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When Boomers Blow Up
He loved museums, architecture, reading, first edition books, the theater, seeing four movies in one day with his friend Annette Williams; the clothes at Barneys, Bergdorf and Armani; cosmetics counters, face creams, spas, manicures and pedicures; travel; five-star hotels; Swiss Style design; Helvetica typeface; the simple beauty of a straight, clean line.
His brother Scott, five years younger, would visit and wonder how the Schnippers had produced such an aesthete.
“He came from a family of dress salesmen, shoe salesmen, shopkeepers, schleppers, furriers and restaurant owners,” Scott Schnipper said. “His art and expression and culture and sophistication and taste stood out.”
Steven Schnipper was an award-winning designer, who kept getting better jobs. At Estée Lauder, he worked his way up to a position as an executive director of design.
For cosmetics lines like Prescriptives and La Mer, he created the packaging, brochures, advertising, in-store displays and direct mailings that looked like fine art.
As his first lover and lifelong best friend, Wesley Mancini, a fabric designer, said, “His 40s were definitely the best decade of his life.” He was making a (low) six-figure salary at Lauder, and in 2001, moved from an Upper East Side studio to a one-bedroom in the heart of Chelsea’s gay community. He supported the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, marched yearly in the AIDS walks and volunteered to deliver food to a senior center in the West Village.
But as Mr. Mancini said at the memorial service, “in his 50’s his world began to go amuck.” In 2003, during a round of downsizing, he was let go after 20 years at Estée Lauder. He quickly found work as a creative director at Revlon, but after three years lost his job there, too, when the company cut its work force 8 percent. He was hired by Coty, but let go in 2007, and never worked steadily again.
As the contraction of the cosmetics industry segued into the Great Recession, he grew desperate. This man who’d studied design under the legendary Paul Rand at Yale and won awards from AIGA (formerly the American Institute of Graphic Arts) was turned down for jobs as a salesclerk at Design Within Reach and a teller at Citigroup and TD Bank.
To make his condo payments, he began withdrawing $25,000 every three months from his 401(k). “What will I do if I can’t find a job?” he’d ask his brother, sobbing.
On March 19, six months after the economic collapse and a week and a half after the Dow fell below 6,600 — the last night of the gloomiest winter in memory — Steven Schnipper, 56, was found dead in his apartment. The medical examiner ruled suicide from an overdose of antidepressants. The downstairs neighbors told police they thought they heard a thump on the floor at 2 or 3 a.m. the night before. There was no note, just a list of his relatives left on the living room table.
“Until now,” said his brother, “Steven never caused anyone any trouble.”
Statistically, he was vulnerable. Boomers 45 to 64 have the highest suicide rate of all age groups, according to 2006 figures, the latest available, from the National Center for Health Statistics. Dr. Myrna Weissman, a Columbia psychiatry professor and member of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said that starting about 20 years ago researchers noticed a higher rate of depression in boomers than the previous generation at that age. They attributed the increase to a number of stresses: more divorces, more-transient lifestyles, more drug use. “We expected to see this generation’s suicide rate increase, since people are more likely to kill themselves as they age,” Dr. Weissman said.
The economy is an A-1 stressor. According to the federal Suicide Prevention Resource Center Web site, “widespread increases in unemployment” are “strongly linked with increases in suicide rates.” Men are most affected. While women attempt suicide three times as often as men, men “succeed” four times more often. In 2006, 33,308 Americans committed suicide, 26,308 of them men.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/fashion/20genb.html
Dropping Down A Gen
Seeing Yourself in Their Light
By ALLEN SALKIN
THE dream used to be different.
Four years ago, noon would have found Gabrielle Bernstein on her way to lunch at the Soho House with a potential client of the public relations agency she co-owned. By night, she was throwing back Patrón tequila at Cielo, the Coral Room or another of the downtown clubs she represented.
Her occupation has changed. Last Tuesday at noon, Ms. Bernstein, 29, was perched on a meditation blanket in a yoga studio on West 13th Street, easing into 45 minutes of silent contemplation.
That night in her apartment in Greenwich Village, she anointed her hands in fragrant oil and, using a mixture of phrases gleaned from self-help books, meditation exercises and inspirational music, led seven young women seated on saffron and red pillows through nearly two hours of spiritual life-coaching.
“Hang out in the light,” she told the women, all in their 20s and early 30s, quoting from her forthcoming book, “Add More -ing to Your Life.” “Take action once a day to do something that ignites your life.”
You could call Ms. Bernstein, who no longer eats red meat or drinks, a life coach, meditation guide or New Age therapist. But the clients who pay $180 for four weekly sessions are more likely to call her guru.
