Fashion / Style

Hunky Models In Cowboy Hats, Lady Gaga’s Texas Romp and a Billionaire’s Celeb-Drawing Hotel: A Look Back at Dallas (and PaperCity‘s) Colorful Past

BY // 08.27.16

Since whirling into Dallas in 1998, PaperCity has been at the center of everything — the parties, the people, the zeitgeist. As we bid farewell to our longtime broadsheet format (we invented it, you know) for a perfect-bound magazine that debuts in September, we gathered PaperCity Dallas editors past and present and set out on a mission: Find the most unforgettable stories, photographs, and memories printed in 18 years’ worth of our glossy pages.

Here, the best of the best from the early years of PaperCity Dallas. Look in this space next week for morePaperCity history, and click here and here for more nuggets from our archives. Plus, don’t forget to pick up the new PaperCity Magazine, on stands everywhere September 1.

2006

April Fool’s! Mohamed Al Fayed brings Harrods to Dallas with a five-story wonder, built completely underground and connected by tunnels beneath Cedar Springs and Pearl Street. Patrons enter by way of an English (above-ground) garden and through a British-style red-telly booth turned elevator. Fact or fiction? “We literally had people calling saying they were at the corner of Cedar Springs and Pearl and couldn’t find the red telephone booth!” recalls Brooke Hortenstine, the mastermind behind the recurring series of April Fool’s spoofs PaperCity plays on its dear readers for the next several years.
Highland Park Village turns 75 with help from the city’s top brass. (Nancy Dedman, Trammell S. Crow, Diane and Hal Brierley, et al.) This fall, a much-upgraded HP Village will celebrate its 85th.
Re-Entrée — the magazine’s definitive list of cultural musts for the fall season — entails seeing the fashionable flick Marie Antoinette, shopping at the recently opened Barneys New York at NorthPark Center (we still miss having a Barneys in town) and taking a jaunt to NYC to stay at the reinvented Gramercy Park Hotel.
No one throws a Neiman Marcus party quite like dapper NM fashion exec Ken Downing. For the arrival of Stella McCartney, he rounds up quite the roster of entertainers: the David W. Carter High School Cowboys marching band and dance team, which cheers for Stella — “Stella McCartney, she’s just begun! Not four, not three, not two, but one! Let’s go Stel-la, let’s go!” — and hunky Kim Dawson Models scantily clad in leopard briefs and cowboy hats gyrate in a rubber-duckie pond.
Black vodka martinis. Two black hens on loan from the fowl-obsessed stylist Jimmie Henslee. How else would Jeffrey Lee, Rajan Patel, and PaperCity toast our beloved Douglas Little at Grange Hall.
Sharon Young re-invents the Dallas Museum of Art’s Beaux Arts Ball — calling it simply The Art Ball.
Mike Thompson goes punk-wild at Neiman Marcus NorthPark for Alice Temperley: DJ Sista Whitenoise blasts the Sex Pistols; waiters dress in morning-after makeup, waxed mohawks and vintage concert tees; actresses Ada Lynn and Barbara Kain play upstairs English maids, vacuuming the shag-carpet runway with Union Jack-emblazoned vacuums.
Harvey Weinstein comes to town, famously party-chatting with then NM prez Burt Tansky. Why Weinstein? To be by the side of his now-wife, Georgina Chapman, who came to Dallas with fellow Marchesa designer Keren Craig at a party hosted by PaperCity and Neiman Marcus.
“How do you call this a home? It’s 37,000 square feet and only one bedroom. I was trying to explain to Barry Manilow that this was, indeed, a house.” So says Kenneth Cole of the Rachofsky House during the TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Gala.

2007
• PaperCity teams with the Nasher Sculpture Center and Bailey Banks & Biddle for a very special December 31, 2006. There will never be another New Year’s Eve party quite like this. The darling Doss Alexander (who now resides in New York) is overheard saying: “It’s official: This will go down as one of the parties to come each year.”
We orchestrate a private dinner party at Tillman’s, complete with Frito pie, the coolest guest list (Billy Fong, Jody Hagan, the restaurant’s then owner Todd Fiscus, Ashley Tatum, et al.) and notebooks in hand to document all that dinner-party chatter.
Neiman Marcus turns 100 — with a little help from us. We even arrange a full cast for the surely to-be-produced Neiman Marcus: The Movie.
Giorgio Armani comes to The Crystal Charity Ball Ten Best Dressed Women of Dallas Fashion Show and Luncheon. Surprise! Ylang proprietress Joanne Teichman chimes in, penning a witty column about the Patron Party.
His Royal Highness Prince Edward (HRH Queen Elizabeth’s youngest son) comes to lunch at Saks Fifth Avenue; Brooke Hortenstine joins for dinner at Joyce and Larry Lacerte’s English-style Estate.
Get smart: Our August 2007 issue cover, the annual Smart Issue, is certainly wiser than its years.
Supermodel Erin Wasson opens and closes the grand finale show for NorthPark Center’s first-ever Fashion at the Park. The megawatt Marchesa extravaganza is just one of many runway romps, all produced by the extraordinary queen of the catwalk, Jan Strimple.
We feature the modernist house of art collectors Lisa and John Runyon, including a glimpse into their stylish master bedroom. Who knew that three years later, W magazine would feature the couple photographed in that very space for a feature on the attention-grabbing Dallas art scene.

