in Queens. (I lied and told him I’d never left Manhattan before.) A “Me Too painting” by Pablo Barba (this is my description, not his), which was the first gift someone ever gave me for doing my job; a goth painting by Issy Wood, the second gift someone ever gave me for doing my job. A pedophilic painting by Stu Mead, which wasn’t so much a gift from my ex-boyfriend as permanent loan that he’s graciously not called in.
If you don’t want to buy someone a painting—because you are stingy!—you can buy them something small from this list. For the record, I took my own advice, and bought my husband this sexy painting by CumWizard69420 for Christmas this year ($3,000) after Sam McKinniss wrote about him for Artforum.
The novelist Nell Zink, the least boring woman alive, says “I know this guy Andreas Münz of the village of Mörz (an hour from Berlin) who rediscovered the lost medieval Chinese art of making a leaf vanish on pottery glaze in a puff of smoke in a wood-fired kiln leaving behind an exact filigree tracery of the leaf’s every vein, except even the medieval Chinese mostly faked it, so literally nobody ever cared, not even then and especially not now, because there were never enough of these bowls to go around (cf), except the other week he finally managed to show one to this former director of Asian ceramics from the V&A (he crashed a meeting of this Asian ceramics society) who was like Wowadelic!!!!! Amazing!!!!! and said she’d put him in touch with some Chinese bazillionaire collectors. But obviously she hasn’t and probably never will, so his prices are still depressingly low…It’s the rural Brandenburg effect where there is literally nothing to do but perfect your art.” You can purchase his bowls here.
Ina Garten, former writer of nuclear energy budgets, says she bought the photographs for her kitchen from Staley Wise Gallery in SoHo. (“I love having art in the kitchen.”) For her 70th birthday, she “splurged and bought a half-bottle of Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes.” Her “red wine splurge for special dinners” is Antinori Tignanello. (Her everyday wine is Torres Mas la Plana.) The “best gift Jeffrey ever gave me was a trip to Tuscany, Provence, and the Cotswolds to see private gardens.” (The best gift she ever gave herself was “installing my Lacanche range” stove.) I’d like to note that from Ina’s website, you can order a (cheap!) signed copy of any of her cookbooks. I recommend my first-ever cookbook, Family Style, a classic. (Oh, and her publicist reminded me you can ship one of Ina’s Coconut Cakes anywhere in the United States.)
The writer Gemma Sieff recommends Rigattieri Liliana, a shop in Venice that sells ceramics in the shape of vegetables. (No website. Address: Sestiere di S. Marco, 3535, 30124 Venezia VE, Italy Phone: +39 041 277 1223.) She says her best scarf is cream colored with heavy pink-and-lilac handwork. From Nik-Nax in Srinagar. (No website. Address is 3RFC+747, Polo View Road, Munshi Bagh, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir 190001. Phone: +91 194 247 4906). If you can’t travel, she says these scarves will do. She recommends this $9,000 hand-painted papier mache Scrabble board from Kashmir and the Sam McKinniss print “Lana Del Ray Reading the Paris Review.” Selfishly, I asked her to recommend an out-of-print book by a woman. She said Gordon by Edith Templeton made a “big impression” on her. (“Reprinted in 2004—is that dusty enough?”)
**For all the literary agents and publishing people looking for something to gossip about at the holiday parties**, may I just say that I’ve heard a rumor that Gemma Sieff is sitting on an unpublished novel. She won’t send it to me, but maybe she’ll send it to you? Whoever gets it first is going to have a good Christmas indeed. (If you haven’t read her work, start here.)
The financier, and European dilettante par excellence, Byron Houdayer recommends a “bespoke shooting suit by Winkler, in Kreuth. Best Loden tailor. Requires referral. Got one for my wife.” He says, for men’s clothes, check out Adret, Adam Rogers place in London. “Impossible to buy online – mostly single pieces. Handmade, what Hermes should have been like.” His bootmaker is Foster and Sons. (Ask for Simon Bolzoni, “a devoted craftsman.”) He recommends Raku pottery “of all relevant periods. Great vesicles for embalming a beloved pet.” And he says it’s worth checking out fabrics from Wilhelm Jungmann & Neffe in Vienna, and Il Vecchio Drappiere in Milan.
