The Observer's version of March Madness entered a new phase at midnight last night when votes were tabulated for the Final Four face-off in our Socialite Slapdown contest.

The contest—which gained a bit of heat last week when Page Six reported on socialites' efforts to stack the votes in their favor—closes with four finalists: Publishing heiress, model and bag-designer Lydia Hearst faces off against socialite/style writer Derek Blasberg, and Lauren Davis, socialite and Vogue editor, faces off against Peter Davis, the mocialite-loving ... style writer!  read more »

We heard you're working on a reality show called The 10021 that takes place in South Hampton?

Yes, it’s basically a show about four New Yorkers living a kind of fashion lifestyle and about how their professional lives intersect with their social lives. It’s a reality show, but it is being done more like a documentary-drama because it’s filmed as a snapshot of our lives.  read more »

"We are here to celebrate all the beautiful people, and tonight you are all beautiful," said David Hershkovitz, publisher of Paper magazine as he took the stage at Hiro Ballroom to introduce Joanna Newsom.

The crinkly-voiced neo-folkist graces the cover of the magazine’s April “Beautiful People” issue, in honor of which many beautiful New Yorkers gathered to celebrate, well, each other’s beauty.  read more »

When Park Avenue Peerage posted an item about the Young Fellows of the Frick Collection gala yesterday, the site’s commenters went a little nuts.  read more »

Q: Who is "Izzy Gold"?

A: According to a HELLO MY NAME IS sticker on Izzy Gold’s Web site:

I WAS BORN IN NYC
I’M A ROUGH TOUGH BADASS
BUT…
WASH ME COLD, TUMBLE ME DRY
AND DON’T FORGET
IZZY GOLD KNOWS!!!

Mr. Gold was born in New York and raised both here and in Arezzo, Italy. He designs a line of T-shirts including one that is called Kiss Kiss inspired by a 1996 Patrick McMullan book of the same name. One of Mr. Gold's dear friends is Ally Hilfiger; in fact one is rarely spotted very far from the other of a New York evening. Ms. Hilfiger guest-designed a special T-shirt for his line and they’ve collaborated on art works that were displayed at the Chelsea Art Museum.  read more »

This morning's Page Six item theorizing that Tinsley and Topper Mortimer may not be dying to hang out together at events like the Young Fellows of the Frick Midnight Breakfast should be an incentive for you to participate in our contest!

See, we're running a bracket competition (very NCAA!) to determine who our readers think the most upstanding New York socialite is, and the voting to determine Round One winners got underway last night.  read more »

Juicy Plum, Orange Blossom, Tiger Lily! No, these are not the names of Eliot Spitzer’s favorite tarts. Au contraire, they are the top notes of Fabulosity, the new fragrance—arriving on shelves this week!—from Kimora Lee Simmons.

Glamour-obsessed, entrepreneurial and hilarious, Kimora, the star of the Style Network reality show Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane and creative director queen of Baby Phat clothing, just might be the most insanely unpretentious person in fashion. Last week I called her on the West Coast and we examined some of the burning issues of the day.  read more »

We’re no fashion expert, but we’re fairly certain that the clothes at Nicky Hilton’s Bryant Park show on Sunday were…bad. Ms. Hilton’s new line, Nicholai, had no unifying theme except shortness, and looked in moments to have been plucked from the sale rack at Forever 21. There was a white St. Tropez-looking bikini The Transom thought was hot, worn with a do-rag by leggy model Caroline Trentini, but it was soon cancelled out by an outfit involving a boxy green metallic blazer that can only be described as Star-Trek-at-the-disco. Almost everything involved sequins. And half of it, you couldn’t imagine Ms. Hilton would wear herself.

But a Nicky Hilton fashion show isn’t really about the clothes anyway, and the front row didn’t disappoint. Instead of Kate Bosworth and Demi Moore, we had Jenna Jameson and Brandon Davis, but hey, this was different! Also spotted were Russell Simmons, Trevor Rains and Richie Rich of Heatherette, Arden Wohl, Amanda Hearst, and Olivia Palermo. We spied no Vogue editors (though on Friday at Sabyasaschi we’d heard a publicist imploring Meredith Melling Burke to come, or at least send someone).  read more »

New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization.

Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editor Jonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.

We have no desire to be free speech martyrs, but it would have been nakedly hypocritical to avoid the same cartoons we'd criticized others for not running, cartoons that however absurdly have inspired arson, kidnapping and murder and forced cartoonists in at least two continents to go into hiding. Editors have already been forced to leave papers in Jordan and France for having run these cartoons. We have no illusions about the power of the press (NY Press, we mean), but even on the far margins of the world-historical stage, we are not willing to side with the enemies of the values we hold dear, a free press not least among them.

This was not an easy decision. I've been reading the Press since 1988 and have dreamed of running it for nearly as long. The paper's editorial staff has worked impossibly hard hours and has come quite a ways in only a few months towards restoring the paper's tarnished editorial reputation and credibility. I'm proud of the work we've done, and wish we'd had time to finish the job. I wish the Press all the best, and hope that under new ownership and leadership it can again be an invaluable read for all good Gothamites.