Blog – Mary Jane Denzer

February 27, 2025

*This gown exemplifies Lela Rose’s gifts for sculptural shapes, rich fabrics and bright palettes. Courtesy Lela Rose.*

Lela Rose once said that she was dedicated to the idea that you should always be dressed, and with her designs you always are.

Think Renée Zellweger on the red carpet for the Sydney, Australia, premiere of “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,” in a strapless, peony-pink column dress with a singular, folded bodice from Rose’s Pre-Fall 2025 Collection. Or Elizabeth Hurley in a long-sleeve, off-the-shoulder midi dress in Barbie pink with buttons down the front. (Other celebrity admirers have included Jessica Alba, Selma Blair, Jessica Chastain, Claire Danes, Laura Dern, Selena Gomez, Anne Hathaway, January Jones, Karolina Kurkova, Olivia Munn, Gwyneth Paltrow, Zoe Saldana, Uma Thurman, Olivia Munn, Chrissy Teigen, Sofia Vergara, Catherine, Princess of Wales, and former First Lady Michelle Obama.)

Or consider the strapless gown seen here with its slightly bell-shaped skirt, an evocation of the late 19^th-century’s Gilded Age, and an oh-so-modern palette of electric blue on black. Whether her color schemes are boldly jeweled or flirtatiously pastel, Rose’s eye for the sculptural always delivers a flattering silhouette, including distinctive bodices and necklines that draw the eye upward.

Rose honed that eye in her native Dallas, Texas, and at the University of Colorado where she graduated in 1991 with a degree in painting and sculpture before going on to the Parson’s School of Design in New York City, now her headquarters. She worked with designers Richard Tylor and Christian Francis Roth before debuting her Lela Rose Collection in 1998 and gaining attention by designing Barbara and Laura Bush’s outfits for their father George W. Bush’s 2001 presidential inauguration. The debut collection was followed by Lela Rose Bridal in the fall of 2006 and, 12 years later, Pearl by Lela Rose, a more casual ready-to-wear line.

Today, Rose’s work also embraces clutches and jewelry to complete your ensembles as well as tablescapes, because, well, your entertaining should be as well-dressed as you are. It’s not surprising, then, that she would name her 2015 home entertainment book “Pret-a-Party” or that this Westerner — who lives in Jackson Hole Wyoming, and has a ranch in Texas, as well as a home in the Catskills — would follow up with 2023’s “Fresh Air Affair: Entertaining With Style in the Great Outdoors.” It dovetails beautifully with her Lela Rose Ranch Collection, with its hand-embellished seed beading, chambray and poplin fabrics and prints like her Rey Rosa “Western Toile.”

In a 2023 interview with Veranda magazine, Rose credited her mother for her love of entertaining with flair: “She was always in the kitchen cooking and dreaming up something spectacular,” Rose says. “For my birthday parties growing up, she would wrap up little trinkets and put them insidethe cake batter, so when you were served a slice, you’d find a little surprise. It was so magical and unexpected that I’ve passed this down to my own children – for any occasion there’s a cake.”

Whether it’s fashion or home design, for Rose the divine is always in the details.

Tags: Lela Rose, Jessica Alba, Selma Blair, Jessica Chastain, Claire Danes, Laura Dern, Selena Gomez, Anne Hathaway, January Jones, Karolina Kurkova, Olivia Munn, Gwyneth Paltrow, Zoe Saldana, Uma Thurman, Olivia Munn, Chrissy Teigen, Sofia Vergara, Catherine, Princess of Wales and former First Lady Michelle Obama, Lela Rose Ranch, Pearl by Lela Rose, Leila Rose Collection, New York City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Catskills, Dallas, Texas, Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, George W. Bush, Renee Zellweger, Elizabeth Hurley,

October 31, 2024

*Lisa Dress in black crepe. Photographs courtesy Sabina Belinko.*

Sabina Belinko’s designs possess an enchanting duality – at once dramatic and romantic.

There is a sleek sophistication to the sequined, beaded Bilenko evening gowns and dresses we are featuring at Mary Jane Denzer – fitted silhouettes, angular necklines and drapery, monochromatic colors – mostly black, navy and cream – or color-block effects.

Recreated for the fall, Bilenko’s best-selling Lisa Dress, a strapless midnight blue midi, displays not only intricate beading but an arresting arched neckline that both draws the eye upward and announces a cocktail party alternative to the Little Black Dress.

