Five stylish people who do glamour on their own terms

SUZI DE GIVENCHY
Model in her fifties pushing for representation

When we meet in February, Suzi de Givenchy is fresh off a casting for the Helmut Lang label in New York, and has plans to attend a cocktail event hosted by Prada Beauty in the evening. Such may sound typical in the life of a model, except that it’s all relatively new to de Givenchy who, at 57, is making her debut on the catwalks of New York Fashion Week.

Wearing a soft Zegna turtleneck, Saint Laurent blazer, Celine jeans and velvet Repetto boots, de Givenchy exudes an understated glamour that matches her genteel demeanour. “I might wear a skirt or dress in the evening if I go out, but for the day-to-day I’m usually wearing pants because it’s comfortable,” she says. “I walk a lot, so [comfort] is my first criteria.”

Much of her pragmatic nature has been shaped by her upbringing. De Givenchy was born to Chinese parents in Hong Kong and moved with her family to the suburbs of Long Island in New York when she was four. Her parents didn’t speak English and later separated. “We had to adapt,” she recounts. “It wasn’t always easy, but we’re pretty strong people.”

A trip to Paris, aged 20, led to a fortuitous encounter with Hubert de Givenchy, nephew of the celebrated fashion designer, who shares the same name. They got married and lived together in the South of France until 2016 when he died. In 2017, de Givenchy — who had previously dabbled in interior design and was also an amateur art collector — returned to Paris to explore new professional interests. “You can’t live in the past. If I had stayed in the house, I would not have been able to get out of a hole,” she says.

De Givenchy was scouted by a modelling agent at a friend’s dinner party in 2019 — a year before the racial protests that prompted the fashion and beauty industry to increase their inclusivity efforts. “There wasn’t anyone like me at the time. No Asian women, or hardly. I thought he was joking. I also said ‘oh my god, you don’t know how old I am,’” she laughs.

With her three sons and their children in mind, de Givenchy decided to go into modelling to set an example. “I realised that my presence could make change and inspire,” she explains. Another turning point came recently, when she took part in a shoot with her grandkids for the February 2024 edition of Vogue France. There was some initial apprehension, she admits. “I was scared of the perception in fashion if people realise I’m a grandmother and that I wouldn’t fit into certain types of jobs.”

As de Givenchy comes to terms with herself, that has also influenced her style. “I went through a period of buying because I saw something new in a magazine or because that was the trend. Now, I try to buy things that I’m comfortable in and will wear more than once. I also have statement pieces that I spend a little bit more money on; while I might not wear them every day, I’ll have them for years.”

Her go-to pieces are tuxedo jackets from independent Paris label Pallas, a blue pinstripe trouser suit set from Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, and a black boxy Stella McCartney jacket bought from the 10 Corso Como boutique in Milan. “[At events] people are mostly wearing cocktail dresses, but I just go with the way I feel.”

She cites the French model, designer and perfumer Inès de La Fressange as one of her early style inspirations. “I’m inspired by people who are not necessarily in the mainstream but have their own style. I can’t say exactly what it is, but they have a coolness because they’ve twisted their [clothes] to fit and made it into something they’re comfortable with.”

Representation continues to be a driving motivator of de Givenchy’s work. She has since modelled for luxury brands including Balenciaga, Lemaire and Schiaparelli, and was delighted to find out that she would walk the autumn/winter 2024 Helmut Lang show. “Peter [Do, the creative director] is of Asian descent as well and I think that’s very important.”

De Givenchy shrugs off the typical beauty standards expected of Asian models and women in general. “There are still stigmas and stereotypes, but my goodness, we’re in 2024 and [some people] are still acting like they’re in the 1990s,” she says. “That’s one of the reasons why I agreed to this new part of my life. It’s about being Asian; it’s about being an older woman; it’s about accepting who you are.”

Kati Chitrakorn

LAQUAN SMITH
Creator of outfits with an eveningwear aesthetic

LaQuan Smith credits the time spent with his grandmother as a young child as his informal introduction to creativity. “My grandmother was really into art and crafts, from very small things like table settings and decorating Easter baskets to costumes for the church plays,” says the 35-year-old, New York-based designer. Fascination with colour, clothing and tailoring quite naturally followed when he was in art school in his early teens.