“A lot of women look up to her,” said Jennifer Fragleasso, 31, who joined Ms. Bernstein’s group in January. “We need this guidance and we are searching for this guidance.”
A decade ago, young women like Ms. Bernstein might have been expected to chase the lifestyle of high-heels and pink drinks at rooftop bars of the meatpacking district. But now there is a new role model for New York’s former Carrie Bradshaws — young women who are vegetarian, well versed in self-help and New Age spirituality, and who are finding a way to make a living preaching to eager audiences, mostly female.
Ms. Bernstein is one of a circle of such figures, influenced less by the oeuvre of Candace Bushnell than that of Marianne Williamson, the spiritual lecturer who wrote “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of ‘A Course in Miracles,’” and by other books of pop self-actualization like “The Secret,” “Eat, Pray, Love” and even “Skinny Bitch.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/fa...ml?ref=fashion
Four years ago, noon would have found Gabrielle Bernstein on her way to lunch at the Soho House with a potential client of the public relations agency she co-owned. By night, she was throwing back Patrón tequila at Cielo, the Coral Room or another of the downtown clubs she represented.
Her occupation has changed. Last Tuesday at noon, Ms. Bernstein, 29, was perched on a meditation blanket in a yoga studio on West 13th Street, easing into 45 minutes of silent contemplation.
That night in her apartment in Greenwich Village, she anointed her hands in fragrant oil and, using a mixture of phrases gleaned from self-help books, meditation exercises and inspirational music, led seven young women seated on saffron and red pillows through nearly two hours of spiritual life-coaching.
“Hang out in the light,” she told the women, all in their 20s and early 30s, quoting from her forthcoming book, “Add More -ing to Your Life.” “Take action once a day to do something that ignites your life.”
You could call Ms. Bernstein, who no longer eats red meat or drinks, a life coach, meditation guide or New Age therapist. But the clients who pay $180 for four weekly sessions are more likely to call her guru.
“A lot of women look up to her,” said Jennifer Fragleasso, 31, who joined Ms. Bernstein’s group in January. “We need this guidance and we are searching for this guidance.”
A decade ago, young women like Ms. Bernstein might have been expected to chase the lifestyle of high-heels and pink drinks at rooftop bars of the meatpacking district. But now there is a new role model for New York’s former Carrie Bradshaws — young women who are vegetarian, well versed in self-help and New Age spirituality, and who are finding a way to make a living preaching to eager audiences, mostly female.
Ms. Bernstein is one of a circle of such figures, influenced less by the oeuvre of Candace Bushnell than that of Marianne Williamson, the spiritual lecturer who wrote “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of ‘A Course in Miracles,’” and by other books of pop self-actualization like “The Secret,” “Eat, Pray, Love” and even “Skinny Bitch.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/fa...ml?ref=fashion
then up a class or two
Amid the Bust, the Boom Boom
By GUY TREBAY
SHOULD you ever happen to run into the Japanese ultra-genius pop star artist and handbag designer Takashi Murakami at the Boom Boom Room of the Standard Hotel, on the eve of his latest art opening, it may help if you have a few questions prepared.
Sample question: Do you find that conducting the whirlwind jet-setting life of an ultra-genius pop star artist and handbag designer leaves you time for quiet consultation with your muse?
Or: What role does fate play in fame and global recognition? Do some ultra-genius pop star artist handbag designers just get lucky, while others wind up making Hendrick’s martinis behind a bar?
Or: Who styles your topknot? It’s kind of cute.
The one thing you should probably never inquire of a person of Mr. Murakami’s stature, on the eve of his exhibition at the Larry Gagosian Gallery, on the final night of Fashion Week, in the Boom Boom Room of the Standard Hotel, locus of all things flossy and urgent and cosmopolitan for the last seven days (and, looking forward, one might predict for the following 90), is what he thinks makes a party fun.
If you present such a banal query, well, be prepared for a look of smoldering incomprehension, a coldly evidenced distaste for breaches in the protocols of global celebrity. You must be ready to experience a displeasure that could atomize you, reduce you to an integer of laboring-class nothingness, a mote of dust.
“Do you know who you are talking to?” a Murakami acolyte will ask you in a tone that is equal parts astonishment and horror.
“Why, yes.”
“Do you know who this person is?” the acolyte will repeat.
“Yes.”
And then Mr. Murakami himself will give you a slow burn and mutter, “I don’t like bars,” and then another acolyte will soothingly murmur, “Let’s sit down,” and then the Murakami coterie will commence to fan the pop star artist and handbag designer with flattery, much as drones in a hive do a queen bee, so his core does not melt.
And you?