Similarly, in the Sabina Dress – a full-length Empire creation in black, as seen here, or white – a V-neck, sleeveless, sequined bodice in cream introduces a seamless transition to a smooth, columnar skirt.

*The Sabina dress comes in black and white with the same sequined bodice. Photographs courtesy Sabina Belinko.*

Bilenko’s gift for subtle eye openers can also be seen in a gown that finds a long-sleeved, black, leotard-style top paired with a cool-black sequined skirt characterized by a waist that’s cut on a bias and a slit up the right leg.

Such glamour reflects the quiet luxury of fashion at this moment. But the monochromatic quality of her designs can also make use of bright and deep colors. Teal peblum midi suits and pants suits with plunging, crisscross backs. Long-waisted dresses in seafoam. Russet gowns with shoulder pads and scaly trains that echo 1940s film noir. These speak to the romantic side of the designer, as do the pink, blush and lavender mermaid silhouettes of the Autumn Winter 2024 Couture Collection, with its floral embellished bodices. (Is it any wonder that Bilenko should also have a striking bridal collection?)

As her website states, “the draping is freer, the embroideries more exaggerated and the sculptural touches gentler – as if Mother Nature has taken over the artisan’s hand.”

*Bold lines characterize this slant-waist, slit gown. Photographs courtesy Sabina Belinko.*

Bilenko’s duality was perhaps born of her twinship. She and twin sister Diana, creative director of the brand, grew up in Uzbekistan, the daughters of a woman who collected fashion pieces. At 15, they moved to London to study and eventually earned master’s degrees in luxury management. They began with a baby couture label in 2017, continued with Grace Floral London in 2020 and, working at a kitchen table during the pandemic, moved on to the Sabina Bilenko label.

You can see the twins’ Uzbek traditions in the designs’ use of ornamentation. But as Diana told Vogue Arabia, “Fashion is about personality and confidence, not brands and trends.”

The sisters are committed to Centrepoint, a charity in the United Kingdom that fights youth homelessness, with Prince William as its patron.

Added Sabina: “I believe it takes both strength and kindness to be elegant.”

Tags: Sabina Bilenko, Diana Bilenko, Uzbekistan, Vogue Arabia, Centrepoint, London, Grace Floral London, Prince William, United Kingdom, Mary Jane Denzer,

July 15, 2024

In the quarter-century since her passing on July 16, 1999, interest in Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s life and style has undergone a renaissance, on the internet and in two new books – Elizabeth Beller’s “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” and Sunita Kumar Nair’s “CBK: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, A Life in Fashion.” “CBK” copyright Abrams. “Once Upon a Time” jacket design by Claire Sullivan and jacket photograph by Penske Media/Getty Images.

One of today’s most prominent fashion influencers has actually been gone from us 25 years.

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, a Calvin Klein publicist; her husband, publisher John F. Kennedy Jr.; and her sister, Morgan Stanley executive Lauren Bessette, were just in their 30s when the plane he was piloting crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999.

In the years since they slipped beneath the rolling darkness on that hazy July night, there have been annual remembrances and the occasional memoir, including the poignant “What Remains” (Scribner, 2005) by Carole Radziwill, Bessette-Kennedy’s close friend and the wife of JFK Jr.’s cousin and best friend, Anthony Radziwill.

But nothing compares to the explosion of interest in Bessette-Kennedy this year, with two new books – Elizabeth Beller’s laudatory “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” (Gallery Books, $29.99, 329 pages) and Sunita Kumar Nair’s elegant, elegiac “CBK: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, A Life in Fashion” (Abrams, $65, 255 pages).

Meanwhile, on the internet, Bessette-Kennedy has been reborn as a quiet-luxury icon for the digital age. The classic minimalism of Calvin Klein and of her own style helped – white shirts, black pants, beige corduroys, a variety of LBDs (little black dresses). (Her simple, scoop-necked, sleeveless sheath of a wedding dress by designer-friend Narciso Rodriquez is captured in “CBK” by Denis Reggie’s famed photograph of the groom gallantly kissing the bride’s hand as they left the church but also in two sparkling pastel and white paintings by Mark Tennant.)

The Bessette-Kennedy aesthetic was also part of a minimalist fashion strategy: Buy few pieces but buy expensive. If you can’t have expensive, wear black. Choose other neutral colors as well – gray, navy and white. Favor texture over prints. Save pops of color for coats and Vineyard sarongs. Keep accessories, hair and makeup simple.

