Venn & Now: Stars, Stripes & Status
Plus: what to do in ACK this weekend, a new private members club in the Four Seasons, one of the most eligible bachelors in New York is off the market and more...
What was the Fourth of July like for you as a kid? Was it magical, sparklers and all, the kind of holiday you counted down to every June? If you were fortunate, you spent it in the Hamptons or on Nantucket, somewhere on the Cape or at a family beach house, with the people you loved. Even then, no matter how charmed your circumstances, a lot of it looked the same from house to house.
There was the uniform: a Ralph Lauren flag sweater one summer, a Tommy Hilfiger stars-and-stripes rugby the next, both bought with the same unspoken understanding that this was simply what you wore that week of the year. Jack Rogers sandals were non-negotiable for any boarding school girl. Maybe you were handed the J.Crew catalog in June and told to pick out a bathing suit before the good colors sold out, back when the blueberry pie at the farm stand was still a few dollars, not the $80 it runs now. There was a red Igloo Playmate in the trunk, a Weber kettle grill in the yard, red Solo cups on every table, no matter the zip code, because these were the props of the holiday, non-negotiable regardless of tax bracket. You showed up to the party in the family’s old Defender, the very truck that die-hard collectors are now reportedly paying upward of $300,000 to have stripped down and rebuilt, engine and all, per a recent Wall Street Journal report from Chavie Lieber, because nostalgia for a truck that once hauled hay is apparently worth six figures now. And something about the holiday always made you feel a little bit like CBK at the family compound in Hyannis Port, even if your house didn’t have a name.
But things are different now. Where the old status symbols were about knowing the right references, the new ones are about scale. The wooden water skis have given way to eFoils. The hot dog comes topped with caviar. The pie is now $80. There are Yeti Tundra 350s running north of $1,300, packing seafood towers that cost four times as much. And the single biggest status marker of a Fourth of July weekend this year isn’t the car in the driveway or the boat at the dock, it’s whether you have a chef on hand for your guests.
This year alone, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got married at Madison Square Garden. Barney Greengrass is doing a pop-up out of Babe’s Diner in Sag Harbor (and RPS was the first to break the news). And Michael Rubin threw his annual White Party at his $50 million oceanfront estate in the Hamptons. (For the best coverage I’ve seen so far, check out Rory Satran’s newsletter, The Hamptons Chronicle).
Still, plenty of it hasn’t changed: the fireworks crack open over the water same as always, the lobster rolls slide out of their buns onto the sand, and somewhere in every town in the country, someone is waving a flag along a parade route with no idea what an eFoil is, and no interest in finding out.
Have a great holiday everyone. No matter how you celebrate it.
And for those looking for non-holiday contact, we’ve got it: everything to do in Nantucket this weekend, the prep school admissions process when it comes to athletes, the Hampton Jitney A/C situation, a new private club at the Four Seasons Downtown New York, one of the most eligible bachelors in New York is off the market and more…
Prep school pipeline, Nantucket Fourth of July, Hampton Jitney, Michael Rubin's White Party, Ivanka Trump, Four Seasons Club 27, luxury hotel memberships, Laurence Milstein, Thomas Isen, Richie Jackson, Paige Lorenze's bachelorette, Chicken Box, Reddit snark and more….
