Philippe I, duke of Orleans, in the robes he wore to his brother Louis XIV’s coronation in 1654, oil on canvas. Palace of Versailles. The Met’s “Camp” show would define the bisexual cross-dressing Monsieur as camp, but would he?

Whose identity is it anyway?

May 12, 2019

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s exhibit, “Camp: Notes on Fashion” (through Sept. 9) was inspired by Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” which she defined broadly as style over substance characterized by theatricality, irony, playfulness, masquerade and unselfconsciousness. It’s a definition and a show that cuts a wide swath, but in the end it turns out to be less about camp and more about identity — its mutability and its ownership.

Tennis, everyone

August 24, 2017

The qualifying rounds of the US Open are underway at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. The actual tournament – the last of the four Slams – begins with first-round play Monday, Aug. 28. In the meantime, enjoy the game’s stars in a lighter mood at Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day on Saturday, Aug. 26.

On the tournament’s infrastructure front, the big news is the temporary Louie (as in Louis Armstrong Stadium) while the United States Tennis Association readies the new Louie for its Big Apple Bow next year. On the personnel front, a number of big names will be missing this year. ...

The Lochte caper enters the backlash-against-the-backlash phase

August 26, 2016

I had planned to write a post about the big, fat September Vogue and editrix Anna Wintour’s latest anointed tennis star, Alexander Zverev, who at 19 is the youngest player to crack the top 30 since Novak Djokovic a decade ago. (The magazine article’s headline blares “Alexander the Great” above a picture of a shirtless, Alexandrian figure indeed.)

But I’m afraid such pleasures pale with the news that Brazilian Police have recommended that Ryan Lochte be charged with falsely reporting a crime for saying he’d been robbed at a gas station during the Rio Games. ...

Borna and Nole – in Vogue

August 23, 2015

Well, once again the gazillion-page (actually only 832-page) September Vogue is out, and, once again, the big issue for me is not the cover or the fashion but whom editrix Anna Wintour has anointed among male tennis players for the ritual dressing (and undressing).

This year, tennis-crazed Anna, the sly minx, is offering a kind of two-for-one and her own version of doubles. In the “People Are Talking About” section, rising star and teen dream Borna “Identity” Ćorić looks like he’s headed off to Harvard, standing at the net in a gray and white Canali sweater with gray J. Crew sweats. Coach Brad Gilbert has given the 18-year-old Croat the nickname but the question is, “Whose identity?” ...

The New York Times’ Fed love

June 29, 2015

What’s with The New York Times’ love affair with Roger Federer?

“Against the odds, Federer bids for an eighth Wimbledon title,” the paper noted in a headline on the eve of Wimbledon’s opening. The article was accompanied by a photograph of Feddy winning in 2007. For the Grey Lady, time stopped in 2007. Honestly, it’s as if The Times were Anna Wintour.

Unfortunately, for Fed, The Times and Anna, along came Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, who proved to be Fed’s real rivals, not merely his opponents. In a sense, however, they came along too late. ...

Tennis, everyone

June 26, 2015

Just in time for Wimbledon (June 29 through July 12), teNeues offers “The Stylish Life: Tennis,” a new coffee table book that ranges over the art, fashion and personalities of the modern game that began in the late 19th century. It’s a book that had me at the back cover.

The photograph (also reproduced opposite the Table of Contents) depicts the green tennis courts of Italy’s Il San Pietro di Positano resort spilling onto the jagged, pristine blue Amalfi Coast. That photograph and the reproduction of a Roger Broders poster circa 1930, with its clay courts tumbling onto a periwinkle Mediterranean Sea in Monte Carlo, are precisely what I imagined in “Water Music,” my debut novel, when my athlete-heroes vacation on the island of Mykonos. ...

Cover me: American Pharoah and the search for authenticity

June 11, 2015

What Anna wants, Anna gets – particularly when it comes to a sleek, gorgeous, well-muscled male.

And what Anna Wintour, Condé Nast creative director and Vogue editor, wants right now is American Pharoah.

Ahmed Zayat, who has pledged that the Pharoah will belong to the American people, has told Bloodhorse, which covers the Thoroughbred industry, that AP will grace the cover of the next issue of the fashion bible.

"We are breaking new territory," Zayat, who operates his family's Zayat Stables, said June 10 in a podcast interview with Bloodhorse.com.

I’ll say. Anna has featured some studs in her day – Tim Tebow (shirtless), Colin Kaepernick, her fave Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic (Speedo), Ryan Lochte (cover, with Serena Williams and Hope Solo at the beach). Now she has a soon-to-be real stud. ...