“In eighth grade, I really started to home in [on] just wanting to construct clothing and design pieces for women,” he says. “Everything that I was illustrating was these sexy croquis [quick sketches of fashion figures] walking dogs in the street. I remember taking an architecture landscaping class and my landscape was a LaQuan Smith store on 5th Avenue. I got a 96 on that project.”

Today, Smith’s designs can be bought on 5th Avenue at luxury store Saks, but also internationally, from São Paulo in Brazil to Sydney, Australia. For the past 14 years Smith has been bringing to life his croquis on the New York catwalks, cladding models in skintight mini dresses with plunging necklines and draped details, sequinned gowns with suggestive cut-outs, high-leg, sheer bodysuits and pencil skirts with vertiginous side slits. He has become a favourite of Beyoncé, who has worn LaQuan Smith multiple times in the past year, including a custom catsuit backstage for her Renaissance world tour, as well as of Megan Fox, Khloé Kardashian and even US vice-president Kamala Harris.

The reference to those early sketches was most literal in his spring/summer 2022 show, when models strutted accompanied by poodles on a runway at the top of the Empire State Building. “I’m designing for a woman who loves being the centre of attention,” says Smith. “She has to feel luxurious and glamour is always the focal point in my collections. Women can wear LaQuan Smith because they are going out, it’s a date or a night out on the town. It’s a celebration.”

After art school, Smith applied to the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design. He wasn’t accepted, but his determination led him to launch his own label a few years later, at 21 years old. His first show at New York Fashion Week was staged inside the Society of Illustrators, a townhouse on the Upper East Side where models walked among a close circle of spectators in the style of the French couture house presentations of the early 1900s. The late Vogue editor André Leon Talley was in the audience and took Smith under his wing. “That was definitely the moment when I felt ‘this is where I belong and this is something that I’m destined for’,” says Smith.

Despite the rise of streetwear in the 2010s and the continuous popularity of activewear and informal clothing, Smith has never veered off course from his evening wear-inspired aesthetic. “I’ve always really listened and played close attention to my women, my consumers and the people who support me,” he says. “One of the things that has made my business successful is building a foundation where people just know exactly what they are getting.”

When it comes to his personal style, however, the designer says he has gone through more of an evolution. “I’m just starting to become a bit more comfortable with myself and my body. Five years ago, I didn’t even own a tuxedo or that many suits,” he says.

Today, suits are a staple of his red carpet appearances, some featuring double-breasted jackets paired with sheer, flowing blouses and wide-leg trousers, others mixing cropped tuxedo blazers with white shirts, unbuttoned to the navel. He also favours embellished, sometimes see-through turtlenecks, velvet blazers in jewelled tones and statement coats. Inspiration comes from Tom Ford, Lenny Kravitz, David Bowie and Studio 54.

“I’d like to think that I live a very glamorous life,” says Smith. “Glamour can be a lifestyle and it has a very specific way of reflecting mysteriousness in the most magical way. One can incorporate small gestures of glamour [in daily life], something like having a signature scent or [burning] my favourite Baccarat candle at home, it’s not just through clothing.”

Despite working in fashion, or maybe because of it, Smith isn’t a frivolous spender. A favourite place to find classic treasures is the Manhattan Vintage Show, an annual, three-day trade show in New York with more than 1,500 vendors. “I’ve found this Valentino fire engine red shearling jacket from the 1980s, runway Gaultier, Mugler — it’s insane,” he says. “I like to purchase things that are conversational and timeless. Before I swipe my card I always ask myself, am I going to wear this 10 or 20 years from now?”

