Jessica Seinfeld's cause

[Chalet]

I just heard her speak for the first time. All I'd ever seen is her smile with a blank stare. I shouldn't be picking on Jess, she's doing good work. I can just never get past the Long Island affected speech having grown up near it. She seems like a nice gal in a very rarified world.

From Privileged Closets, Pradas to the Rescue Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times


IN A GOOD CAUSE Sorting through contributions for Lucky Shops, a three-part sale of high-priced hand-me-downs to assist mothers and newborns, are, from left, Beth Buccini and Sarah Easley, the owners of the Kirna Zabête boutique; and Jessica Seinfeld, the wife of Jerry Seinfeld and founder of the beneficiary, Baby Buggy.

By GUY TREBAY
Published: November 2, 2006

DON’T let Jessica price the clothes, because she’s giving stuff away,” Stefani Greenfield, the Scoop proprietor and “Today” show regular, said on Monday, referring to Jessica Seinfeld.

The two women were among a small group of friends busily wading through hip-high boxes of high-end castoffs at the Times Square offices of Lucky, the shopping magazine.

The clothes were all donations to Lucky Shops, a charity sale that the magazine holds annually, and that this year benefits Baby Buggy, a charity Ms. Seinfeld, the wife of Jerry Seinfeld, founded to provide postnatal necessities to newborns and young mothers in a tax bracket very different from her own.

Five minutes earlier, Ms. Seinfeld had suggested putting a $400 price tag on a gently worn woman’s leather coat from Prada. There are those, of course, who may think $400 is plenty to pay for an article of secondhand clothing, but no such person was in this particular room.

“A thousand, definitely,” said Beth Buccini, a proprietor of the SoHo designer boutique Kirna Zabête.
Ms. Buccini, along with her business partner, Sarah Easley, and Ms. Greenfield had been recruited by Ms. Seinfeld to organize (“curate” was the word Ms. Buccini used) the clothes shaken out of friends’ closets for the sale. A $300 a ticket V.I.P. event will take place on Wednesday evening at Gotham Hall, Broadway and 36th Street. And if the names listed on the benefit committee are any indication, the event will draw heavily on a pool of the local “it” girls, who also happen to treat shopping as a sacred vocation.

In addition there were 1,000 tickets at $75 each, all sold, for a presale party there on Nov. 9. Dedicated hoi polloi are welcome to try their luck at the final leg of Lucky’s shopping Triple Crown, which is to take place on Nov. 10, with an admission price of $50 at the door.

“We called in a lot of favors,” Ms. Easley said of the bags and dresses and necklaces and shoes and skirts and coats and hats, new and used, that the two women procured from vendors and pals. “Beth was calling up and saying, ‘Oh, could you possibly part with a bag for our sale?’ And I said: ‘Stop with the one bag! We need 100.’ She called me ‘greedy cop.’ ”
From the look of things, good cop and greedy cop and all their friends hit the jackpot. Gwyneth Paltrow sent a Lanvin necklace, a newsboy cap and a tented blouse, which came with handwritten instructions. (“To be worn with black skinny jeans and pumps or heels.”) Diane Von Furstenberg sent the dress she wore when she wed Barry Diller; Heidi Klum a sequined J. Mendel minidress that put one in mind of a figure skater preparing for her first communion; India Hicks the jacket and skirt she wore to bury her father, the dictatorial English decorator David Hicks, who, it should be noted, even stipulated which clothes the mourners should wear to his funeral. (??????)

One Manhattan socialite sent no fewer than 240 castoffs, if that is the proper word to describe Jil Sander coats from recent seasons, two dozen pair of unworn shoes from Manolo Blahnik, dresses from Marni, skirts from Azzedine Alaïa, dresses and coats from Versace, Prada and Chanel.

“She sent so many things, I thought she must be dead,” Ms. Easley said. “I mean, who would give this stuff away?”

It was a good question. And it was probably not one that would bear looking into deeply, considering that these fantastically costly articles were mere surplus.

“One woman gave us all this huge amount of stuff, and she had it dry-cleaned first,” said Alexandra Golinkin, the publisher of Lucky.

“Tons of people gave anonymously in Hefty bags,” she added. “My theory is they were in a size they never wanted to remember.”

Ms. Golinkin then pointed out a pastel floral couture evening dress from Escada ample enough to function as a party tent and a mystifying pair of custom-made jackets the owner maintained had originally cost $14,000 each. (“She said she’d send the invoice if we wanted,” Ms. Golinkin said.)

They were suggestive of nothing so much as the clothes one might find in a catalog catering to the cross-dressing crowd. “The pink one is, like, off in a bad Yves Saint Laurent kind of way, but the blue is just bad car salesman,” Ms. Buccini said.

“Maybe we don’t want this in the boutique,” Ms. Easley said.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/fa...Eg&oref=slogin