ACRIA

Those kooky new Trojan condom commercials on TV, which magically turn a dirty hog into a beddable dude after he picks up a condom, may work for some people—like, for example, the frat boys who regularly recognize Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively on the street. But when it's time to recruit a more well-heeled consumer to the joys of Trojans, Gillian Hearst-Shaw is the lady for the job.

“Before I was married, I was very picky and selective about who I chose to get intimate with,” she told The Daily Transom at a recent dinner party benefiting ACRIA, an AIDS charity.  read more »

Last night, we met up with André Balazs—the hotel magnate behind a cartel of boutique sleeperies, which includes the Mercer in SoHo, L.A.’s Chateau Marmont and the Standards. Looking dapper in a form-fitting gray suit that had a subtle sheen, Mr. Balazs, 50, had just flown back to New York after a weekend at Art Basel Miami and was among the guests at the 12th annual holiday dinner benefiting ACRIA, an AIDS research and education initiative.

We asked Mr. Balazs about this year’s fair. “Every year it’s more and more of a circus and a phenomenon,” he told The Daily Transom while standing in Donna Karan’s Urban Zen boutique on Greenwich Street in the West Village. The store, filled with calming music and some sort of overpowering exotic incense, had been turned into a makeshift entrance, leading guests towards a larger dining space next door. “Everyone in the [art] business tells me they’ve never done better, and yet, at the same time, the whole thing is taking on an air that goes way beyond the art world or anything that has to do with art,” he said. After saying hello to a chic-looking, pink-cheeked couple walking by, Mr. Balazs, who received a joint masters degree in journalism and business from Columbia, added, “I’ve never seen such an influx of people interested in branding and using some marketing opportunity to push culture.”

Despite the recent buzz suggesting that the American-European art bubble can’t continue to inflate at its current rate without bursting, he remains somewhat confident. “I think it can sustain itself for a while,” he said.

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