Annachiara Biondi

LINDA RODIN
Designer with a decades-long love of denim

When Linda Rodin was 18 she moved from New York to Italy with a boyfriend. There, she started modelling, learnt Italian and shopped for beautiful clothes. “The day I got to Florence, I bought this Italian leather coat with a zip at the front and then a hat, and I thought, ‘oh my god, I look so cool’,” she says. It was 1968 and the “Swinging Sixties” were about to turn into the hippy ’70s, two decades that Rodin remembers fondly. “The ’60s were so fantastic, with maxi coats and mini skirts and all that stuff. And then in the ’70s, I was wearing denim a lot.”

Denim, it turns out, is one of Rodin’s life-long loves. It has been a staple of her wardrobe since she was five years old and she has worn it in all of its forms: mini and maxi skirts, dresses, jumpsuits, jackets, coats and — of course — bell-bottoms. A billowing pair from her line Linda Hopp, worn with sliders and a zipped-up jumper, represent for her the epitome of glamour. “I would assume that’s not anything that anyone would call glamorous, but I feel glamorous. I look relaxed and I look interesting,” Rodin says. “If I [had] ever got married, I would have worn some fabulous denim outfit, like denim pants and a jacket.”

She often elevates her denim looks with a bright red lipstick, but what really completes her outfits is a pair of statement glasses. “It’s my signature: my lipstick, my glasses and my dog,” says Rodin, who started wearing them in her early fifties and has worn them every day since then. She favours thick frames, tinted lenses and a variety of shapes, from oversized bug-eye styles to classic cat-eye and modern rectangular pairs.

“Whatever I’m wearing, when I put on my glasses I always think, ‘oh I don’t look so bad’,” she says. They also remind her of her mother, aunt and grandmother, other glasses aficionados. “My mum was really a beauty and in all of her pictures, whether she is in the garden on her knees or going out, she always looked glamorous because she had glasses on.”

Rodin was born in 1948 in Long Island, New York. She describes her approach to life as “let’s jump off a cliff and see if it works”. After her adventure in Italy, she went back to New York where she opened Linda Hopp in 1979, a clothing boutique at 379 West Broadway in SoHo. At the time, the neighbourhood was mostly warehouses and the store, designed by her architect brother in the Bauhaus style, stood out. It included Rodin’s own designs as well as a handful of New York designers. The New York Times described it as a “gallery-like boutique”.

Later, a short stab at photography turned into a long career in styling thanks to a frank comment from her sister. “[She] told me, ‘you know Linda you really don’t take great photographs but really pick great clothes’,” Rodin recalls. She learnt the basics by working with fashion photographer Gösta Peterson, a mentor of hers, and his wife, fashion editor Patricia Peterson.

Rodin is also known for her Olio Lusso, a face oil she concocted in her kitchen and started selling publicly in 2007 for $170. Seven years later, her skincare brand was purchased by Estée Lauder for an undisclosed sum (and discontinued by the latter in 2021). When we speak, she is busy working on an autobiography in pictures, including 1,000 pages of photographs from her life. She is also designing shoes in collaboration with an Italian brand after a fortuitous encounter with the label’s founder.

Rodin thinks many of these ventures, especially the ones she had early in life, would not happen today. “You could do so much back then that you could never do now, there were many more possibilities for luck and to meet people,” she says. “Now if you walk on the street you don’t meet anyone because everyone is on their phone. I hate being old, but boy I’m so glad I had the life I had, because now it wouldn’t be feasible. Any of it, it wouldn’t work.”

Among all of the adventures, style has been a constant in Rodin’s life and her taste hasn’t changed with age. “I still wear mini skirts, just now I wear them with tights. I still have the same silhouette that I’ve always had, so it was never a dramatic change,” she says. “I buy vintage clothes that remind me of what I [used to wear]. Sometimes I feel like I’m buying back my own clothes.”

She still remembers the first dress that her mother bought for her when she was about four years old, a yellow paper dress with black and white dry piping that cost $1. “She also bought me a pair of suede, little strapped shoes and I spilled something on them. I was so upset that I remember sitting in a closet at my friend’s house trying to get whatever I spilled on them off,” she recalls.

“Whatever the decade and whatever was going on, I was into fashion, but with my own twist. I didn’t want to look like anybody else. I live the way I dress, which is totally quirky and just about throwing things together. Fashion for me it’s like, you are a blank canvas and you are going to paint it to make it the way [you want it].”

