Pippa Middleton v Victoria Beckham: who made it in Manhattan?

Manhattan is a brutal place to be a celebrity. Just ask Pippa Middleton, who stormed into New York earlier this month with her glossy-haired posse of girlfriends, intent on teaching New Yorkers how to party like a princess’ sister, the theme of her soon-to-be-released book. Or Victoria Beckham, arguably closer to royalty in the celebrity world than Pippa, and thanks to her much-lauded fashion label, a serious power player... for now. Because that’s the thing about NYC, it will fête you and floor you in a minute; stars rise and fall based on little more than a poorly toned arm or who can get a table at the latest impossible-to-access bar. This is a make-or-break town and as Pippa and Posh well know, only the toughest come out on top.

Which is why, when you spot Anna Wintour at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning in early September among the stacks of the New York Public Library, you realise something — or, more accurately, someone — is up. At that time of year she is more likely to be found swatting tennis balls behind the gates of her summer compound on Long Island, yet there she was, along with New York’s almost-as-powerful editors and buyers, sitting not courtside but ringside in the cavernous gallery of the Beaux Arts landmark, volleying bons mots with her guest Maria Sharapova. Why? Victoria Beckham’s S/S 2013 collection.

Mrs Beckham had endured a sleepless night (fretting about collars), but then, who wouldn’t? The pressure was palpable. ‘You don’t get Anna Wintour out of bed on a Sunday morning for nothing,’ says a fashion columnist. ‘This is major league.’ The morning was all business — so much so that when the only celebrity, David Beckham (with daughter Harper), arrived and quietly took his seat, nary a single editrix glanced up from her BlackBerry.

The two great lions that flank the library are nicknamed ‘Patience’ and ‘Fortitude’. As a designer, Beckham has shown both. She’s no longer the plastic perma-tanorexic who once vamped onstage at a London Fashion Week show in a burgundy flamenco dress, but rather a modern-day study in how to carefully, calculatingly, build a successful high-end brand. Her tears following the show were real, as were the accolades for her flirty short skirts, deftly cut pants, and use of tomato (a surefire colour trend for S/S 2013), a marked departure from her signature second-skin dresses of

previous seasons: ‘She continues to grow her brand with quiet assurance and intelligence,’ concluded Vogue’s arbiter of international style, Hamish Bowles. (Sharapova, for one, admired the trim little tennis dress and skirts.) Backstage afterwards there wasn’t a bodyguard in sight, nor a single paparazzo. Victoria, dressed in a little black dress with cap sleeves and a flounce at the bottom, had briefly nodded and waved on the catwalk and now demurely received her admirers.

When Mrs Beckham reflected on her success later that day, it’s tempting to wonder whether the successful Manhattan jaunt of another British visitor, Pippa Middleton, who had toasted the town the week before, preyed on her mind. For weeks in advance, the city had been abuzz with the news that the two rather different statuettes of English celebrity were coming to town. High-powered publicists had alerted their lackeys: carte blanche access for both to all private doors in the city. This was lining up to be a deliciously fraught clash of personalities — and styles.

But it was never meant to be. In the event, they were lavish ships passing in the night. Both could claim a sort of victory — Victoria secured her place in the fashion pantheon and Pippa was the toast of the tabloids — but the real British winner, the one who eclipsed them both, was on centre court at the US Open. Andy Murray, finally victorious in a Grand Slam final at his fifth attempt, warmed the cockles of every New Yorker's hardened heart with a performance that all the flippy skirts and VIP access in town couldn’t outshine.

Not that the press didn’t try to cause a racket from the moment Pippa touched down. She had ostensibly arrived in New York to plan the promotion of the October publication of her home-entertaining book Celebrate, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t time for some good old-fashioned fun; and, as the gossipeuses noted, celebrate she did. She and two girlfriends (bunked up like Park Avenue princesses at The Carlyle Hotel — once Diana, Princess of Wales’s preferred home-from-home) caught a meal at Catch, a Meatpacking fish joint so fresh to the New York scene that most foodies have yet to flock there, where they ate salmon carpaccio and hellfire rolls. Then she was spotted at the loungey Electric Room at the Dream Downtown hotel, chatting it up with a hunky hat trick of Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford, the former hockey star turned restaurant mogul Sean Avery, and Mazdack Rassi, boss of photography company Milk Studios.

But what is wrong with a little paparazzi-fuelled promotion for a budding authoress? Curiously, Pippa never, as some had expected, made her way to New York Fashion Week. She preferred to watch the tennis, venturing to the US Open not once but twice, to watch (courtesy of Roger Federer) a women’s quarter-final match and the triumphant Andy Murray. Not that she needed Federer to procure her seats; her escort on both occasions was the 24-year-old son of the president of the US Tennis Association, Spencer Vegosen; a Harvard-bred, East Asia scholar who speaks both Mandarin and Classical Chinese and looks like a fledgling Gordon Gekko. Pippa and he shared a diminutive cake courtside to celebrate her 29th birthday.

Despite a jaunt through Central Park on her Rollerblades, Pippa didn’t quite make it to the much-lauded Titians at The Frick. She did, however, find time for André Balazs, the 55-year-old impresario (owner of Evening Standard in New York and Chateau Marmont in LA), who flew her to his bohemian Sunset Beach hotel on Shelter Island for a day of ping pong and al fresco dining. Their time together appeared ‘businesslike’ said an onlooker — and why not? Who better for a prospective global party-planner to consult than the brains behind the Boom Boom Room (aka the Top of Evening Standard, where the city’s chosen ones, including Jay-Z and Beyoncé, knock back $200 shots of tequila)? ‘Pippa’s sister has given her a lot of access and she’s taken advantage of it. Who wouldn’t?’ says one fashion writer.