14 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
in the press pen snapped from afar. Be-
fore ducking backstage, Swift gave him
a wave and a “Great to see you!” Mazur
delivered his memory card to the Getty
table. “I got so much good stuff,” he told
them. “She was giving it to me.”
—Michael Schulmancameras hanging off him, Mazur greeted
his “photo brother” Jeff Kravitz, a friendly
rival. “When we started, we would be
the only guys out here,” Kravitz groused,
eying the fans. “Now, with Instagram,
everybody is their own content creator.
And you’re competing with the celebri-
ties, too, who are taking pictures of them-
selves.” He sighed. “We’re all dinosaurs.”
Mazur was sunnier. “I don’t think
I’m a dinosaur,” he said. “Not yet!” The
cast of the reality show “The Challenge”
came by. “I have no idea who the fuck
they are,” Mazur admitted, but shot
them anyway. (Kravitz: “My rule is: any-
one who looks like they spent more
than fifteen minutes on what they’re
wearing, I shoot them. Everyone else is
a schlub.”) DJ Khaled arrived, squirt-
ing hand sanitizer on fans’ palms, and
Mazur chased after him. “Mayhem!”
Mazur panted. “Fun mayhem.” He spun
around, spotted Lil Nas X’s feathered
headpiece—“Oh, shit, what’s that?”—
and ran off. When Snoop Dogg rolled
in, he greeted Mazur with a fist bump.
Then: pandemonium. “Taylor Swift’s
coming in,” Mazur said. She swanned
by, draped in crystal chains. “Taylor, right
here first!” Mazur yelled. Swift, who has
known him for years, did as directed.
He trailed her down the carpet, just a
few feet away, while the photographers
1
ONTHERU N WAY
MODERN,ITALIANSTYLE
I
t was Fashion Week in New York
again, with all its usual enthusiasms—
a singing Lil Nas X in a silver crop top
walking a runway, anyone?—but in a
quiet, book-lined room in the Italian
consulate, on Park Avenue, the billion-
aire fashion entrepreneur Renzo Rosso
was taking a breather. Rosso, who is six-
ty-seven, was in town for the runway
presentation of the fashion house Marni,
which he owns, and which was holding
its first show ever in New York. From
his perch on a maroon velvet chair, he
listed the notables who were confirmed
to attend. “Is unbelievable,” he said. “We
have seventy celebrities already accred-
ited to be part of the show. Seven-zero!“Accidentally flying onstage does not count as
‘doing Shakespeare in the Park.’”• •
We have Madonna, and Kylie Jenner—”
“Iann Dior,” added Marita Spera,
Rosso’s chief of public relations, nam-
ing the young rapper known for the mel-
ancholy banger “Mood.”
“Marni is becoming very supermod-
ern,” Rosso said. “It was much more in-
tellectual, much older when I acquire
the company, seven years ago.”
Rosso has built his fortune on know-
ing what the youth want. In the nine-
teen-seventies, he founded the brand
Diesel, which rose to prominence in the
nineties on a wave of cheeky advertise-
ments. (Two sailors kissing by a boat,
V-J Day style; a Black man wearing Die-
sel diving into a pool as white women
freak out around him, with the caption
“Sun City, 1975.”) Rosso also owns the
Jil Sander and Margiela labels, and re-
cently he bought a stake in the Amer-
ican streetwear company Amiri, whose
ripped jeans, which retail for six hun-
dred and ninety dollars and up, are be-
loved by rappers and N.B.A. players.
The brands are part of Rosso’s Only the
Brave conglomerate. “All my brands are
brave,” he said, scrunching down his
sock to reveal a tattoo of the company’s
logo on his ankle.
Rosso, who is married for the second
time and has seven children (ages: six
to forty-four), was dressed in slim black
separates—pants, shirt, and socks from
Diesel, jacket from Jil Sander—acces-
sorized with a diamond necklace and
bracelet. With his blondish-silver curls
and his initials tattooed on two of his
knuckles in Gothic script, he looked like
a wealthy rock star reaping the rewards
of decades on the road.
He was born on a farm in the village
of Brugine, in northeastern Italy. “I would
go with my father to the market on Sat-
urdays. He would always wear a suit and
a scarf.” He turned to Spera. “Cravatta?”
“A tie,” Spera corrected.
“I was in love with my father for this
kind of attitude,” he said. “But I wasn’t
in love with being a farmer.” He swapped
the farm for fashion at fifteen, when he
started technical school in Padua, where
he made and sold jeans to friends. “I felt
super strong, rich,” he said. “Because
then I can get not just a drink when I
go to the disco, I can buy a bottle of
Martini, so it is nice—to have women,
to have a nice life.”
The la-dolce-vita-on-Viagra ethos is