The holiday season is in full swing and boutique windows are glittering on Rodeo Drive. So who better to talk to right now than the famed window dresser, Simon Doonan!

When he was creative director at Barney’s, Doonan never missed an opportunity for maximal effect with storefront displays that transformed fashion retail into spectacle. Now he is a writer and eminence on all things style-related – and he has released a new book about design at full volume.

Maximalism: Bold, Bedazzled, Gold, and Tasseled Interiors, features lavish spaces around the world: from opulent Old World interiors to a Bel Air bedroom with no surface untouched, by Kelly Wearstler, the candy colored Trixie Motel in Palm Springs by Dani Dazey, and Doonan’s own bedazzling New York apartment, designed by his husband Jonathan Adler.

Guest host Frances Anderton talks with Doonan on the season-closer of Rodeo Drive - The Podcast about why you can never layer on too much, and how Maximalism is right at home in Los Angeles, dating “from Busby Berkeley to Tiny Naylor's coffee shop,” and on to today’s spectacular concerts by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Harry Styles. “We live in such a visual world that minimal decor doesn't mean anything online or on your phone or on TikTok” says Doonan. “Everything has to be maximal, and LA is at the center of the culture in so many ways.”

Doonan recalls an encounter with the larger-than-life Tony Duquette at his home Dawnridge, in Beverly Hills. Duquette, a prolific designer whose resume includes creating costumes and sets for Fred Astaire musicals, and making jewelry for Tom Ford in his eighties, filled his home and garden with antiques, chinoiserie, sunburst sculptures, gold-leafing, tapestries and cleverly upcycled trash. It was, says Doonan, an “unhinged visual extravaganza.”

Doonan peppers the conversation with amusing insights. When asked if maximalism, or “maxi,” can ever become too messy, he says he will never judge, having fond memories of a childhood vacation at the blue collar Butlins holiday camp in the UK, which was “drenched in the fabulosity of maximalism.” He adds, “If somebody is happy, and their apartment looks like a good reflection of them, you do you, boo.” As for the ultra-rich who prefer battleship gray T-shirts over lavish displays of affluence, “one of the most hilarious things is when somebody becomes so wealthy that the only way they can find pleasure is to build a concrete bunker on a Swedish Island, and go and hide in it,” says Doonan.

Finally, to those who believe minimalism is the path to happiness, he concludes: “I just think maximalism is more life affirming and maximalism doesn't need minimalism…Minimalism relies on maximalism to have something to denounce, whereas maximalism is much too big to fail.”

Season 4 of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Two Rodeo Drive, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season 4 Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kathy Gohari

Scriptwriter, Editorial Advisor and Guest Host: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso

Visit the website: https://rodeodrive-bh.com/podcast/

Join us on Instagram @rodeodrive

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was the beautiful fashion PR who married the most eligible bachelor in America, John Kennedy Jr. The couple, and Carolyn’s sister Lauren, tragically lost their lives when a plane flown by Kennedy crashed into the ocean in 1999.

But Bessette Kennedy had an outsize influence on style and fashion in the 1990s that endures today, and her legacy has been celebrated in a new book, CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion, by the British author and fashion creative director Sunita Kumar Nair, with a foreword by Gabriela Hearst, and preface by Edward Enninful, OBE.

On Episode 5 of Season 4 of Rodeo Drive - The Podcast, Kumar Nair talks with Lyn Winter about her carefully curated and sumptuously illustrated book, which tracks Bessette Kennedy’s fairytale rise, starting with a job at a Calvin Klein store in a mall where she was, ”plucked by a corporate executive at Calvin Klein, and offered the golden ticket – come to New York.”

From there the willowy blonde with a knack for an ultra-chic and minimal “thrown together look,” became a fashion muse herself, in an era when American fashion traded padded shoulders and power suits for the understated elegance and comfort of Klein, Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren.

