Writing the monthly guide has become a tradition over the last ten years, yet it still challenges me.

To distill, discuss, and comment in a way that captures the mood, the flow, and the sheer activity that finds us scrambling to keep pace with it all. Yes, we bring the business on ourselves. We create the buzz and excitement to keep our Baby followers engaged, informed, and excited about fashion and art through our own personal lens, but it still stirs a bit of anxiety to make sure we're hitting the mark and giving our audience something genuinely interesting. It's a lot of pressure to make it happen. Like planning a party of any size or occasion, you want your guests to have a truly good time and walk away with a positive impression of what's been put in front of them.

This month we have two fabulous events, back to back. We've invited some of our favorite people to showcase their wares and expertise — a curated presentation of vintage and individual style that frames the essence of their collections, their curation, and their attitude toward fashion, style, and the personal aesthetic we all try to share with the willing.

This month we also took the opportunity to focus on an era. A time that turns our attention to the cultural forces driving art, music, fashion, and society in 1971. We chose this year to celebrate the current exhibition, which opened July 3rd: Circa 1971, drawn from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation.

I was particularly drawn to this exhibition, and this year, because 1971 marked the start of my connection to the cultural movements shaping an incredible decade that was just waiting for me to discover. I was twelve years old, and between the influence of older siblings who exposed me to the music, art, fashion, film, and social movements that would define a generation, I began to mature culturally into the person I am today. I didn't walk toward my understanding and education, I ran.

I started picking out my own clothes, buying records, fashion magazines, wearing makeup, going to concerts, passing notes to boys, going to dances, visiting major galleries (under the tutelage of my Aunt Ruth, a docent at MoMA), reading novels, and recognizing all at once, the importance of curating a life filled with all of it. At age 67, my passion for living with beauty acts as my North Star, and nature is my guiding light to always find it. It is always there for you, You just have to choose it. Yes please!!

With that, let's Sunday Guide this out...

SVMoA (Sun Valley Museum of Art) was the perfect setting to host the 1971 collection series and let these important works be seen and experienced in the shadows of the glorious Bald Mountain.

I hope you'll see the exhibition, or read up on Jordan's philosophy and his approach to discovering artists and sharing their work with the public — to enlighten and engage the viewer, young and old. He asks us to find our own personal connection to art, one that is uniquely ours. It's the same way I approach fashion and style: creating a personal narrative about self, identity, and attitude. It takes a lifetime to both hold onto that narrative and let it evolve through every stage of life.

The Year Everything Spoke: Jordan Schnitzer and the Art of 1971

There is a moment in every decade when culture stops imitating itself and starts telling the truth. 1971 was one of those moments: the year fashion left the salon for the street, the year music got louder and more honest, the year art stopped asking permission. It is fitting, then, that the Sun Valley Museum of Art has built its summer exhibition around exactly that year, pulling from the extraordinary collection of Jordan Schnitzer, a man who has spent his life proving that art is not a possession. It's a conversation.

I sat down with Jordan recently, and what unfolded wasn't really an interview. It was a philosophy.

Why 1971?

The premise of the show is almost too perfect: the Sun Valley Museum of Art itself opened its doors in 1971. So when curator Jennifer Green Wells set out to build an exhibition from Jordan's collection, which spans over 1,200 artists, she didn't start with names, She started with a date. She combed through thousands of works to find the roughly sixty or seventy pieces actually made in 1971 and 1972. A snapshot of a single cultural instant. Lichtenstein, Frankenthaler, Baldassari, Warhol, Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly — a whole generation of artists, caught mid-sentence.

Art is Not to Be Hoarded.

Jordan's collecting philosophy is disarmingly simple, and it is the line I keep returning to: "Art is to be shared. It isn't to be hoarded."

He collects prints and multiples in part because of this; not because they're lesser, but because they allow him to hold an artist's entire evolution rather than a single, isolated triumph. He can trace Lichtenstein from 1952 to 1997. He can show a young artist beside the master they became. "It's easier," he told me, "to see beginning works of an artist, and see how they grew over their lifetime" — a journey, rather than eight spectacular, disconnected pieces.

And crucially: every one of these exhibitions is given to museums for free.

The Three Things

I asked him what makes an artist’s work worth collecting.. Worth hanging on a museum wall for the rest of us to stand in front of. He gave me three conditions, and I have not stopped thinking about them since, because they apply to fashion as precisely as they apply to painting.

1. A genetic predisposition to an aesthetic. Some people, he said, are simply born seeing the world a certain way. The same way some women walk into a shop already possessing style, while others need to be led toward it.

2. A burning message. They need to get out of themselves and onto the canvas "for all of us to look at, frown, smile, or criticize."

3. A way of doing it that belongs to no one else. You look at a Warhol, he said, and you know it's a Warhol. In essence — a brand. A signature so distinct it needs no name attached.

Aesthetic instinct. Urgency. Singularity. That is not just a theory of collecting art, it is the entire architecture of personal style, of a decade's fashion, of a generation's music. It is why 1971 street style became couture. It is why we still recognize it on sight, fifty years later.

Mother Nature, the Original Abstract Artist

The most beautiful thread of our conversation had nothing to do with a gallery at all. I described an experience I had driving through the Copper Basin after a hike with with friends, the light doing something unrepeatable to the mountains, the landscape, the vast basin below and everyone falling silent. Collectively, it took our breath away, and it was like we were walking into a painting.

