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Inside the glamorous world of Lauren Santo Domingo: the ex-Vogue editor changing the way women shop
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Plissé tulle ballgown, price on request, Giambattista Valli Haute Couture (giambattistavalli.com) CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
Lauren Santo Domingo had a party last night. Not that you can tell. The only hangovers in her 18th-century hôtel particulier in Paris are a couple of stray American red plastic party cups (one on the gilt console table and one next to a Marc Quinn orchid sculpture) and there are no signs on the woman herself.
LSD, as she's known, is in her pink fluffy dressing gown, fresh from the shower and ready to be photographed for our shoot in the couture gowns that are arriving every hour with their handlers from Chanel, Givenchy et al.
Via Instagram, though, I can see that the party was a good one. Bianca Brandolini posted a snap of her hostess filling the college-style beakers from buckets full of champagne. The actress Jessica Chastain took selfies with the professional mingler Derek Blasberg, while a clutch of models and influencers played beer pong.
It was a relatively low-key evening compared to some of LSD's other recent soirées. In February she threw a birthday party for Vogue editor Edward Enninful, where Gigi Hadid, Alexa Chung and Naomi Campbell bundled on to her sofa while a drag queen dressed as the Queen presented a giant cake.
The living space, by day, feels calm, airy and hallowed. François Catroux, decorator to the Gainsbourgs, the Rothschilds and the Santo Domingo family since 1992, has delivered a home filled with talking points. Is that a Man Ray? Yes. Where's the coffee table from? It's a Giacometti.
CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
Velvet dress with double organza skirt, and transparent and leather stilettos, both price on request, Givenchy Haute Couture; Diamond earrings, price on request, Graff
Santo Domingo, who lives between here and Manhattan most of the time, explains that she designed her place in Paris to feel like a retreat between fashion shows. As the founder of Moda Operandi, the luxury shopping website that allows women to order clothes directly from the runway, she returns to the city at least four times a year to get a first look at what the designers will be serving next.
Her husband is Andrés Santo Domingo, a record-label founder and the son of a Colombian business magnate, making him heir to a billion-dollar fortune. The couple met in Paris when she was 21 and he was 19 (they are now 43 and 41), married in 2008 in Cartagena, and inherited their Saint-Germain duplex seven years ago from his parents after Andrés and his brother had tossed a coin for it.
Entertaining is what the Santo Domingos do best. Even their children know how. Seven-year-old Nicolas is getting ready to go to the Picasso museum with his father and some friends. Six-year-old Beatrice is buzzing around the apartment, hiding under a cloud-like Giambattista Valli gown, while introducing the photography crew to a beanie octopus named Tickles, christened by Apple Martin, daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. Whatever they do, this family does it in style.
"I travel with the fashion calendar," Santo Domingo explains of her routine. "I joke that it's always fashion week somewhere, so I travel a lot, whether it's London, Hong Kong, the Middle East... But I have always had a home away from home in Paris."
CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
Diamond necklace, price on request, Graff
As a child, Santo Domingo visited the city annually with her businessman father, Ronald V Davis, the man who took Perrier water to America - he brought the family over for their summers. "I would always do my back-to-school shopping with my father here,' she says, smiling. 'Although back then it was just about stationery..."
LSD's grown-up autumn shopping list is filled with new designer names to know (Staud, Rokh and Marina Moscone) as well as labels that are pitching a 1990s sensibility that she likes (Matériel, Anna October and Nanushka), plus a few party-dressing favourites (Attico and Alessandra Rich).
September, in the fashion world, is filled with promise for those returning from long summer holidays and preparing to trade in their sundresses for more variety and new trends. On the catwalks, we will be previewing what designers will have in stores next spring, but for Santo Domingo, the street-style parade outside the shows is also a chance to publicly declare a fresh sense of self, sartorially speaking.
"I am very deliberate with my fashion choices," she says of her approach. "I plan ahead at the shows and I pre-order so much. I always ask myself who do I want to be next season, what are my hopes and dreams of what I want to wear? I think about where I'm going to be in six months' time: maybe I'm looking forward to a season full of weddings and parties, so that's what I'm looking for at the shows, or a bleak winter of fundraising, or holiday parties.
CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
Tweed dress and patent-leather shoes, both price on request, Chanel Haute Couture. Tatiana Verstraeten white-gold and diamond earrings, £60,000, available at Moda Operandi. Bracelet, Santo Domingo’s own
"We have annual events, like we go to Colombia every New Year's Eve, so for that I want one great dress for that night, plus kaftans from the resort collections. Or, of course, I know that I'll be doing fashion weeks in these cities. It gives me a chance to reinvent myself, and it's nice to look forward and imagine myself there. I'm quite organised so I very rarely have that dreadful feeling of 'I have nothing to wear.'"
The notion of planning one's wardrobe ahead of time, partly, is what prompted Santo Domingo to launch the business model of Moda Operandi in 2010. Pre-ordering clothes that would arrive six months later was the norm for American women before fast fashion took over; after any catwalk show, rich clients would attend trunk-show parties with the designer to place orders for the pieces they wanted. But as internet shopping took off and the recession hit, the trunk-show system collapsed. Santo Domingo had the foresight to see how it could be reinvented for the dotcom era.
"All that I really did was take a very traditional way of shopping and put it online," she says, self-deprecatingly. "Trunk shows were always part of the process after a runway show. It could be on the shop floor at Bergdorf Goodman, in the designer's studio or at a woman's house. There were famous stories of Oscar de la Renta doing million-dollar mornings at someone's home in Texas."
"After the recession, department stores were buying more conservatively so offering less choices, but also there was this idea of stealth shopping, as women didn't want to be seen in public shopping and drinking champagne at 11am. On the other side, street style and social media came in, so trunk shows seemed outdated, but women still wanted to shop for exciting clothes."
CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
Net top, sculpted top with matching skirt, pearl earrings, belt and shoes, all price on request, Dior Haute Couture; hat, price on request, Stephen Jones for Dior Haute Couture
Santo Domingo was perfectly positioned to bring the format into the future. She knew the high-net-worth market (personally, by name - her 1,000-strong wedding guest list informed the business's initial customer mailing list) and LSD has since become Moda Operandi's best poster woman.
The 'Lauren's Closet' section of the site holds her personal picks - her edit from the resort collections tells me what she'll likely wear in Cartagena next New Year's Eve: a canary Raisa Vanessa ruffle dress for £4,098, and a £17,988 Sanjay Kasliwal bangle.
While the website is the heart of the business, in-person events are also crucial, as Santo Domingo and her team offer the super-rich access to fashion's inner circles. She rattles off stories about clients in Hong Kong who will happily buy a diamond over WeChat as long as it's under 5ct, and how most women at certain times of the year are having their purchases shipped to their beach homes on St Barts. She has valuable insights into the behaviour of the wealthy and knows what will appeal. As such, an average spend on Moda Operandi is $2,000, three times that of its competitors.
All MO clients are treated like VIPs, with stylists on hand to offer in-depth advice. "For me, giving advice is so much more than just, 'Buy this dress because it's in season,'" Santo Domingo explains. "I'm like, 'Oh honey, pull up a chair and talk to me. I want to know is your ex-boyfriend going to be there? Do you plan on dancing?' Every fashion choice has so much going into it."
When we meet she has just attended the couture shows, an important event to her personally, but also as a businesswoman advising clients what to buy. "We had a handful of Moda clients here with a couple of stylists and we act as their entrée into this world."
With Giambattista Valli at Paris Fashion Week autumn/winter 2019 CREDIT: GETTY
If there is anyone who can get you in, it's LSD. She knows everyone. Santo Domingo WhatsApps the pictures of her daughter playing in the Giambattista Valli tulle directly to 'Giamba' himself. Clare Waight Keller of Givenchy gets a personal text to say that the gown has arrived at her place and looks great. Santo Domingo began her career as an assistant at American Vogue and says that many of the friendships that she formed then are the ones she values most in the industry now.