Kumar Nair shares anecdotes about the celebrities – Kate Moss, Jennifer Aniston, Sharon Stone – and the great names in fashion and design who worked with Bessette Kennedy, and were inspired by her.  

She says the photographer Mario Sorrenti “remembers a time when they were sitting on the floor, talking about what the goals were for the advertising,” and corporate would want to know, “what does Carolyn think?”

She also talks about Bessette Kennedy’s powerful sense of self, wearing what pleased her despite societal expectations. When she married into American royalty, she might have taken to “wearing perhaps Dior or Yves Saint Laurent,” as well as the jewelry she inherited from her late mother-in-law Jackie Kennedy, also a fashion icon. “But instead she chose to wear Yohji Yamamoto and Ann Demeulemeester, and I think the only piece of jewelry (of Jackie Kennedy’s) that she would wear often was Jackie's Cartier Tank.”

Finally, Kumar Nair explains how Bessette Kennedy’s allure endures today, in part because of how she approached life and clothes, with discretion and simplicity. “I think there is just this demand for her because there's a dignity in the way that she lived and I think it's inspiring for people who didn't grow up with her to pick up a book and discover her and her world.”

Season 4 of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Two Rodeo Drive, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season 4 Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kathy Gohari

Scriptwriter and Editorial Advisor: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso

Listen, subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Visit the website: https://rodeodrive-bh.com/podcast/

Join us on Instagram @rodeodrive

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You’re no doubt familiar with haute couture, but how about haute parfumerie? That’s what you find at Henry Jacques, the jewel box of a perfume boutique on Two Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

The ultra exclusive French perfumery was founded in the 1970s by Henry Jacques and his wife Yvette, creating bespoke fragrances for private clients. When it was on the brink of closure, their daughter Anne-Lise Cremona stepped in, and has led the company in opening exquisite retail boutiques around the world.

On Episode 4 of Rodeo Drive–The Podcast, Season 4, Cremona, now global CEO, talks to Lyn Winter about bringing perfume into the 21st century, while preserving the brand's storied history and tradition, 

Henry Jacques takes cues from French haute couture, explains Cremona, which hues to tradition while creating a bridge to innovation. “We produce everything in house. We do a lot of things by hand, and we keep using a certain know-how that doesn't exist commonly today.” 

Meanwhile, the company has opened a state of the art laboratory with more than 1200 components of perfume, and produced cutting edge delivery systems for perfume like the titanium Clic-Clac for solid scents.

She talks about collaborations, with her uncle, Richard Mille, and Rafael Nadal and his wife Maria, and with the maison’s designer Christophe Tollemer on the branding of the company and the luxurious, wood-paneled, apartment-style interiors that offer visitors a sense of mystery and discovery.  “It’s perhaps also the future of retail to open a door and enter a completely new world, where you are transported by a universe,” Cremona says.

Cremona also talks about why the company no longer has the traditional, singular “nose,” and offers thoughts on outmoded gender distinctions in perfume. One evening in Italy, she recounts, her son wore La Nuit, a flowery perfume made of white flowers and orange blossom.  “Everybody was crazy in love with the spirit, the perfume he wore. And who could imagine that this perfume would suit a young boy?”

Finally, Cremona shares her personal wardrobe of scents, the joy of keeping the business in the family, and the endless delight of working with Henry Jacques perfumes, that in addition to being “haute” are also labeled “vivante.” “I like things to be living. And perfume helps you to feel alive. And that's why it's haute parfumerie vivante. We're here, we exist. It's possible.”

The Henry Jacques boutique is located on Two Rodeo Drive at 204 N Rodeo Drive.

Season 4 of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Two Rodeo Drive, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season 4 Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kathy Gohari

Scriptwriter and Editorial Advisor: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso.

Listen, subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Visit the website: https://rodeodrive-bh.com/podcast/

Watch moments from the series on YouTube

Join us on Instagram @rodeodrive 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.