It was an approach to fashion that was not without its irony, and perhaps its disingenuousness, for Bessette-Kennedy honed “her uniform,” as Beller writes, so that she wouldn’t stand out in the glare of the detested paparazzi. Far from making her recede, however, it would brand her in the spotlight – then and now.

Bessette-Kennedy’s fashion sensibility would also crystallize the gulf between the way the press and public saw her and the way she apparently was. She was portrayed as an ice princess. But Beller describes the White Plains-born Bessette-Kennedy, who grew up in Greenwich, as a lively girl in an Italian-French Canadian family that had a strong work ethic. She went to Catholic school; liked people, particularly those who were vulnerable in some way; and always seemed to have a job. (One of the jokes was that while JFK Jr. and Anthony Radziwill were paling around on Aristotle Onassis’ Scorpios as teens, their future wives were working in Caldor’s discount department store – something JFK Jr. always marveled at.)

After St. Mary’s High School in Greenwich, Bessette-Kennedy studied education at Boston University but wound up working as a saleswoman at a Calvin Klein boutique in Beantown, where she was discovered, came to Calvin Klein in Manhattan – working with high-profile clients and rising to director of show productions – and met JFK Jr. “CBK” captures those heady, sunset days in images of the couple at events or strolling the streets of a pre-9/11 New York in what should’ve been theirs and the city’s happily ever after.

We know what happened. The world moved on to obsess over other luminaries. But an icon never dies. She just acquires a new meaning. So, too, Bessette-Kennedy, whose style has become an understated beacon for a new generation searching for a look to hold onto in uncertain times.

Tags: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr., Lauren Bessette, Calvin Klein, Morgan Stanley, Greenwich, White Plains, St. Mary’s High School, New York City, the 1990s, Denis Reggie, Narciso Rodriguez, Carole Radziwill, Anthony Radziwill, Caldor, “What Remains,” Elizabeth Beller, “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” Sunita Kumar Nair, “CBK: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, A Life in Fashion”

June 17, 2024

Robe à la française, British, 1740s. Photograph © Nick Knight, 2024. Images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Sleeping Beauties: Fashion Reawakening,” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute through Sept. 2, is an exhibit with two, often competing themes. The first is the fragility of fashion, seen through garments that lie in state like the fairy-tale princess and are designed to be reawakened through the sensory experiences the exhibit provides.

The second, related theme is the influence of the garden on fashion, with the cyclical nature of the garden as a metaphor for the vulnerability of clothing, culture and indeed all life. (That aspect of the show – along with The Met Gala held on the first Monday in May, as The Costume Institute Gala always is – was inspired by J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Garden of Time.”)

Hat, Jasper Conran and Philip Treacy, 1992. Photograph © Nick Knight, 2024. Images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The viewer wanders through crowded, serpentine, one-way galleries, straining to look at objects, listen to related narration, sniff walls with tubes that contain the scents of garment molecules and touch fabric samples – the only scent not involved is taste – all while trying to read label copy that for the most part is confined to the bottom of display cases. So exhibitgoers will be entirely forgiven for abandoning the layered upon layered Sleeping Beauty theme and instead feasting on historical designs that capture the lush history of the garden in fashion, beginning with an elegant, florally embroidered 17^th-century British waistcoat and equally elegant, florally embroidered 18^th-century robes à la française and à la anglaise.

“May” ball gown, Christian Dior for House of Dior, spring/summer 1953. Photograph © Nick Knight, 2024. Images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Some 200 years later, Christian Dior would introduce the postwar New Look, feminine and flirty and well-represented in the show by the strapless, cinch-waist, belted “May” ball gown, with its cascading purplish red clovers and greenery, from the designer’s spring/summer 1953 “Tulipe” line. It’s one of many swoon-worthy objects in a show that includes the “Irises” jacket from Yves Saint Laurent’s spring/summer 1988 collection, inspired by an 1889 Vincent van Gogh painting; a light red, glazed silk chiffon 1992 Jasper Conran/Philip Tracy hat with black coq feathers, burned and stripped into the form of a poppy; and a pair of 1955 Charles James butterfly gowns, form-fitting, strapless affairs with trains, made of cream silk satin overlaid with brown silk chiffon and light brown nylon tulle, brown silk satin and polychrome nylon tulle.