She has incredible stories from her 16 years at Vogue (she still serves as a contributing editor). "I started as a [fashion] assistant so there wasn't a dress that went down the runway that didn't come through my hands," she says. "We did an annual couture issue and I remember a Versace dress came in for Nicole Kidman to wear. It arrived in this big wooden box, with a cartoonish 'This side up' label, and we were six assistants vying to get at it.
Anna [Wintour] asked if I could wear it for her to see, and so that was the first piece of couture I ever wore. I could not move, both emotionally and physically. Having been obsessed with fashion from a young age, I think at that moment an angel sang and beams of light came into the Vogue closet. I was sold."
Being a friendly face in fashion, Santo Domingo says, is important to her, and she admits she likes using clothes to start a conversation and to provide entertainment.
"If I am meeting new people, I don't like fashion to be intimidating," she says. "Perhaps that was my experience having been a young assistant interacting with a lot of people who were extremely intimidating. I realised fashion could be a weapon at times.
Attending the Met’s Heavenly Bodies exhibition last year with her husband, Andrés Santo Domingo CREDIT: GETTY
"It's an impulse for me now to think about these things and be upbeat and enjoy fashion and colour. Having worked at Vogue for so long I rarely wear black. Anna famously rejected black for [use in] her magazines so to this day I rarely wear it."
Santo Domingo's extraordinary outfits and her fabulous life, naturally, translate very well on social media. With her tagline 'Why be boring?' @thelsd has more than 270,000 followers on Instagram. She strategically shares snippets of the glamour with fans, rather than presenting her everyday reality.
"I have no angst about social media because I am totally comfortable putting my best foot forward and hiding the boring or the bad stuff," she says. "I know people are conflicted by it, but I don't have that problem.
"I am the friend that you call when you get the job, you get the proposal, you get the house, you're going on vacation. I will celebrate you. There are other people you call when you are sick, or heartbroken. I know that about myself and everyone else does too. I want to see my friends at their best, looking their best, and living their best lives. Maybe with a little Valencia filter.'
Sign up for the Telegraph Luxury newsletter for your weekly dose of exquisite taste and expert opinion.
Save
Plissé tulle ballgown, price on request, Giambattista Valli Haute Couture (giambattistavalli.com) CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
- Caroline Leaper, senior fashion editor
Lauren Santo Domingo had a party last night. Not that you can tell. The only hangovers in her 18th-century hôtel particulier in Paris are a couple of stray American red plastic party cups (one on the gilt console table and one next to a Marc Quinn orchid sculpture) and there are no signs on the woman herself.
LSD, as she's known, is in her pink fluffy dressing gown, fresh from the shower and ready to be photographed for our shoot in the couture gowns that are arriving every hour with their handlers from Chanel, Givenchy et al.
Via Instagram, though, I can see that the party was a good one. Bianca Brandolini posted a snap of her hostess filling the college-style beakers from buckets full of champagne. The actress Jessica Chastain took selfies with the professional mingler Derek Blasberg, while a clutch of models and influencers played beer pong.
It was a relatively low-key evening compared to some of LSD's other recent soirées. In February she threw a birthday party for Vogue editor Edward Enninful, where Gigi Hadid, Alexa Chung and Naomi Campbell bundled on to her sofa while a drag queen dressed as the Queen presented a giant cake.
The living space, by day, feels calm, airy and hallowed. François Catroux, decorator to the Gainsbourgs, the Rothschilds and the Santo Domingo family since 1992, has delivered a home filled with talking points. Is that a Man Ray? Yes. Where's the coffee table from? It's a Giacometti.
CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
Velvet dress with double organza skirt, and transparent and leather stilettos, both price on request, Givenchy Haute Couture; Diamond earrings, price on request, Graff
Santo Domingo, who lives between here and Manhattan most of the time, explains that she designed her place in Paris to feel like a retreat between fashion shows. As the founder of Moda Operandi, the luxury shopping website that allows women to order clothes directly from the runway, she returns to the city at least four times a year to get a first look at what the designers will be serving next.
