Gene genie
With Inheriting Beauty, fashion photographer Roger Moenks captures society’s glamour girls in their natural habitats.
By Viia Beaumanis
Shown: Allegra Hicks, designer of fashion and furnishings. Photography by Roger Moenks.
This is Allegra Hicks, designer of fashion and furnishings, connoisseur of caftans and coral. Born to wealthy intellectuals with a yen for architecture and aesthetics, she studied frescoes in Brussels and design in Milan, and grew up in a glass house in Turin inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright. Hicks likes art and cinema and museums, and when she spent a few years in Manhattan, she lived in a building that belonged to Marc Chagall’s grandson. Today, she resides in London with interiors doyen Ashley Hicks (son of David Hicks, hexagon obsessive and Brit design guru) and their daughters, Ambrosia and Angelica. The library of their townhouse has over 1,000 books and a fireplace made of stone from Jaipur. Her husband designed the wallpaper for the hallway, and on top of it they placed their trio of Basquiats.
That’s why fashion photographer Roger Moenks took this picture for his new book, Inheriting Beauty, published by PowerHouse Books. At their private addresses in New York, Paris, London, Milan and Hong Kong, he also photographed haute, high-minded heiresses like Roberta Armani, Delphine Arnault, Vivia Ferragamo, Valesca Guerrand-Hermès, Jacqui Getty, Veronica Etro, Renee Rockefeller and Nadja Swarovski. Then Moenks had Vogue contributing editor and social wit William Norwich pen the intro, and asked Christopher Tkaczyk, a playwright/Fortune reporter with a degree in dramatic literature, to write the text. Which makes perfect sense.
Paris Hilton wasn’t invited. Actually, she was uninvited. When it was leaked to the press, Moenks’ agent was quoted in the New York Post muttering something about “standards.”
First published in FASHION Magazine April 2008
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