The Surprise Guest

The Surprise Guest

BY ERIKA MAZA | Town and Country September 2024 Issue
Every party needs oneor 17.

Uptown. Downtown. In the popular imagination they’re not just different zip codes, they’re separate planets, with their own orbits, languages, even magazines.

For 178 years T&C has epitomized uptown, and for the past 40 of those, Paper has embodied downtown. Always they have rotated around the same axis: New York City.

So we convened a dream dinner party, inviting Paper people and card-carrying members of Club T&C, a first-of-its-kind collab between two media institutions that have more in common than meets the eye. 

We have Paper OGs turned T&C contributors and T&C fixtures cosplaying Paper.Are they Paper- curious but T&C-forward? Maybe more like Paperistas by day and Town & Countrytes by night.  


Probably both. It’s all in a change of wardrobe, a secret wink and hand- shake, and the international language of “invincible glamour,” as Guy Trebay puts it in his new memoir, Do Something, which chronicles an earlier version of the city in which the only currency that mattered was being yourself “in a world that, as someone once said, day and night does its best to make you into every- body else.”

Perhaps that city is not so bygone. Perhaps it’s right here, right now.

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