Features - November 17, 1999

The world according to Katherine Betts '86
The editor of Harper's Bazaar cultivates her vision of a magazine for well-dressed women with well-dressed minds

by Katherine Hobson '94

Seated in her new 37th-floor corner office, Manhattan spread out behind her under a gray cashmere blanket of mist, Katherine Betts '86 looks calm. This would seem to be a physical impossibility. Her new job, as editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar magazine, officially began only weeks ago, and already she's heavily into planning the details of the magazine's redesign. She has a new baby at home, and separation anxiety is on her mind. And she's still recovering from the exhausting cocktail of designer collections and parties and editorial decisions that makes up Fashion Week, the twice-yearly round of fashion shows in New York City-this particular version complicated by the havoc of Hurricane Floyd. Of course, she's been through Fashion Week many times before, in her former job as fashion news director at Vogue, but it's very different when yours is the name at the top of the masthead.

"It's different to be managing a staff," says Betts, who is known as Kate, while seated behind an L-shaped desk that's cluttered with schedules and a turquoise iMac. "At Vogue I was my own island." That wasn't without its advantages, but ultimately, she says, "I didn't have the final word." But she is now the final word at Harper's Bazaar, which puts her among the final words of fashion, period, in the company of such tastemakers as two of her former bosses, Vogue's Anna Wintour and W's Patrick McCarthy. The career path of a fashion editor doesn't typically start at the FitzRandolph Gate. But Betts said she didn't have much choice-her great-grandfather, grandfather, and father (Hobart Betts I, II, and III) all attended Princeton. Betts Auditorium is named after her grandfather, an architect like her father.

"I didn't pick Princeton, it picked me," she says. And while former roommate Sarah Pelmas '86 says she seemed "quite effortlessly smart," Betts says she was initially overwhelmed by the workload. "I thought you should read every book assigned for the semester," she says. "Finally someone told me they didn't expect you to really read everything."

Halston for a neighbor

She majored in European history but also took a host of classes in art history and French. "The education was amazing," she says, reeling off a list of favorite professors including Jerrold Seigel-who advised her on her thesis about the 1968 student uprising in France-Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, John Martin, and visiting professor Gloria Emerson, the journalist, who taught Politics and the Press.

While Betts found the courses at Princeton absorbing, she remembers being mystified by the school's obsession with eating club hierarchy-she joined Cap & Gown, at the time the only selective club to admit women, and then left and joined Terrace. Though Betts had danced seriously at Choate Rosemary Hall, her theater career hit a roadblock when she didn't get into the Triangle Club. "I couldn't sing!" she says. Instead, she pursued her other love-writing-and joined The Daily Princetonian.

But she always retained an interest in things beyond Princeton. Growing up in New York City with her photographer mother and architect father (with designer Halston as a neighbor) gave her a more cosmopolitan perspective than most undergrads, remembers Pelmas. "And she looked, from my perspective, simply beautiful all day without broadcasting it. She was so casually stylish." While from the outside, Princeton conjures up a raffish, Fitzgeraldian sartorial reputation, few students would describe it as on the cutting edge of style. To get her urban culture fix, Betts headed home to New York some weekends, and spent summers in Paris working at odd jobs.

Wild-boar hunting in Brittany

On campus, she cultivated a varied mix of friends. "I had these roommates who were rowers, and they used to ask me every day why I wore makeup," Betts said, laughing and remembering Pelmas and Lucy Hodder '86. "I was not into sports at all." Hodder remembers her as always having an eclectic range of tastes, alternating between Mick Jagger and Dolly Parton tapes, making a mean crème brûlée for her roommates after eating potato chips, and, most of all, making their Little Hall dorm room a place "where everyone stopped by on their way home from the library" for conversation. "She was definitely outspoken in an incredibly interesting, charismatic way," says Pelmas. But when senior year rolled around, Betts said she had no idea what she wanted to do beyond graduation, though she knew it wasn't going to have anything to do with Wall Street, the career path of choice during the 1980s. She opted to head back to her summer haunt of Paris, thinking she'd try to get a writing job.

In France, she found a job on the International Herald Tribune's copy desk, then began to do freelance writing about travel and culture. One of her assignments for European Travel and Life, a story about wild-boar hunting in Brittany, caught the eye of John Fairchild, the publisher of influential fashion publications Women's Wear Daily and W (both recently acquired by Condé Nast), who offered her a feature-writing job at W, which came with the perk of a working visa. She took it.