Her husband is Andrés Santo Domingo, a record-label founder and the son of a Colombian business magnate, making him heir to a billion-dollar fortune. The couple met in Paris when she was 21 and he was 19 (they are now 43 and 41), married in 2008 in Cartagena, and inherited their Saint-Germain duplex seven years ago from his parents after Andrés and his brother had tossed a coin for it.
Entertaining is what the Santo Domingos do best. Even their children know how. Seven-year-old Nicolas is getting ready to go to the Picasso museum with his father and some friends. Six-year-old Beatrice is buzzing around the apartment, hiding under a cloud-like Giambattista Valli gown, while introducing the photography crew to a beanie octopus named Tickles, christened by Apple Martin, daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. Whatever they do, this family does it in style.
"I travel with the fashion calendar," Santo Domingo explains of her routine. "I joke that it's always fashion week somewhere, so I travel a lot, whether it's London, Hong Kong, the Middle East... But I have always had a home away from home in Paris."
CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
Diamond necklace, price on request, Graff
As a child, Santo Domingo visited the city annually with her businessman father, Ronald V Davis, the man who took Perrier water to America - he brought the family over for their summers. "I would always do my back-to-school shopping with my father here,' she says, smiling. 'Although back then it was just about stationery..."
LSD's grown-up autumn shopping list is filled with new designer names to know (Staud, Rokh and Marina Moscone) as well as labels that are pitching a 1990s sensibility that she likes (Matériel, Anna October and Nanushka), plus a few party-dressing favourites (Attico and Alessandra Rich).
September, in the fashion world, is filled with promise for those returning from long summer holidays and preparing to trade in their sundresses for more variety and new trends. On the catwalks, we will be previewing what designers will have in stores next spring, but for Santo Domingo, the street-style parade outside the shows is also a chance to publicly declare a fresh sense of self, sartorially speaking.
"I am very deliberate with my fashion choices," she says of her approach. "I plan ahead at the shows and I pre-order so much. I always ask myself who do I want to be next season, what are my hopes and dreams of what I want to wear? I think about where I'm going to be in six months' time: maybe I'm looking forward to a season full of weddings and parties, so that's what I'm looking for at the shows, or a bleak winter of fundraising, or holiday parties.
CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
Tweed dress and patent-leather shoes, both price on request, Chanel Haute Couture. Tatiana Verstraeten white-gold and diamond earrings, £60,000, available at Moda Operandi. Bracelet, Santo Domingo’s own
"We have annual events, like we go to Colombia every New Year's Eve, so for that I want one great dress for that night, plus kaftans from the resort collections. Or, of course, I know that I'll be doing fashion weeks in these cities. It gives me a chance to reinvent myself, and it's nice to look forward and imagine myself there. I'm quite organised so I very rarely have that dreadful feeling of 'I have nothing to wear.'"
The notion of planning one's wardrobe ahead of time, partly, is what prompted Santo Domingo to launch the business model of Moda Operandi in 2010. Pre-ordering clothes that would arrive six months later was the norm for American women before fast fashion took over; after any catwalk show, rich clients would attend trunk-show parties with the designer to place orders for the pieces they wanted. But as internet shopping took off and the recession hit, the trunk-show system collapsed. Santo Domingo had the foresight to see how it could be reinvented for the dotcom era.
"All that I really did was take a very traditional way of shopping and put it online," she says, self-deprecatingly. "Trunk shows were always part of the process after a runway show. It could be on the shop floor at Bergdorf Goodman, in the designer's studio or at a woman's house. There were famous stories of Oscar de la Renta doing million-dollar mornings at someone's home in Texas."
"After the recession, department stores were buying more conservatively so offering less choices, but also there was this idea of stealth shopping, as women didn't want to be seen in public shopping and drinking champagne at 11am. On the other side, street style and social media came in, so trunk shows seemed outdated, but women still wanted to shop for exciting clothes."
CREDIT: PHOTO: BOO GEORGE. STYLING: SOPHIE GOODWIN
Net top, sculpted top with matching skirt, pearl earrings, belt and shoes, all price on request, Dior Haute Couture; hat, price on request, Stephen Jones for Dior Haute Couture
Santo Domingo was perfectly positioned to bring the format into the future. She knew the high-net-worth market (personally, by name - her 1,000-strong wedding guest list informed the business's initial customer mailing list) and LSD has since become Moda Operandi's best poster woman.
