Social Diary 7/6/05 - Remembering Nan

We got a lot of mail on the passing Sunday night of Nan Kempner, one of the last of the great high priestesses of fashion in America. Her almost religious devotion to fashion belied her talent for living.

One of the letters we received testifying to that came from a European man who first met her in Paris:

I had the honor of meeting Mrs. Kempner many years ago whilst attending an Haute Couture show in Paris. That was chez Chanel; I was 27 and I was there with my girlfriend.

Nan on the cover of Quest, November 2000

I clearly remember her entrance. She was as glamorous as only she could be. I can’t get out of my head the spectacular shatoosh she was holding on her thin long hands and the beautiful sling backs she was wearing. My girlfriend and I were in awe. I have had the privilege to meet very glamorous people in my life but no one like Mrs. Kempner. She exuded chic and style.

Minutes later she was seated right next to me! She had exchanged places with someone else .... She introduced herself to us and with a lovely smile she whispered " I have been rather naughty. I didn't like my seating arrangements, who wants to sit next to another old prune like me. I said to myself I MUST conquer that young man!, so here I am”.

And there she was. A connection was made. More so when during our conversation we talked about our families and she surprisingly recalled having met my grandmother many many years ago at Yves St Laurent ´s home.

By the end of the show she asked us if we wanted to share dinner with her. Christa and I took her to Le Voltaire, one of her favourite restaurants in Paris. From then onwards I would not see Mrs. Kempner very often but every time I was in New York she would find a moment to have tea with me. Always at The Carlyle, my home when I am in town.

Nan was a very democratic person, no matter what people may think. She moved with such grace and ease between so many worlds and cultures that she was the perfect companion to take to a family dinner in Venice or a black tie event in Paris. She was always prepared, interested and charming.

I can’t remember when I first met Nan Kempner, although I knew about her and had seen her many times long before. The following is an entry to my Social Diary in Quest magazine ten years ago, June 1995:

“Wednesday. Cancer Research Benefit. The Racquet Club. Society and fashion crowd; large and diverse, most of whom appeared not to know each other except for the large paid-for-tables of society types including Mrs. Thomas Kempner, chairman of this night’s event. Mrs. Kempner, known to her friends as Nan, is a woman who more than anybody else around New York exemplifies that aphorism attributed to both Babe Paley and Gloria Guinness about how a woman can’t be too rich or too thin.

Mrs. Kempner is so that thin that it’s startling. She also has straight-as-an-arrow posture. So when you see her walking down the street, clop-de-clop-de-cloppity clop, as I did one afternoon while having my coffee at Starbucks on Lexington and 78th, when you see her looking like she knows exactly where she’s going, you notice. Her beauty is her presence. She has good shoulders and a basically flat front and back. From either side, however, she has a small waist, small hips and long pencil-thin legs. She has a lot of thick, blonde, wavy hair. When she wears it pulled back, it accentuates a combination of the aquiline and feline so that you might not know if she’s smiling or plotting, just like in a novel.

There have been thousands of pictures taken of Mrs. Kempner. She’s been in all the fashion magazines many times. You can see her at parties here and all over the country and the rest of the world. She must know thousands of people because she goes and goes and goes. For Mrs. Kempner travels only in the stratosphere. The interesting part is how she looks. She’s very soigné in a way that is practically extinct. It’s an extreme fashionableness, an almost over-the-top kind of chic that is so attended to it becomes an art. A social art. I don’t know Mrs. Kempner, so I have no idea what her personality is like, be it charming or witty or chatty or somber (which I doubt). Her rigid self-presentation is distinctly cosmopolitan, Euro-New York. She is San Francisco born and bred. But she belongs to New York.

Walter Kerr, the great theatre critic and playwright of the 1960s and 1970s wrote a piece 30 years ago about the great female stars of the Broadway stage. Merman, Mary Martin, Lynn Fontanne, Carol Channing. He pointed out how unreal, how very unpedestrian they were. How exaggerated but so raffiné that they could (and did) claim all the attention for themselves. He could have made the same observation about Mrs. Kempner. She’s out of the school of Vreeland and Wallis Simpson and Coco Chanel. They’re freaks of style, aesthetic exaggerations, the genesis of high fashion.”

We went searching through our archives of images of Nan over the past fifteen years. There were two Quest covers among them. We know she had closets full of clothes but you can see from the pictures, if there were something she especially liked, she wasn’t shy about wearing it again and again, including when she was photographed. It was, after all, for the fun of it. And she was one of the lucky ones: she had fun.