One season, she was assigned to cover the haute couture shows in Paris. "For a writer who's never been before, it's unbelievable," she says. "The characters, the scene-it's a great experience." She'd found her beat. Soon, she was writing full time about fashion, eventually becoming W's Paris bureau chief, a job that had her doing a little bit of everything, from writing to overseeing cover shoots.

If the W job, as she says, was her equivalent of grad school, in 1991 she got the fashion writer's version of an invitation to join Phi Beta Kappa: a job offer from Vogue's Anna Wintour. Not many turn her down. But Betts thought the fashion features editor position she was offered wouldn't allow her to keep doing what she really loved-writing stories. "I thought, 'She'll never call me again,' " she remembers. A few months later, Wintour did call again, this time offering Betts a job as fashion news director. This time, Betts accepted, trading Paris for her hometown of New York.

Creator of the 'Index'

At Vogue, she oversaw the magazine's fashion coverage and also got to keep writing her own pieces, including profiles of designers like British rudeboy, Alexander McQueen, and Tom Ford, whose sexy style revitalized Gucci. The personalities in the rarefied fashion air are "hard to understand outside their own context," says Betts. "I love trying to figure them out and explain them to the outside world." She also created features like "Index," a quick, photo- and chart-heavy compendium of the latest trends and where to find them that's become the first thing many Vogue readers flip to every month.

And then there was the comprehensive survey of the fashion establishment that ran in the magazine's April 1998 issue and included a list of the top 100 designers, which perhaps gave her an early hint of the famous fashion world politics she'll face now that she's an editor. In part, she relished the chance to take a sweeping view of the industry, whose most influential players were once family businesses and are increasingly being snapped up by large publicly traded companies like LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, but the list didn't please some of the excluded. "Anna was willing to take risks," Betts says. "It was a big statement." She appreciates that willingness to take a stand. "It's important to express a specific point of view," she says. Still, she's aware Harper's Bazaar and its rivals need to work harmoniously with the designers whose clothes they show in the magazine. Betts isn't planning any more top 100 lists. She does, however, have big plans for her editorship, a job she says she's always wanted. "I was at Vogue for eight years, but there were ideas I couldn't use there," she says. "Then I got the call from Hearst." The former editor, Liz Tilberis, who died of ovarian cancer in April, was passionate about photography, and revived Harper's Bazaar's reputation as a visually stunning magazine during her seven years as editor. Betts would like to punch up the text. "I want to bring in new writers with specific voices. People should read and buy it for the writing, not just the visuals."

"It has to be smart"

And she's very conscious that the role of fashion has changed from the days when Diana Vreeland and Richard Avedon shaped trends in the magazine. "Fashion is so much more a mainstay of culture now," she says. "Everyone knows who Calvin Klein is." Moreover, it's no longer a matter of designers dictating trends with the runway. Trends are just as likely to come from the bottom up, like hip-hop, which has spawned not only an entirely new genre of music but of fashion as well. It's a cross-pollination. "Never have kids so young known so much about luxury [brands], and never before have older people been so open to shopping at The Gap and Old Navy."

Rather than dictate the definition of elegance to readers, Betts refers to the1950s era of Harper's Bazaar, under the aegis of Carmel Snow, when it was known as a magazine for well-dressed women with well-dressed minds. She'd like to achieve that tone again. The first revamped issue comes out in February, and Betts and newly hired creative director Michel Botbol, the former fashion editor of W, are planning a major focus on American icons, from Klein to Lauren to Kors. "It's not just going to be, 'Here are 10 coats that you must have,' though that service aspect is still good," she says. "But journalism is really important. Information is really important. It has to be smart."

The confidence to take a stand comes in part from Princeton. "I came out feeling like I'd had an amazing education -I feel superior and very lucky," Betts says. And putting in her time on the C floor of Firestone gave her a work ethic that persists today. "I struggle with that," she says. "I expect everyone to work as hard as I do."

Betts has another major project that's demanding her attention: her new son, Oliver Betts Brown, who was born in June just days after his mother took the job at Harper's Bazaar. She says she's lucky to have a "great nanny," and a freelance writer husband, Chip Brown, who can occasionally work from home. (They met at Vogue, when the two were both rewriting pieces for the same editor, and married in 1996.) What was supposed to be a relaxing maternity leave turned into a flurry of hiring new staff and planning. And then it was time to start her job and leave her infant son at home. "It's hard," she says. "During Fashion Week I only saw him for a little bit in the mornings. And I hear it only gets worse." But she doesn't regret either her baby or her new job. "They were both once-in-a-lifetime opportunities," she says.