The 'Lauren's Closet' section of the site holds her personal picks - her edit from the resort collections tells me what she'll likely wear in Cartagena next New Year's Eve: a canary Raisa Vanessa ruffle dress for £4,098, and a £17,988 Sanjay Kasliwal bangle.
While the website is the heart of the business, in-person events are also crucial, as Santo Domingo and her team offer the super-rich access to fashion's inner circles. She rattles off stories about clients in Hong Kong who will happily buy a diamond over WeChat as long as it's under 5ct, and how most women at certain times of the year are having their purchases shipped to their beach homes on St Barts. She has valuable insights into the behaviour of the wealthy and knows what will appeal. As such, an average spend on Moda Operandi is $2,000, three times that of its competitors.
All MO clients are treated like VIPs, with stylists on hand to offer in-depth advice. "For me, giving advice is so much more than just, 'Buy this dress because it's in season,'" Santo Domingo explains. "I'm like, 'Oh honey, pull up a chair and talk to me. I want to know is your ex-boyfriend going to be there? Do you plan on dancing?' Every fashion choice has so much going into it."
When we meet she has just attended the couture shows, an important event to her personally, but also as a businesswoman advising clients what to buy. "We had a handful of Moda clients here with a couple of stylists and we act as their entrée into this world."
With Giambattista Valli at Paris Fashion Week autumn/winter 2019 CREDIT: GETTY
If there is anyone who can get you in, it's LSD. She knows everyone. Santo Domingo WhatsApps the pictures of her daughter playing in the Giambattista Valli tulle directly to 'Giamba' himself. Clare Waight Keller of Givenchy gets a personal text to say that the gown has arrived at her place and looks great. Santo Domingo began her career as an assistant at American Vogue and says that many of the friendships that she formed then are the ones she values most in the industry now.
She has incredible stories from her 16 years at Vogue (she still serves as a contributing editor). "I started as a [fashion] assistant so there wasn't a dress that went down the runway that didn't come through my hands," she says. "We did an annual couture issue and I remember a Versace dress came in for Nicole Kidman to wear. It arrived in this big wooden box, with a cartoonish 'This side up' label, and we were six assistants vying to get at it.
Anna [Wintour] asked if I could wear it for her to see, and so that was the first piece of couture I ever wore. I could not move, both emotionally and physically. Having been obsessed with fashion from a young age, I think at that moment an angel sang and beams of light came into the Vogue closet. I was sold."
Being a friendly face in fashion, Santo Domingo says, is important to her, and she admits she likes using clothes to start a conversation and to provide entertainment.
"If I am meeting new people, I don't like fashion to be intimidating," she says. "Perhaps that was my experience having been a young assistant interacting with a lot of people who were extremely intimidating. I realised fashion could be a weapon at times.
Attending the Met’s Heavenly Bodies exhibition last year with her husband, Andrés Santo Domingo CREDIT: GETTY
"It's an impulse for me now to think about these things and be upbeat and enjoy fashion and colour. Having worked at Vogue for so long I rarely wear black. Anna famously rejected black for [use in] her magazines so to this day I rarely wear it."
Santo Domingo's extraordinary outfits and her fabulous life, naturally, translate very well on social media. With her tagline 'Why be boring?' @thelsd has more than 270,000 followers on Instagram. She strategically shares snippets of the glamour with fans, rather than presenting her everyday reality.
"I have no angst about social media because I am totally comfortable putting my best foot forward and hiding the boring or the bad stuff," she says. "I know people are conflicted by it, but I don't have that problem.
"I am the friend that you call when you get the job, you get the proposal, you get the house, you're going on vacation. I will celebrate you. There are other people you call when you are sick, or heartbroken. I know that about myself and everyone else does too. I want to see my friends at their best, looking their best, and living their best lives. Maybe with a little Valencia filter.'
Sign up for the Telegraph Luxury newsletter for your weekly dose of exquisite taste and expert opinion.