Jordan smiled brightly and proclaimed that this reaction is what makes Mother Nature the supreme artist of all.

“None of you will ever have that same experience again - it is yours to own”.

To the skeptics who tell him they'd prefer a nice bowl of fruit to an abstract canvas, his answer is always the same: look outside.

"The greatest abstract artist of all time — Mother Nature." No two hikes are ever the same, he says, just as no two people ever experience the same painting the same way. We are each, in his words, "a million little mosaic parts of every experience we've ever had". Which is precisely why the same Rothko can undo one person and leave another unmoved.

Why It Matters Now

Jordan made a case I find myself agreeing with entirely: in an age when algorithms tell us what to wear, what to eat, who's relevant and who isn't, art and nature remain the last two places where no one can tell you how to feel. Nobody can instruct you on how to experience a mountain range, or a canvas, or a piece of music that catches you off guard. That sovereignty — the right to feel something entirely your own — is, he believes, more valuable now than ever.

His closing thought, delivered with the plainness of something he clearly believes down to his bones:

"Too many eyes don't wear out the art.”

Bring everyone, he says. The two-year-old and the hundred-and-two-year-old. The art doesn't get smaller by being seen more. If anything, it's the opposite. Art, like beauty itself, is the antidote.

I came to it honestly, too. My father took his style seriously — his wardrobe, his posture, the way he walked into a room. More seriously, even, than my mother did. He taught me that how you present yourself is a kind of language: that style, manners, and good grooming aren't vanity, they're a statement. A way of telling the world who you are before you say a single word.

And then there were the movies — the real education. Cary Grant and his easy, unbothered command of a room. Grace Kelly's cool restraint. Myrna Loy and William Powell trading wit in The Thin Man. The sparkle of High Society, the longing of An Affair to Remember, the Parisian shimmer of Gigi and Roman Holiday, the sheer joy of Funny Face. Audrey again and again Breakfast at Tiffany's, How to Steal a Million, Rear Window, Houseboat. These weren't just films. They were a finishing school in glamour, wit, and self-possession. Proof that style was never about clothes alone. It was about how a woman carried herself through a room, a story, a life.

As I grew older, my muses became more contemporary, but no less commanding. Lauren Hutton's gap-toothed, unbothered cool. Diane Keaton's androgynous wit in Annie Hall: that tie, those trousers, that confidence in looking like no one else. Bianca Jagger's regal nonchalance. Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren, proof that elegance only deepens with age and intelligence. Kelly Klein's clean, quiet American sophistication.

And the films kept teaching me. The Thomas Crown Affair— Steve McQueen's effortless command. Diana Rigg in The Avengers, catsuits and perfect composure. Shampoo, Julie Christie and Warren Beatty tangled up in 1970s LA decadence. Jane Birkin and Twiggy — that era's unstudied, bohemian beauty that somehow still looked considered.

But if there is one figure who shaped how I actually thinkabout fashion — not just how I wear it, but how I understand it as a cultural force, it's Diane Vreeland. The documentary The Eye Has to Travel is essential viewing. Vreeland didn't just style women; she invented the modern fashion magazine as we know it: Fashion as theater, as story, as a way of seeing the whole world more vividly. She taught me that style isn't decoration. Its imagination, applied to a life.

Which brings me to something we're doing this season that I am genuinely excited about.

We are hosting an evening conversation with LA stylist and Aquarius Cocktail brand ambassador Jamie Verve — a woman with the kind of instinctive, luminous style that makes her clients not just look better, but see themselves more clearly. Together, we'll be exploring one of fashion's most personal and surprisingly elusive questions: how do you name, define, and own your personal style?

Because here's what I've come to believe: if you can name it, you can hold onto it. Through every stage: College, career, motherhood, reinvention, retirement, the weight changes, the age changes, all of it.

A defined sense of style becomes your compass. The people and muses we most admire are usually recognizable to themselves. Their style has a through-line. That's what stops you in your tracks. That's what you remember.

I want to challenge each of us — myself included — to hold true to that thing that makes you unmistakably you.

So let me ask you something to get us started:

Have you ever been asked to describe or name your personal style?

Tomboy. Minimalist. Classic. Sporty. Preppy. Sexy. Understated. Conservative. Messy.

Or, like me, a combination of a few.

There is a reason I ask the question:

— Because naming it changes everything. It's not a box you climb into. It's a flag you plant. Once you know what you stand for stylistically, trends become a conversation rather than a dictation. You shop differently, you edit differently, you dress with a confidence that has nothing to do with age, or size, or what's on the runway.

— Because I want you to sit with it if you come to the talk - Not to arrive at a perfect answer, but to start the question. Style evolves, yes, but there is usually something constant underneath, something that has always been yours. This conversation is an invitation to find it, name it, and wear it without apology.


— Because the women who always look like themselves knew the answer a long time ago.

— Because it's the question Jamie and I will be putting at the center of our evening together. And I suspect, once you hear it out loud, you'll realize you've known the answer longer than you think.

I do hope you are able to join both Jamie and myself to explore your answer.

It should be a great discussion, and I am sure you will come away with some insight for how to embrace and celebrate that wonderful thing we call style that makes YOU look and feel like only YOU.