Katherine Hobson is a reporter for TheStreet.com.

Furniture with flair
Silas Kopf '72 has worked for Bill Gates and others while gaining fame as a master of the revived Renaissance art of marquetry
by Maria LoBiondo

Furniture generally falls into two categories. There is serviceable, as in a flea-market find or store-bought necessity. Then there are masterpieces, handmade by the likes of Gustav Stickley or Thomas Chippendale. Silas Kopf '72's furniture fits the latter category with a distinguishing touch-humor. His wit surfaces in the veneer scenes he creates.

Consider his tall cabinet dotted with 120 human eyes, a pun on that woodworker's favorite, bird's-eye maple. Or view his mirror in which a distinguished gentleman (his father, Robert Kopf '36) permanently adjusts his tie. Or see social commentary in a corner cabinet decorated with rats, and appropriately titled "Rat Race."

Working in his Northampton, Massachusetts, studio, Kopf handcrafts furniture embellished with marquetry. Yale University's Art Gallery and the Massachusetts Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield have acquired his pieces. Steinway Pianos has commissioned a piano art case to honor the 50th anniversary of the Aspen Music Festival and School (his second Steinway commission). The Barry Friedman Gallery in New York City, which specializes in the decorative arts, shows his work. Kopf has also worked for Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, completing designs for four doors in Gates's Seattle-suburb home.

Marquetry, in which woods 1/28th of an inch thick are inlaid piece by piece onto a less expensive wood base and tightly bonded to another surface as decoration, has a long and noble history. Also called intarsia, it was most popular from the Renaissance to the 18th century in Europe, where examples abound in cathedrals, while cupboard doors with landscapes or imaginary views of the cupboard's contents fill aristocratic homes. Kopf says, "It's like painting, but with a limited palette and significant restrictions as you deal with shapes pieced together."

His portrait pieces bridge Renaissance roots with today. In addition to the mirror with his father, he has featured his wife, Linda, who appears as if she is inside a cupboard with the door open, leaning out; himself peeking from behind a "brick" wall as he mortars it; and his daughter Sasha '02 (the third generation of Kopfs at Princeton, joining Silas's uncle Harry Kopf '43 and brother Robert Kopf, Jr. '66), seated and writing at a desk. "I'm always looking for an edge, something that personalizes the object, a twist to a concept that will intrigue people," Kopf says.

While some of his designs are offbeat, he does traditional ones, too-breathtaking florals reminiscent of Dutch still lifes and those in which birds practically burst into song. These scenes are how he started when, after working with Wendell Castle, a founder of the current studio furniture movement, Kopf decided to make marquetry his niche. "There isn't anyone else in this country that I know of who is as good as he is and who uses marquetry so effectively," comments Castle. Kopf taught himself from books, although two trips-one to Italy and another to France-allowed him to observe other experts.

A career making furniture may seem an unlikely path for an Ivy League architecture major, and Kopf admits shyly that his choice was romantic, but not altogether impractical. "Wood is accessible. We humans have a long history of using it. And I saw I could get a job," he explains of his first attraction. "Furniture making is architecture on a smaller scale with a design problem to solve."

At Princeton, two subtle influences pointed Kopf toward his future profession. William J. Baumol, the Joseph Douglas Green, 1895, Professor of Economics (now emeritus) complemented his courses in economic theory with a woodworking workshop that introduced Kopf to his craft. Another emeritus professor, Robert J. Clark, focused his art history course on American decorative arts from the turn of the century to modern times, giving Kopf an eye for the fine furniture of Stickley and others.

Today, an assistant helps execute his furniture designs, but Kopf does all veneer work himself, concentrating on one project at a time. Some people collect books; Kopf collects veneers, especially those from trees like ebony which are fast becoming rare. He helped start the Good Wood Alliance, a group that supports managed forests where the number of trees harvested is balanced with the number nature can regenerate. "I would like to buy wood from certified forests where I know the ecosystem is respected," he explains. The varied woods allow Kopf a palette from pale ash to the reddish tones of padauk to the earthy depth of East Indian rosewood.

"I enjoy the discipline of marquetry," Kopf says simply. But more philosophically he adds, "The most important part is the sense of continuity, the idea of being part of this kind of work that's gone on for hundreds of years."

Maria LoBiondo is a writer in Princeton.

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