Annachiara Biondi

PAM NASR
Filmmaker whose work is rooted in Lebanon

Pam Nasr’s directorial debut, the short film Clams Casino, sees protagonist Arcelia struggling to build a relationship with her mother Gladys, all while getting ready to host a live-streamed video that involves eating large amounts of food on camera. Nasr drew on her studies in fashion styling and photography for the costumes and interiors — a mix of 1970s glam for Arcelia, who wears a feathered off‑the-shoulder top in her livestream — and 1980s excesses for Gladys, with her shining blazers, furs and gaudy New York flat.

“I wanted the viewer to know the characters before the characters even spoke and I think that’s what fashion does best,” says Nasr, 32, who shot the film in the house of Roma Lopez, the actor who plays Gladys. “It was like a time capsule, a Lebanese house in the 1980s and 1990s. She also had that old school glam vibe to her so the majority of the clothes we used were actually her own.”

Lebanon and the aesthetics of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s are a recurrent theme in Nasr’s films. Another short, shot for Versace Jeans Couture, features a group of friends decked out in the brand’s garish 1980s-inspired outfits stranded in Beirut on Christmas Eve after their car breaks down. The protagonists pair jumpsuits and dresses in loud prints with denim gilets and golden heels, all finished off with statement jewellery, voluminous hair and chain belts. It’s definitely not the classic glamour look associated with old Hollywood, but it’s charmingly unselfconscious, with touches of decadence and nostalgia.

Born in Dubai, Nasr moved to London to study a BA in fashion styling and photography at the London College of Fashion. She decided to move from fashion to filmmaking after moving to Lebanon as a graduate, the first time living in her home country as an adult. “As a way of understanding and digesting what I was surrounded by, I started documenting everything on video, and then I started creating all of these mini films,” Nasr recalls. In 2018, she gained a masters in directing from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

“When I shifted into filmmaking, my fashion background allowed me to shape my films visually, creating something that people can recognise [themselves] in,” says Nasr. Her personal style seeps through her work, a combination of structured tailoring and figure-hugging silhouettes that takes its cues from those eras, accessorised with chunky jewellery and belts.

“I’m a big ’80s and ’90s girl. When I think of what inspires me deep down I think it really is all the photos that I’ve seen of my mum and family outside of church, where they are dressed up in their best outfits,” she says. “My mum wore a lot of suits, big sunnies and matching belts and bags and shoes, big hair, a lot of jewellery. I feel like that look is so timeless and it’s a source of endless inspiration.” She believes glamour is “in your DNA” and “not something that you can change”. Outside of her family, it’s the women of TV series The Sopranos that make the cut.

A self-described “sucker for leather”, Nasr sources most of her wares on Etsy, where she has recently found numbers from 1980s designers such as Liz Claiborne, Michael Hoban and Jean Claude Jitrois. Denim, another staple of her wardrobe, is bought in Dave’s, a New York store specialised in men’s casual, military style and outerwear clothing.

Nasr says she resists a lot of newness in fashion and is consistent in how she approaches her personal style, treating her wardrobe like a uniform: “I have my go-tos and I have variations of these go-tos,” she says. “It makes me feel like myself and not trying to resemble something that I saw or a trend that’s looming over us.”

Her newest venture in the works, a bikini line, also has a strong connection to Lebanon and to Etsy, where she connected with the seamstress who has created the first prototypes. The idea was born from Nasr’s frustration of not finding a swimsuit that could suit her body in the exact way she wanted it to.

“In Lebanon, the beach culture is huge. Women go all‑out in Beirut when they wear bikinis by the pool. There are heels, there is jewellery, there is lipstick, mascara —the whole nine yards,” says Nasr. “I really want to make them very glitzy and very glamorous. My bikinis are going to be like the gowns of the bikini world — the evening event bikinis.”