The famously obsessive Daphne Merkin, who is “obsessed with facials,” urges you to ignore the “panoply of ballyhooed and overpriced facialists” in New York, and give someone a gift certificate to Diane Higgins (facials start at $170). “Her place is on the second floor of a grimy building on 2nd avenue in the 70's but don't be put off.” Diane does all the facials herself, you won’t be pawned off to a trainee. If you’re looking for a unique shoe, Merkin says she buys sneakers in “green suede and pebbled turquoise leather” at Lukure, “a sliver of a store on Madison Ave.”
Rivka Galchen, who wrote my favorite short story of all time, said she only ever gives people chocolate. (She does not care which brand.) I outsourced the question. New York Times Book Review editor Sadie Stein recommends Sauternes Raisins from Boissier, Paris. “The most refined Raisinets you've ever tasted: made from Sauternes grapes, they're perfume-like (in a good way) and covered in high-quality dark chocolate. They're addictive but also too precious to eat a lot of; you want to mete them out, since they won't ship these internationally.”
The painter Marcus Brutus says “he has a friend that sends people really ridiculous gifts. Like he once sent my friend live ducklings and he sent another one of my friends 50 pounds of bird seeds.” Great ideas.
Novelist and lyricist Polly Samson says all she wants for Christmas is an Akhal-Teke horse, an ancient breed from Turkmenistan. “They have a metallic sheen to their coat and are the most glamorous creatures…They gleam gold.” If she can’t have a horse, she says she’ll be “moderately happy” with a handful of crickets. “I shan’t be asking for a Qing Dynasty cage (or even the plain wooden one that Salvador Dali used for his pet crickets in his bedroom at Portlligat) because I don’t believe in prisons. Mine will live in the fruit bowl beneath a sunlamp where they’ll break my heart every day with their songs of Mediterranean summers long gone.” Speaking of, Polly wrote the perfect summer novel about just that.
Polly’s daughter-in-law, the set designer and long-time Simone Rocha collaborator Janina Pedan recommends Gushka wool, a Ukrainian company based in the Carpathian mountains. Janina prefers “super practical” small gifts. “Nothing beats a well-designed potato peeler.” This gränsfors wildlife hatchet is a favorite of hers. (I’ve seen Janina wield many a sharp tool.) “It fits in a normal bag. Equally good for chopping up kindling or big pumpkins.” Her father recommends Lardo di Callonata, a special type of lard from Italy. “It’s cured in special marble basins in the mountains near Carrara, the place famous for its white marble. I have yet to try but marble-cured lard sounds good.”
Janina designs beautiful silk scarves for a worthy cause: Profit from the sales goes to Ukrainian volunteers. 100 pounds, 100% silk.
Publisher of Seven Stories Press, Dan Simon had a quibble with last year’s guide. “Everyone,” he says, “knows about Bonnie Slopnick,” the cookbook bookstore on 2nd street. The best kept secret in Lower Manhattan “if not the whole world” is his neighbor, the specialized antiquarian bookstore Joanne Hendricks, Cookbooks at 488 Greenwich Street. (Joanne is the wife of Fluxus artist and archivist Jon Hendricks.) “In her shop, you’ll find a pristine copy of La Cucina Futurista for $5,000.” Dan recently published The Boxed Set of Annie Ernaux’s work ($180, and you get a poster). For the slut in your life!
The best book critic at the New York Times, Molly Young, recommends “this fucked-up perfume called Miss Tranchant by Italian madwoman Hilde Soliani—the primary notes are butter and oysters. It is my favorite of her frags but she also makes one that smells like Maraschino cherries but dries down to wet concrete!” She also says it’s “weird how many people who are into design don’t have this book.”
A little PSA from me: the strangest small batch perfumer in the USA — who you might recognize from last year’s gift guide — has two new perfumes out as of this week. (You should NOT smell like anyone else!!! What is wrong with you!!!)
Infamous New Yorker book critic Merve Emre said that for “that Business Insider profile, they photographed me at B&B rare books, where there is a first edition of Ulysses for $45K. I never thought I'd care about first editions...”
