It was 5:30 p.m. on a frigid December 23rd in NYC, the eve of my holiday break after a tough few weeks of scrambling to meet deadlines. All I wanted to do was get home to Connecticut so I almost didn’t answer the phone (after months of consoling my depressed retailer friends, it was getting harder to come up with words of encouragement…) But I did answer...

“Business is not quite up to last year, but it’s not bad,” confides the always elegant Domenico Spano, over dinner last week at The Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station (which, by the way, was jam-packed with both New Yorkers and tourists. We may be in a recession, but we still had to wait 20 minutes for a table, even with a reservation. The oysters,...

It was a beautiful party last week at Arno’s that Steve Wax from Bounty Trading threw for Mac Alberg (65 years in the men’s industry, more than 35 with Macy’s and 22 with Bounty) and Stan Bauman, (40+ years at Bounty, in their women’s division.) Among those in attendance were Bounty founders Bob and Sara Wax and clearly, there was a lot of love in the room...

“I thought my boss was going to kill me,” Andrew Weisbrot, national sales director at Brioni, confided about a comment he made to a customer at Richards in Greenwich in front of Brioni USA president Todd Barrato.

It was at a recent trunk show at Richards when a loyal Brioni customer walked over to Weisbrot and said he needed a navy suit. “I happened to...

I thought I was going to yet another fashion industry dinner honoring VIP industry executives with proceeds going to yet another worthy cause. (Not that I don’t love these dinners: I’m always so proud of our industry for its fundraising abilities and the many worthy causes we support!) But much to my surprise, the dinner crowd at Cipriani this past Thursday...