Annachiara Biondi

ELIZABETH SULCER
Stylist to supermodels, renowned for red carpet moments

Uber-stylist Elizabeth Sulcer is steeped in the codes of glamour. She describes how the mood board in her mind’s eye is populated by icons from past decades: Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface (“the satin slip dresses, the fabulous white suits . . .”) Iman, Audrey Hepburn, Diana Ross, David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust days, Jerry Hall at Studio 54, Lauren Hutton in the early 1970s (“just unapologetic, and undeniably herself”) and Kate Moss, for her “effortless, cool girl glamour” — always.

New York-based Sulcer is probably best-known for styling supermodels (she has worked with Gigi and Bella Hadid, Adriana Lima, Shalom Harlow and Candice Swanepoel, as well as brands such as Louis Vuitton and Max Mara) and for her own distinctive style, which she shares with more than 800,000 followers on Instagram. Her own high-impact wardrobe is heavy on monochrome, sharp shoulders, sunglasses and luminosity. With clients, too, her take on glamour is never “too big or too frilly — there’s something important about letting the person and their beauty shine,” she says.

Other inspirations include Helmut Newton (she is a fan of the documentary Frames From The Edge, which shows how the photographer “created his language of fashion and glamour”) and Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” video from 1988. “The girls in the stockings and the slicked hair and the red lipstick. It was imprinted on my mind: these girls are so beautiful, so powerful, they are literally ‘irresistible’, they just ooze this glamour.”

The video made such an impression that she now jokingly calls the women she works with “Palmer Girls” when she posts pictures of them looking coolly alluring in outfits of her creation — a term which is also partially a reference to her husband and five-year-old son, Stone, both of whom share the surname Palmer.

Sulcer understood the power of dazzling clothes from an early age. She used to watch her mother, an interior designer, getting ready for “parties and galas in her gowns and jewels”. The stylist grew up in the suburbs but visited Manhattan a lot, including staying at a friend’s apartment in the renowned Carlyle Hotel, which she describes as “one of the most glamorous places on earth,” thanks to its combination of traditional elements — huge sash windows, crown mouldings — with sleek, upscale touches such as a marble floors. She loved watching old movies and buying magazines with supermodels on the cover. “It was all part of this big glamorous fashion dream for me,” she says.

At 20 she interned with Alexander McQueen. By 24 she was fashion director of arts and culture magazine BlackBook. She has since worked for magazines including Vogue Italia and Self Service, and on advertising campaigns for brands such as Bulgari, and with celebrities ranging from Cate Blanchett to Eva Mendes. Her slinky taste made headlines in 2016, when she dressed Bella Hadid in a spaghetti-strap crimson Alexandre Vauthier dress for the Cannes Film Festival, a formative moment in the supermodel’s career. That look encapsulated modern red carpet allure, she says “super simple, but glamorous and elegant and powerful. Everyone kind of went mad. It was a real moment in time”.

The brands she is drawn to for her own days in the spotlight — which sound as though they are frequent — include Saint Laurent (vintage and current), Tom Ford era Gucci and Alexander McQueen. She is also big on shiny things: great belts with gold hardware, vintage jewellery from Bulgari and Cartier. For daytime polish, she takes inspiration from the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair, and recommends jewellery, great boots, jeans that fit perfectly and “a beautiful wool or cashmere coat and in a special colour — not just black; something cream or white.”

She is adamant that non-supermodels can harness these tactics too. Shining fabrics can bring radiance to any outfit, she says, though not all light-reflecting clothes are created equal: Sulcer recommends “paillettes, lamé or crystals,” rather than sequins, though a double-faced satin can inject a touch of luminosity in the moments when going full disco might be a bit much. “Even just a silk slip dress,” she says; “it can be quite effortless.” A lot of glamour is confidence, she adds, so her biggest tip is to “get a great tailor and show off the parts of your body you like the most.”

Sunglasses are a must for Sulcer. Her Instagram is full of pictures of her posing in sunglasses: she favours square-edged, oversized black styles and lightly tinted 1970s-style aviators. “They add a kind of effortless coolness. And they sort of allow me to play a different character, which is fun. Whether I’m working with actors or models or myself, I have to find that character in order to create her.”

Hannah Marriott

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