“The gracious Pat Patterson asked me to cover a ‘little book signing’ she was hosting for her friend, photographer Laura Wilson, at her 3525 penthouse, the former home of Greer Garson. The book was Wilson’s Avedon at Work, documenting a six-year span of Richard Avedon photographing his ‘In the American West’ series. Wilson and Avedon were both present at this ‘little book signing,’ and I was only armed with my automatic ELPH — the Kia of cameras. As I snapped away, Wilson and Avedon laughed and lovingly placed their arms around one another for a brief yet magical moment. The copy signed by both artists remains one of my most prized possessions.” – Brooke Hortenstine

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PaperCity's first book, "Domestic Art: Curated Interiors," (Assouline), released in October 2008
PaperCity‘s first book, “Domestic Art: Curated Interiors,” (Assouline), released in October 2008

2008
Hold on to your highballs: We go inside the Kessler Park house of Ken Downing and Sam Saladino.
• PaperCity’s first book, Domestic Art: Curated Interiors (Assouline), co-edited by Holly Moore, Rob Brinkley, and Laurann Claridge, hits stands on October 5. Debuts with a party at Neiman Marcus Downtown and a bash at The Carlyle Hotel in NYC.
• PaperCity turns 10 and celebrates with a big bash at Forty Five Ten.
“In the Happy Tent, we hear Fiscus’ voice, and just like a Broadway director … he was miked up and making sure all the drag queens and cage dancers knew their cues … Hellooo, Lucy Wrubel, channeling her best Harajuku girl and wearing a bird’s next in her mane.” Such is the report from Todd Fiscus’ Chinese-chic Be Happy party. Case in point: Some things never change. P.S.: RuPaul performed.
Barneys New York use PaperCity magazines for its window displays. Rodarte darlings Kate and Laura Muleavy party with us in store.
Hamish Bowles. Tory Burch. Hip-hop star Eve. Billy Reid. Isabel Toledo. Julie Gilhart. Anne Vincent. Mischa Barton. Naeem Khan. All come to town for another iteration of NorthPark’s Fashion at the Park. “I am sweatin’ and they are partyin’!” says Eve at the gala for Tory Burch. (For the record: We are still partyin’.)
We get up close and personal with legendary society decorator Joseph Minton; we have yet to find a more interesting photo archive to raid.

2009
Lady Gaga — before the hermetically sealed egg, before the Super Bowl, before all those Grammys — performs after the Miss Sixty fashion show at NorthPark Center during Fashion at the Park. “A runway is the perfect stage for me. I felt at home up there!” she says.
Stiletto Strut debuts and becomes the most anticipated spring party. Who knew society ladies would love strutting around the block of Neiman Marcus downtown in their Jimmy Choos, Manolos and Louboutins.
Martin Scorsese. The Jonas Brothers. Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson. Tim Headington opens The Joule hotel with a bang. (He’s still stunning us today.)
Dallas Art Fair: Year One.
On the eve of chairing the opening of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, Jeanne Marie Clossey confesses: She has a bit of a crush on Jon Hamm. (So do we, Jeanne, so do we.)

2010
“You could take an elegant tea in the dining room, then slide into that peacock-blue library for some Scotches and bawdy talk.” And with one pull-quote, the tony house of Niven Morgan and Shelby Wagner is perfectly summed up.
Recession hits. Vogue empress Anna Wintour declares September 10 national Fashion’s Night Out to prompt fall shopping. Every single store in town hosts a party.
The late photographer Larry Travis (gone but not forgotten) photographs our September 2010 cover in Dallas — complete with yarn-bombed taxidermy art works, naturally.
Is that Steve Wrubel or Santa Claus at Forty Five Ten? You decide.

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