The incomparable Buffy Easton, the Director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, recommends a little clock from Verdura. “The smallest thing from the fanciest store. Always a good policy.” She has five of them in her bedroom. She notes: You can't buy them online. “They wrap them beautifully, and deliver by hand in NYC — so I haven't been to the store in years.” (“Ask for Adele”: 212-758-3388.)
The painter Cecily Brown says “this is not obscure but I always take Florida Water, from Bigelows, to England. My whole family is obsessed with it. Nothing to do with Florida.” Her ex-student Sophy Naess makes “delightful silk scarves” for which she invited a “rather brilliant” subscription service, where you get a new scarf every few months. A tip: Cecily’s step-daughter Allegra Eifler has an annual antique and vintage jewelry sale at her interior design studio. I’m not allowed to share details, you’re going to have to suss it out yourselves...
After making her recommendations, Cecily sent me a text urging me to read a book called A Year on Earth with Mr Hell by Young Kim. Cecily described it as “A scream.” She’s correct. It’s a memoir — written in secret — about a short affair Kim had with Richard Hell, the aged and famously sexy musician and poet. Cecily describes Kim as “the best gift giver I’ve ever met.” In fact, when you read the book — and you must — you get the sense Kim is torturing Richard with her gifts. Oppressing him with her generosity and ingenuity. It’s downright inspirational. Anyway, I emailed Young Kim and begged for her recommendations. She sent—surprise, surprise—a bulleted list of thirty-one gifts. YOU CAN READ IT HERE…
An abridged version: She recommends a stiletto-shaped chocolate from Jean Paul Hevin, in Paris. “They don’t have a frosting service but I’ve piped melted white chocolate myself into the shoe with cheeky phrases, for example, ‘Eat me Adonis!’” She likes to buy a giant block of chocolate from Alain Ducasse, also in Paris, which comes with a mallet to smash it. Fun is her metier: “Return to childhood with a silly shoot out using a pair of stylish rubber band guns from Elastic Precision.” She recommends visiting Liwan, in St. Germain, for unique and artisanal objects from Lebanon. “Spectacular beaten metal stools, wine buckets, satin blankets, thongs.” If you need to send a bouquet in Manhattan, call Emily Thompson Flowers, an artist turned florist (212-882-1384). At Lena Rewell, you can find handmade wool blankets from Finland. In Venice, order custom bookplates at Gianni Basso Stampatore (30100 Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy). She says visit Castro Smith, the London jeweler, for “extraordinary hand-engraved rings and pendants for the rocker whether bespoke or ready-made.” Andraab, in Jaipur, has “the finest handwoven cashmere scarves and shawls.” She also recommended the now-discontinued Folle 26 stapler by Henning Andreasen. “Makes stapling a pleasure.”
I personally love an office accessory. I remember complimenting the painter Sam McKinniss on his grade-school style manual pencil sharpener, which is installed in his kitchen pantry in Litchfield County, Connecticut. He said the writer Michael Londres, his boyfriend, bought it for him last year.
Novelist Sarah Blackley Cartwright, winner of blurb of the year, recommends “thinking about the public artworks near important intersections of your shared life with the giftee, and setting up an alert on the auction aggregate site Invaluable.com for small-scale sculptures by the artist who made them.” She’s done this herself: In the park—the corner playground on Bleeker and West 11th— where Sarah’s daughter took her first steps sits a memorable bronze sculpture by the artist Chaim Gross. (“A family of five finds equilibrium by balancing on each other’s hands—the family is both corporeally grounded and gracefully reaching toward the sky.”) Her husband, the artist Nicolas Party, found, at auction, a tabletop bronze by the same sculptor, of a mother and child. “The dissimilarity of the scale, from the public sculpture we walk past every day, makes it feel even more intimate.”
This story was corrupted by a game of telephone, but London’s most feared literary editor, Claudia Fitzherbert, said her son, the academic Xavier Buxton, once forgot her birthday. So she went to his mantel piece, ran her hand slowly over all the objects, and paused when his lips began to flutter. That’s when she knew what to take.
