Before the 1990s, the word “elegance” was not used in the same sentence as “Vegas.” The reality of an earlier Vegas was excess, not elegance. It was about ogling long-legged cocktail waitresses in Daisy-Duke tights. Food was thick steaks, drinks were Scotch, and the fashions were furs on the mistress and jackass slacks on the Dunes golf course. 

It took a man who understood both worlds to bring about change. Steve Wynn, whose father ran bingo games back East and squandered his profits on the gambling tables of old-time Vegas, has become a tycoon in the business of marketing snob appeal. 

- A. D. Hopkins for the Las Vegas Review-Journal

Dear ol’ Dad was in town last weekend, and on Sunday we drove to Philly to tour the USS Olympia. When she heard that I’d gone, Mom said, “You actually went inside? Shit, the last time he wanted to see a battleship, I waited in the car!” Dad, they truly were the two most boring hours of my entire life, but I am so, so glad that I got to spend them with you.

—Bill Blass, Gary Cooper: Enduring Style

Billy and Christie made it look easy. (It probably was not easy.) 
Camcorder, baby on hip, breezy white slacks, Old Glory tee. What glamour. 

The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art is a maze of glass cabinets in the Met’s American Wing. It houses hundreds and hundreds of pieces of furniture, paintings, and decorative arts, not exhibited in the traditional sense but in perpetually “open” storage—just as art should always be. It is also now my favorite place in New York City.

SO FRESH (every day)!

Trundle quilt by Laura Fisher comprised of sixteen 48-star American flags.

Scribbled on the last page of one of Washington’s journals is a short, cryptic note: “Take a large Sifter full of Bran,” it begins. Add hops “to your Taste,” boil, mix in three gallons of molasses, ferment—”let it work”—for a week, then enjoy. Rugged Americana, from the pen of our most patriarchal founding father. 

The docents at Washington’s Mount Vernon estate recreated his recipe a few years ago, and I called them for advice. My first question, naturally, was, “Is it good?” Research historian Mary Thompson answered after a long pause, “Well, I’m not really a beer drinker. It takes two or three sips to get past the shock.”

- William Bostwick for the Wall Street Journal

Americans have always wanted the past and the future—the idyllic dream of a mythical past and the magical promise of a perfect tomorrow. These are fantasies, of course, but they are quintessentially American fantasies, intrinsic to the good life that is the American dream—no matter how you get there.

We look to the past for comforting familiarity, for reassuring connections to a heritage that may be real or imagined, and to the future for solutions that break all the established rules—the simple Cape Cod cottage with its rose-covered picket fence or the house of tomorrow with its visionary labor-saving devices and futuristic forms. Both, of course, are stuffed with the latest technology.

Behind the reality is a backstory of mythmaking and tastemaking as intrinsically American as the style itself. A small, unorthodox exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, “The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis” [on display now through October 30], has a large agenda: to restore the reputation of a tradition discarded by modernists as irrelevant and expendable, and to establish the style’s continuing suitability and adaptability to the contemporary city and, in particular, New York.

- Ada Louise Huxtable for the Wall Street Journal

(This is exhibit is now on display at the Museum of the City of New York through October 30.)

Sifting through Fashion Week coverage, I am reminded of how singular the American style is. In spite of its many forms and silhouettes, there is this common thread of exuberance and movement that I see, season after season, that has nothing to do with fashion at all but rather with a collective spirit. The designers may not be conscious of it when creating their collections, but it shines through anyway. American fashion is light; it’s about function and sport and making fast getaways. I look at legends like Ralph, who made a four-inches-wide necktie because he could not find it anywhere else, and Diane—her wrap dress was immediately iconic and so practical and every woman could and still can wear it, and it looks just as modern as it did thirty years ago. Lilly Pulitzer used those citrusy, splashy prints in all of her designs because they covered up juice stains. (Seriously.) The best American fashion seems borne of necessity, wearability. “How to build a house or change a tire while looking and feeling like a million bucks.” All the hundreds of designers—global brands and boutique names alike—and this could be said about every one of them, and that, to me, is what makes American fashion so wonderful.

Freedom Quilt.
Jessie B. Telfair. Dated 1983. Cotton with pencil. 74 x 68 inches. American Folk Art Museum.
See also: the Lost Heroes Art Quilt Project, which honors Americans lost in Iraq and Afghanistan since September 11, 2001. 

Newport: the point where Ocean Drive turns right, if you’re facing west, just before Bailey’s Beach, and where the anticipation of reaching the sea is met by the sea itself. 

I love this picture. She looks a little tired, like she’s been somewhere fun. She’s not flawless, but she doesn’t seem to give a damn, and that’s what makes her perfect.

Cindy embodied the clash in the ’90s between European fashion (flashy and baroque) and American fashion (obsessed with cleanliness and simplicity). Rather than the image of a model as a fussy and feminine living doll, Cindy Crawford was James Dean. 

Even in a ball gown or styled to look demurely feminine, Cindy broadcasts toughness, a kind of forthright cowgirl confidence. She is an aggressive object. When thinking about models there is a void where the knowledge of an inner life should go. We are left to imagine a person based on what their appearance suggests. Cindy Crawford made it easy to imagine that person.

She branded herself as American, constantly. As much as Michael Jordan did. She established an iconography of white tees and blue jeans and soda, an American flag rippling somewhere in the background. She might as well have been Wonder Woman. 

- Molly Lambert for Grantland