C.Z. Guest American Style Icon

C.Z. Guest American Style Icon by divadebbi 

I was inspired to create this Polyvore set after reading Susanna Salk's latest book, C.Z. Guest American Style Icon, on Quintessence, my favorite lifestyle blog.

C.Z. Guest was one of Truman Capote's "Swans", a group of impossibly stylish, beautiful women that included Babe Paley, Gloria Guiness, Slim Keith, Marella Agnelli and Lee Radziwill. 

The image of this luminous group, from a time gone by, has always intrigued and amused me. Their shut out of T.C. was lasting and final, when he allowed Esquire to publish "La Cote Basque" a thinly veiled chapter from his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, that chronicled William Paley's veracious appetite for women other than Babe.

Truman never recovered.

 

They were "Socialites" before the term took on the connotation of simply living well without contributing much. 

 

C.Z. certainly did that, enjoying her horses, entertaining and tending to her gardens, but she also wrote and shared her love and knowledge of gardening with readers in a syndicated column.

 

In the spirit of Jackie Kennedy, C.Z. Guest represented beauty, manners and breeding that made American women seem every bit as refined their European counterparts.
 

I have no quibbles with American royalty and I'm looking forward to reading Susanna's book. As she herself wrote fittingly in her introduction, “I wanted to do this book as a kind of tribute to Guest’s timeless power, as I don’t think we’ll ever see the likes of her again.”

 

Amen...

 

xox,

DD