The arts journalist Edward Helmore—who is vaguely related to Xavier, a connection so tenuous that in fact I was the one that introduced them—recommends a cheese house with a chicken wire front. “Keep your cheese at room temperature.” He recommends a subscription to Sparticist, the Socialist newspaper. “It’s quite relaxing to read.” He reminded me that the artist Jack Pierson is hosting a Christmas shop right now at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts (105 Henry Street).
The artist Cyril Kuhn recommended a wood chain from Maine, carved by ex cons. He included a picture, but no information about how to procure one. I have a feeling he doesn’t do these, but do try to get a portrait commission out of Cryil.
Journalist Alice Gregory recommends a “rain cloche lined in necktie silk from John Pearse,” the British tailor beloved amongst aging rockstars. (“I bought one this summer in rainbow velvet but should have restrained myself and gone with black moleskin.”) For children, she recommends personalized name bowls from Brittany. They’ve got “ears,” perfect for grubby little hands.
Jon-Jon Goulian, who the New York Times describes, correctly I think, as “his own best character,” who I would describe as a gardener in Vermont but I hear he’s moving back to New York so I’ll call him a Literary Figure of a type we never really deserved, says someone once had his favorite book, Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson, made out of marzipan. “A cool and thoughtful gift, and, if you like marzipan, which most people don’t, delicious.” E-mail Dahlia’s Custom Cakes. He recommends giving someone a framed luna moth, even though he gave his away. “Why? Because not long after receiving it, during a two-week period in which I was flirting with an extreme form of veganism (wondering what right I had to kill mosquitoes or flies), I found myself feeling guilty for owning it, guilty for being a party, however passive, to the capturing, killing, and exhibiting of this exquisite thing. So I took it to the Museum of Natural History and placed it on one of the glass insect enclosures, and then I ran out of the museum. I'm not quite sure what this achieved, but it made me feel better. Years later, I found out that luna moths only live at most one week, so capturing it and killing it, especially on day six or seven, seems a trivial deprivation of life and liberty.” (In Young Kim’s book about having sex with Richard Hell, she says you can get a custom box of pinned insects from Deyrolle. Jon-Jon says it’s cheaper to buy one on Etsy.) Jon-Jon also recommend the perfect stocking stuffer for people who hang out in the woods: “A pack of three ORIGINAL TICK-KEY TICK REMOVERS, for 20 dollars, in blue, red, and silver. The advantage of using a tick-key to remove a tick from your body, as opposed to a tweezers, is that the tick-key stands a greater chance of removing the whole tick, whereas tweezers might leave the head.”
The critic Rosa Lyster recommends Janet Flanner’s World: Uncollected Writings 1932-1974. “Dispatches from the woman who served as the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent for fifty years… I press this collection on everyone, and I’ve yet to meet someone who isn’t knocked out by at least a few pieces from it. How did she do it? Why does no one write like this anymore?” She says You’re All Invited: Margot’s Recipes for Entertaining, by Margot Henderson, wife of Fergus and founder of Rochelle Canteen, “contains, to my knowledge, the first written instance of the term ‘Negroni roar’ ie what happens to the volume in a room after everyone is two Negronis down.”
The artist George Condo, says he greatly appreciated this truffle set and a lordship in Scotland. Gifts from his daughters, Eleonore and Raphaelle! Journalist Eleonore Condo says the gift she treasures most from her father is a taxidermied Blue-Necked Tanager under a bell jar. Eleonore says Blue Tree (1285 Madison Ave) has “over the top versions” of beloved games. “I have a Clue Board that is completely 3D.” For funky plate lovers, Eleonore recommends Seletti Hybrid China. For those into silly ceramics, she recommends flying to Margarites, the town in Crete dedicated almost entirely to ceramics. “At this shop called Kerameion Pottery Workshop (+30 2834 092135), we found a salt shaker that looks like a little pebble. You pour salt into a hole at the bottom of the shaker, but it doesn’t spill out, it only shakes out. It’s like magic.” (She sent me a video, it does what she says.)
One of our greatest living writers Jamaica Kincaid says, “I want nothing for Christmas really for I am Jew.” I felt a little crazy when I read that e-mail.