The exhibit ends with its showstopper – the 1930 gown designed by Callot Soeurs for New York socialite Natalie Potter’s wedding to financier William Conkling Ladd. The sleek gown – made of a blend of silk and cellulose acetate, an inexpensive alternative to silk – had an over-blouse that originally had a cluster of white artificial carnations falling over the left hip.

“Butterfly” ball gown, Charles James, circa 1955. Photograph © Nick Knight, 2024. Images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Like the Broadway shows and movies of the period, the gown flew in the face of the Great Depression, with a theatrical, cathedral-length train featuring interlocking scallops that evoked ocean waves and the concentric circles of seashells. In the exhibit, that train fans out down a staircase.

In such moments, “Sleeping Beauties” truly reawakens.

Tags: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Costume Institute, Natalie Potter, William Conkling Ladd, Callot Soeurs, Charles James, Jasper Conran, Philip Tracy, J.G. Ballard, “The Garden of Time,” Christian Dior, robe à la anglaise, robe à la française,

May 20, 2024

*On March 8, 2015, Iris Apfel appeared at O Cinema Miami Beach to present “Iris,” Albert Maysles’ documentary about her. https://www.flickr.com/photos/55155430@N03/16733360409/*

She’s been the subject of an exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute and a documentary film, the inspiration for a Barbie and a character in “The Incredibles” film series.

Designer Iris Apfel, who died March 1 at her home in Palm Beach at age 102, was, to borrow the name of her jewelry collection and the Costume Institute retrospective, a Rara Avis (rare bird) indeed – a maximalist among minimalists, an individual in a world a conformity, a woman of style where others sought to be merely fashionable.

“Why would you want to look like everyone else when there’s such a big choice of things today?” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2018. “It’s hard to give blanket advice, but I just think that if everybody tries to be as self-respecting and interesting as they can, it would be a better world. Use your head and think about other people and look in a mirror once in a while.”

The mirror came naturally to the native New Yorker, whose family owned a glass and mirror business and whose mother had a fashion boutique. As a youth, Apfel scoured antique shops and drew style compliments from a Brooklyn department store. Even during the Depression, she and her crafts-minded family stayed stylish on a budget. Apfel studied art history at New York University and art at the University of Wisconsin, then honed her eye working for Women’s Wear Daily, interior designer Elinor Johnson and illustrator Robert Goodman.

But it was her longtime professional and personal partnership with Carl Apfel that propelled her onto the world stage. In 1950, they started the textile business Old World Weavers, which reproduced 17^th through 19^th century fabrics. Among their clients – nine U.S. presidents, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan inclusive and Bill Clinton.

Sourcing fabrics from around the world, Apfel also began buying artisanal clothes in bright colors and bold textures and patterns that she would pair with her statement jewelry pieces and wear at parties. Add her oversize glasses, red lipstick and, as time went on, shock of white hair, and you had the makings of a global style icon.

As the urban legend goes, an exhibit at the Costume Institute fell through, and “Rara Avis: Selections From the Iris Apfel Collection” soared in 2005, marking the Costume Institute’s first show about someone who was not a fashion designer. What followed was a media blitz – a touring exhibit, two documentaries (“Iris” and “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast”), a book (“Iris Apfel, Accidental Icon”), a Barbie that was not for sale, plus two “Styled by Iris Apfel” Barbies that were, and a modeling contract. (The Museum of Lifestyle & Fashion History in Boynton Beach, Florida, is designing a building with a gallery to house Apfel’s clothes, accessories,and furnishings.)

Apfel did it all, and she did it her way. At a time when everyone began discarding everything Marie Kondo style, Apfel layered her looks and her dwellings. She was the living embodiment of the Mae West saying: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

Tags: Iris Apfel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute, Palm Beach, New York University, Harper’s Bazaar, Mae West, Carl Apfel, Old World Weavers, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barbie, “Rara Avis (Rare Bird): The Irreverent Irish Apfel,” “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast,” Elinor Johnson, Robert Goodman, University of Wisconsin, Women’s Wear Daily, Albert Maysles, O Cinema Miami Beach, Miami Film Festival,

The polished designs of Lela Rose

Sabina Belinko’s twin use of drama and romance

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy – a style icon then and now

The garden in fashion comes to life in The Met Costume Institute show

Iris Apfel, the not-so-accidental icon