Interview

The Westin has as many stars on the front as the Principe, and it does have some advantages over the latter. For example you can pay extra to check in immediately and avoid the punitive wait until the afternoon when "your room is ready."  I did, and so at first, laying on the soft bed, I didn't mind the small size of the room, the threadbare upholstery on the desk chair, the less than luxurious bath products, or the darkness on the gilt fabric around the air conditioning ducts. The place looks like it was decorated in 1950 to resemble 1850. The hotel is full of sensible, seasoned buyers and I didn't miss the models and fabulous denizens of the Principe and its bar, although I must say I went across the street for a glass of champagne instead of hanging at the Westin. But what really began to bug me about the Westin was the feeling that I was interrupting the concierge when I asked them for my invitations, or for an umbrella. I seemed to be interrupting a rich social life.  

And when I finally made my getaway to go to the airport for Paris I was in an awful rush. I'd had four hours sleep and I dazedly packed my bags in a few minutes. Then I got my heart rate up when I forgot where I'd put my passport. (In a drawer.) Finally I rushed out, leaving my trusty Bose noise-canceling headphones (which are almost indispensable for transatlantic sleep, delivering true quiet in a jet cabin) on the floor next to the desk in their case. I realized this in the car on the way to the airport and I called the hotel. Unfortunately the concierge was too busy saying "Ciao" to beloved passersby to focus on my call and finally he told me to call back later. An hour later he had no memory of my query. Nor did another concierge who was about to go off on his meal break when I landed in Paris. "Please, call me after dinner."

Finally I called the office in New York to get someone who had a half hour available to call the hotel. When they failed I had our Milano advertising agent Susie Scott to call to speak to them in her fluent Italian, but by that time the costly headphones had found a new home- whether with the housekeeper or the mini-bar stocker or the concierge I will probably never know. So please remember this the next time you are tempted to book at a Westin. And Senore Westin, I am returning your VIP card and I'm going back to the Principe, where they might have attitude but at least I'll see Lapo and Olivier Zahm in the bar. Or if business picks up maybe I'll check into the chicly modern Bulgari, so I can hang out with Stefano Tonchi from the Times. It's nice to have some contemporaneity in a gray old city, and I hear the food is good and I had a wonderful lymphatic drainage massage in the spa. I have no idea what lymphatic drainage means but maybe that's why I felt so good arriving in Paris.

The strangest thing about the fashion trek routine is getting used to the Groundhog Day aspect of it. You see the same cast of complex characters every single day for a month and every day you switch seats a half-dozen times. A lot of these people have complex ideas about themselves and their roles in the world, which is why this random clique of people who spend days with one another may not fraternize as much as you might expect. Yesterday I sat next to a very nice intelligent editor from a great and powerful magazine whom I had sat next to at a dinner a few nights before, explaining how that dinner was a little odd because I was sitting catty corner to another editor with whom I never speak. It is mutual. My colleague laughed and said that she figured this out halfway through the dinner and then noted that there are numerous folk among our loose-knit band of observers who do not speak to this one or that one. No one from Vogue speaks to her, for instance. I don't know what that's about but maybe it's not personal. Maybe they are conserving energy. I try to be nice to everyone. In fact there are many lovely people in the front row and I enjoy talking to them one after another in our endless round of musical chairs. And generally if it seems that they aren't speaking to me I say a nice big "Hi!" Surprising how well that works.