Ex-my-favorite-writer-of-all-time Elizabeth Gumport, now a lawyer, recommends an Elsa Peretti bean box. “She designed these soap dishes for Halston in the 1970s, I think—they're available in porcelain, ceramic, and plastic. The dish can hold trinkets or just sit on a shelf and be what it is, which is an exquisite white bean. It looks like a sexy bone. If you want, you could buy the matching bean-shaped soap.”
The translator Alasdair MacKinnon, a witness at my wedding, says you can get Sealskin slippers in various levels of ethicality here.
The only critic to put fear in the hearts of her fellow millennials, Lauren Oyler, says her friend Monika Grabuschnigg makes Nightshade sculptures that look like “goth pets.” “I first saw them in a group show in an office space in Berlin. She had two on a cheap IKEA desk next to a computer monitor and other office stuff. Creepy and beautiful.” Though “wary of book recommendations,” she usually gives people A House in Norway by Vigis Hjorth. “It’s especially good for landlords who feel conflicted about being landlords, and for housing activists.”
The furniture designer Rich Aybar says he can’t stop thinking about a “blackened-bronze box in the shape of a rabbit” by the Swiss artist Andreas Caderas. “Ludicrously incapable it is as a container.”
The OG Artforum critic David Rimanelli says you should stop by Nardi in Venice. “Let’s just say blackamoors galore, usually with eyes made of rubies Jewelry. Fabulously, politically, incorrect, glamorous, crazy, wicked evil jewelry. It’s like Harry’s Dolce on the Giudecca… the real Venice.” Oh, and he says he used to have nice red silk cardinals socks from that store in Rome that sells ecclesiastical vestments for the Vatican.
The English writer Ella Cory-Wright, who as it happens is a glamorous ex of my husband, says “most days” she wears cowboy boots from Heritage Boot in Austin. (“I bumped into the shop’s owner at an airport, and she said: ‘You’re wearing my boots’. And I said ‘No! They’re mine’.) A gift from her mother. She says she was given a copy of Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life by an ex. “A remarkable poetic/photographic story of life in Harlem in the 40s and 50s. It is dirty and it is holy and it is joyful. (‘I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose’.)”
The greatest satirist of our generation, the novelist Lexi Freiman says, “My mother once gave me a velvet pouch full of my baby teeth…mixed in with my brother’s baby teeth. Though usually she’s very generous. For my 21st birthday, she gifted me an eight-day intensive therapeutic workshop where we spent hours beating up effigies of our parents. It was a life-changing gift, and it’s called The Hoffman Process.”
The elegant critic Joanna Biggs says, “I was given a first edition of Le Deuxième Sexe in French as a present when I left London, which came from The Second Shelf, which is hardly a secret but a good place to find rare Beauvoir.” She says Womb House Books has “trustable taste in books,” noting they’re selling “a Norton edition of Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which is destined for a revival, being the astonishing feminist Bildungs-Kunstlerroman in blank verse that it is.” (They also have “ vintage self-help like Jaguar Woman, The Dance of Anger or Codependent No More! You can obviously only buy self-help for people you know extremely well, but what is better than the gift of being seen?”) She says she wishes someone had gotten for her, at auction, “a photo of Plath during her Platinum Summer… or Didion’s Cartier desk clock.”
Homegoods store owner Audrey Gelman recommends The Tiny Dollhouse, New York's only dedicated dollhouse and miniatures shop. She’s building an elaborate English country themed dollhouse. “I purchased this darling miniature paper towel holder and a cheese dome the side of a pushpin. For the morbid lover in your life, you can even buy this 1/12th scale tiny coffin.”
Cultural critic Katie Roiphe says the best gift she ever got was Art Shay's photograph of Simone de Beauvoir. “She is naked, in heels, getting ready in a bathroom.” Her husband tracked it down. “One very high maintenance gift I would like is for someone to go to New Delhi and bring me home tablecloths, napkins, pillows, and pajamas from Anokhi and Fabindia (Their websites only carry a few things and don't do justice to the range of their possibilities.)” She recommends, for those buying books in London, Persephone bookstore in London. “They have a cool selection of books by and about women, with stylishly simple gray covers and colorful patterned endpaper. Somehow I find them the platonic ideal of books.”