Well, perhaps you will mooch a mini-truffled grilled cheese sandwich or a caponata crostini with basil from one of the trays being passed by a waitress hired equally for her comeliness and her ability to glide coolly through mobs of important people, carrying a drinks tray and wearing a uniform comprising a virginal white Rubin Chapelle dress and Capezio salsa dancing shoes.
Does it matter whether this young woman, drawn from the ranks of women no less lovely and who arrive here daily in waves, cannot yet distinguish the small and taut-fleshed, tightly tailored, and faintly Tang-colored fashion eminence and art collector Giancarlo Giammetti from Stavros Niarchos, the Homerically handsome young scion of a fabled shipping fortune?
It does not.
The Boom Boom Room has only just opened. There will be plenty of time for her to figure that stuff out.
And when she does, the designer Cynthia Rowley remarked on Thursday night, as she perched on a suede marshmallow chair in a nook by a window that gave out on a panorama encompassing what looked like all the lights of New Jersey, much else will come clear.
“When you come in and see her, at first she’s like a beautiful nurse in white, bringing you your cocktail,” Ms. Rowley said, indicating one of the waitresses as she moved with gymnastic ease through the crowd. When once she has dispensed her curative potions, Ms. Rowley added, the nurse-waitress magically “becomes an angel.”
And, after a certain amount of time on the job at the Boom Boom Room, the nurse angel waitress, Ms. Rowley said, may well “become a bride” to one of the monied denizens of this very world.
And thus she will have completed a circuit that places like the Boom Boom Room exist to facilitate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/fa...ml?ref=fashion
Sample question: Do you find that conducting the whirlwind jet-setting life of an ultra-genius pop star artist and handbag designer leaves you time for quiet consultation with your muse?
Or: What role does fate play in fame and global recognition? Do some ultra-genius pop star artist handbag designers just get lucky, while others wind up making Hendrick’s martinis behind a bar?
Or: Who styles your topknot? It’s kind of cute.
The one thing you should probably never inquire of a person of Mr. Murakami’s stature, on the eve of his exhibition at the Larry Gagosian Gallery, on the final night of Fashion Week, in the Boom Boom Room of the Standard Hotel, locus of all things flossy and urgent and cosmopolitan for the last seven days (and, looking forward, one might predict for the following 90), is what he thinks makes a party fun.
If you present such a banal query, well, be prepared for a look of smoldering incomprehension, a coldly evidenced distaste for breaches in the protocols of global celebrity. You must be ready to experience a displeasure that could atomize you, reduce you to an integer of laboring-class nothingness, a mote of dust.
“Do you know who you are talking to?” a Murakami acolyte will ask you in a tone that is equal parts astonishment and horror.
“Why, yes.”
“Do you know who this person is?” the acolyte will repeat.
“Yes.”
And then Mr. Murakami himself will give you a slow burn and mutter, “I don’t like bars,” and then another acolyte will soothingly murmur, “Let’s sit down,” and then the Murakami coterie will commence to fan the pop star artist and handbag designer with flattery, much as drones in a hive do a queen bee, so his core does not melt.
And you?
Well, perhaps you will mooch a mini-truffled grilled cheese sandwich or a caponata crostini with basil from one of the trays being passed by a waitress hired equally for her comeliness and her ability to glide coolly through mobs of important people, carrying a drinks tray and wearing a uniform comprising a virginal white Rubin Chapelle dress and Capezio salsa dancing shoes.
Does it matter whether this young woman, drawn from the ranks of women no less lovely and who arrive here daily in waves, cannot yet distinguish the small and taut-fleshed, tightly tailored, and faintly Tang-colored fashion eminence and art collector Giancarlo Giammetti from Stavros Niarchos, the Homerically handsome young scion of a fabled shipping fortune?
It does not.
The Boom Boom Room has only just opened. There will be plenty of time for her to figure that stuff out.
And when she does, the designer Cynthia Rowley remarked on Thursday night, as she perched on a suede marshmallow chair in a nook by a window that gave out on a panorama encompassing what looked like all the lights of New Jersey, much else will come clear.
“When you come in and see her, at first she’s like a beautiful nurse in white, bringing you your cocktail,” Ms. Rowley said, indicating one of the waitresses as she moved with gymnastic ease through the crowd. When once she has dispensed her curative potions, Ms. Rowley added, the nurse-waitress magically “becomes an angel.”
And, after a certain amount of time on the job at the Boom Boom Room, the nurse angel waitress, Ms. Rowley said, may well “become a bride” to one of the monied denizens of this very world.
And thus she will have completed a circuit that places like the Boom Boom Room exist to facilitate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/fa...ml?ref=fashion
Executive Summary
The Rome Analogy Holds....
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