Third Reich on the 7th floor

A former New York Times Styles writer turned Nazi artist is a hit in Bergdorf Goodman's Decorative Home department.

(Our last newsletter was our most read newsletter to date. Thank you so much to the family of the late Daphne Caruana Galizia for amplifying our story about government corruption in Malta.)

The conversation piece at the center of Elizabeth Hayt’s UES living room is not her glamour shot, a Jackson Hallberg commission depicting the former New York Post sex columnist, Times Styles writer, and Dr. Brandt devotee as a middle-aged Alice in Wonderland passed out in a field of pharmaceuticals. It’s her Third Reich funeral cortege, a gilded bar cart housing a handmade open casket bordered with golden arm handles posturing in a Nazi salute, inlaid with decorative braille text from Mein Kampf, and filled with rhinestone flowers blossoming from vintage Aryan blue glass eyes made for injured Nazi war veterans–each one now decoratively etched with Schutzstaffel bolts.

Elizabeth Hayt, above, in a commissioned portrait by Jackson Hallberg, and below, leafing through an original braille printing of Mein Kampf on her living room floor.

The cortege sits between her sofa and a table of her sculptures in the round. Next to a piece that’s a meditation on how much Hayt hates her mother, sits a dying Holocaust victim, simultaneously succumbing to a chintzy shower of rhinestone Zyklon B canisters and being raptured up a swastika-emblazoned chimney dispersing her in a cloud of white cotton smoke.

Elizabeth Hayt’s Nazi funeral cortege and Holocaust sculpture in the round.

Those flowers, minus the glass eyes, are now available in-store at Bergdorf Goodman, and they’re currently featured–in a paid promotion–in the June issue of Conde Nast’s House & Garden UK.

This caught me by surprise. Since last June, I’ve been the first and only person to write about Hayt’s artwork. I first spotted the flowers on Instagram last spring, a craft project teased out by Zoe Kestan, aka @weed_slut_420, the RISD alum Richardson model and stripper. I followed the tags which led me to the project’s publicist, Gia Kuan. She told me the project was called “Gilded Asylum,” that it was actually Hayt’s vision, and Vogue had the exclusive.

Zoe Kestan, aka @weed_slut_420, poses at home beside Elizabeth Hayt flowers.

But deep down I knew downtown It girls locked in a closet crafting a vainglorious agoraphobic ex-tabloid writer’s “Gilded Asylum” was a perfect Garage exclusive. Even better, my editor went to school with Kestan, making the story an easy sell.

So Kuan relented, and invited me uptown to meet Hayt and her girls ahead of Vogue. Hayt had hired Kuan with the hopes of Bergdorf Goodman carrying the line. But what the publicist and I didn’t know until we got there–and what Bergdorf Goodman still hasn’t figured out to this day–was Hayt has a personal sympathy and aesthetic obsession with Nazism that she channels into decorative arts only a self-hating Murray Moss could love. Once I witnessed that and interrogated Hayt, confirming she had nothing critical to say about Nazis, and that her art is not a judgment of them, I knew what I was going to write. I was determined to make sure Bergdorf Goodman never picked up her line, and Vogue killed their piece. I only half succeeded, which is no success at all.

Hayt, above, in her living room, leafing through an original braille Mein Kampf in custom Lou Dallas jeans, and below, revealing the casket’s inlaid braille interior.

I wrote for Garage about how Hayt acquires memorabilia through dark web white supremacist auction sites and how she worries the FBI is tracking her, how she found the braille Mein Kampf so beautiful it pained her to put scissors to it, how she attributes her interest to her father being stationed in Germany and so obsessed with “traditional” German culture that he took her on family vacations to concentration camps. And still Bergdorf Goodman picked up the line! Garage even ran the Zyklon B photo! It’s times like this I fear no matter how damning a story can be, all publicity really is good publicity. Someone at Bergdorf Goodman saw Hayt was featured in Garage and they didn’t need to read the story. Worse, back in December, the new president of Bergdorf Goodman, Darcy Penick, posed beside an Elizabeth Hayt flower for her portrait in The New York Times. Of every possible item in all of the new, modern, consumer-aware Bergdorf Goodman to stand beside, Penick chose the work of a known and enthusiastic Nazi sympathizer.

(And how did we all miss Hayt’s tell-all sex memoir was blurbed by the author of a book called Dreaming of Hitler??)

The more extraordinary thing is that it’s not just Kestan and Kuan working for Hayt but so many RISD cool kids, like Lou Dallas designer Rafaella Hanley, all of them having no issue taking Hayt’s money, and taking advantage of her Long Island summer house, despite her views. (Hanley cautioned Kuan last year to keep her name out of “Elizabeth’s narrative.”) Even Fern Mallis, the former head of the CFDA, had no issue showing up at the opening of “Gilded Asylum” which featured Hayt’s flowers on display around her Nazi tributes. Mallis doesn’t even seem to mind that her niece, Alexandra Metcalf, continues to bend her will into Hayt’s $575 stems. If this is the only work available to the niece of a woman who founded New York Fashion Week, what chance do the rest of us have?

Darcy Penick, above in The New York Times’ Styles section. Below, Fern Mallis and Alexandra Metcalf at the opening of “Gilded Asylum.” Mallis’ slideshow leaves out the Nazi works.

I forgot all about Hayt until this week. But now that the city’s in the thick of New York’s fascist and progressive forces clashing outside day and night, I’m reminded and disgusted how behind closed doors they still get along just fine. That’s when I revisited Hayt’s Instagram, saw the Times clipping, the Bergdorf’s tags hanging off her flowers, the June House & Garden UK plug. That’s when I found Hayt’s new online store which displays her living room, the golden wings of the bar cart just poking out from behind the sofa, and my story linked at the bottom of the page as a mark of pride. (Hayt’s only objection to the story at publication was writing she was 60 when she was 57–now 58.)

As NYC retailers open tomorrow as the city enters Phase 1 of its pandemic recovery, it’s the perfect time to encourage Bergdorf Goodman to do more than just board up its windows from protestors, but rid its shelves of hostess gifts that fund a hateful woman’s tasteless nostalgia for an era people are still dying in the streets to put behind them. If they do nothing they’ll only prove Elizabeth Hayt knows a blind eye when she sees one.