The OG Artforum critic Rhonda Lieberman says she’s “not too proud to suggest The Rhonda Lieberman Reader, ed. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer (Pep Talk, 2018).” I don’t let anyone recommend their own work, but I’ll make an exception. I reviewed it, positively, for Artforum. I hear she reads tarot. That’d be a great gift.
Novelist Chiara Barzini says she loves “the artwork of the elusive Roberto Di Alicudi Contessa Schifanoja (a pseudonym). He lives in a tiny Sicilian island called Alicudi and does amazing paintings on glass. Impossible to purchase his artwork online. And when you do manage, it usually works that you meet up at his studio in Rome where the paintings get hand delivered. The whole procedure makes the satisfaction of finally holding a painting in your hands particularly satisfying.” Here is a piece about him on Art Tribune.
Artist Willa Nasatir recommends buying a portrait of your loved one from the artist Emma McMillan. $1000. She does pets, too. (Willa has been known to make people fake press passes for Christmas. A mensch.)
Expert reader Francine Prose says “for adults still waging the good fight to make kids fall in love with books,” try The Planets and The Mysteries of the Universe. “Our 7-year-old grandson coveted his school library copies: the pages were edged with gilt! When we got him his own, he seemed to think he'd gotten the Gutenberg Bible, and when his friends came over to play, my proudest moment: He showed them...his new books.”
MAST BOOKS employee Laila Alqaddumi recommends Irth in Ramallah. “The lady who owns the shop sources all the objects from different crafts people from different villages across Palestine. “She also has beautiful fabrics and can make you a custom thobe for like $200. They are handsewn by women in Gaza.” She says her boyfriend once got someone “a Birkin Bag, but made out of Chinese joss paper, like the ‘hell notes’ meant to burn at funerals. I thought that was funny but could have unfavorable spiritual outcomes…”
An absurd number of English people tried to make submissions anonymously. I refused most of them, but these were too good not to share: (1) “S.J. Phillips is the most exciting jewelry shop in the world. The sort of place where a John Le Carre character would go to buy something for his bad-tempered but/and bewitchingly sexy mistress. On Bruton St in London, in a building with a thrillingly ugly 80s lobby.” (2) “See what you need, really, is a waist coat that you wear under your shooting jacket made from Peruvian hamster pelts. Because hamster is light and warm and it can SW-ING!”
If you would like to buy me something for Christmas, I’d like: (1) More wineglasses from Miranda Keyes. The most breakable wine glasses in the world. For our wedding present, she made us two custom champagne flutes. I’m afraid to drink out of them. They make me so happy. (2) More Patrician White Wine Glasses from Lobmeyr. My husband bought me these last year, and smashed one the same day. I always need more wine glasses. (3) Ludwig Reiter boots. I say this every fucking year. And every year no one gets me any. Infuriating. My first pair, purchased by an ex, were stolen at The Wing. (4) A house account at Eulalie, in Tribeca (formerly The Simone, of the Upper East Side). It’s my date night restaurant. I define date night restaurant as having a hand-written menu and costing upwards of $300 for 2. Joe and I had a wonderful dinner there last week where we spotted Matt Schneier, the new New York magazine food critic, and one of my favorite reporters. Watch out for his review… (5) I want a new chin from Casey Welk. He just opened. So right now he’s a secret. As with all secrets, I heard this one from Alexis Page, the most important person in beauty you’ve never heard of. I wouldn’t get a new chin from anyone else!!!!!! (6) Season tickets to the Knicks. (7) Actually… Tickets to any game for any sport. I love sports. I am really upset that since I got married, men do not invite me to games. It hurts my feelings. (8) What I REALLY want is someone to build me a bookshelf, in my kitchen, stocked with the best books ever written as selected by the Genius Alex Carnavale. Every single one of these books, please. (I hate when people put bookshelves in their living rooms. Get a library!)
There are a few clothing items I covet BUT you’re going to have to wait to hear about them. I’ll be writing a more… “shoppable” gift guide for Magasin that will run mid-Dec. Subscribe! It’s my favorite newsletter. (She always tells the truth i.e. the new Phoebe Philo stuff isn’t that interesting.)