Maura Moynihan in the News
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Music and Mysticism, September 7, 2001
YOGA HOTEL, August 31, 2003
The Terror In Nepal, May 7, 2002
A Little Bit Of The East, July 1, 2001
India Has Maura To Give Thanks For, August 2, 1996
New York Times, July 1, 2001
A Little Bit of the East, on Fifth
By ABBY ELLIN
HIGH above Fifth Avenue in a duplex apartment brimming with Matisses, Picassos and presidential autographs, the talk turned to saris. Can Western women get away with traditional Indian garb and not look as if they're wearing a bedspread?
"The only way is if we're in another country, and then at a party," said Sarah Giles, the design editor at Harper's Bazaar. "Bindis are fine, but not saris. We don't know how to walk in them."
A woman with a tiny diamond-shaped bindi dotting the space between her blue eyes nodded.
"That's true," said the woman, Maura Moynihan, who in addition to the bindi was swathed in a diaphanous gold sheath. "And Indian women say the most terrible things about you under their breath." She broke into a flawless Hindi accent. "Look at that foreigner, how ridiculous she looks in that! "
Maura Moynihan's latest bohemian incarnation is as a dressmaker, in Kathmandu.
"A sari is the Indian babe's fashion trump card," said Ms. Moynihan, who, throughout, swathed herself in various garments from her collection. "They're very sexy. But not for Westerners."
Ms. Giles turned to her and said, "You can wear them, but the rest of us look idiotic."
Ms. Moynihan, who is 43, has been wearing saris since the early 1970's, when her father, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was ambassador to India. They lived in New Delhi. Since 1999, Ms. Moynihan's adopted home has been Katmandu, Nepal, where she founded a company called Choli, the Hindi word for the shirt worn beneath the sari.
On Wedn6sday, she held a sample sale at the Upper East Side home of Sharyn Mann, whose husband, Steve, is the former finance chairman of the Moynihan for Senate committee. "She used to lend me clothes for Dad's fund-raisers," Ms. Moynihan said. "Now she's buying mine."
Ms. Mann, a co-founder of the Food Allergy Initiative, a nonprofit charity, purchased two jackets and a pair of pants. " I love that her clothes come from a different era," she said. "You get really tired of designer clothes. This has meaning."
Over a four-and-a-half-hour stretch, about 20 customers zipped in and out, while a uniformed butler passed around silver platters of pirogis (he called them Nepalese dumplings), fresh asparagus and lemonade in crystal glasses. Many of the customers were friends Ms. Moynihan knew through people who traveled in her father's circles.
She was inspired to import ethnic Indian clothing, she said, because she thinks Western women could benefit from the Eastern addition to their wardrobes.
"In Asia, women are allowed to age gracefully," she said. "They attain more status as they get older. Not here. Asian women have uniforms, but American women don't. I'm trying to bring the uniform to American women. Besides, I am so sick of the little black cocktail dress. I could die of boredom."
Black dresses aside, Ms. Moynihan's life has been anything but boring. For the past 28 years, she has been ricocheting between Asia, Washington and New York, where she stays with friends. Her latest visit has been extended because of the turmoil after the massacre of most of the members of Nepal's royal family on June 1. Fearful of going back to chaos, Ms. Moynihan rescheduled her departure from about three weeks ago to August.
An accomplished bohemian, Ms. Moynihan has a long resume of artistic gigs and social causes. She published a short story collection, did a stint on "Saturday Night Live" in the early 1980's, released two CD's, worked at the Holocaust Museum in Washington and was a celebrated friend of Andy Warhol. "He didn't quite get my love for the slums of India," she said. "If I could be backstage at Xenon with Keith Richards, why would I go to India?"
Over the last few years, in Katmandu, she worked in Tibetan refugee camps with Refugees International. Last year, she started Choli, and says that one of the appeals of having a business in Nepal is employing the local people.
"After a certain point, you need to provide jobs and not just wrap Band-Aids," said Ms. Moynihan, who has 15 people working for her. She says that typically a Nepalese school-teacher makes the equivalent of $40 a month, and that by paying her workers by the garment, she enables them to make as much as $60 a month.
"They need work," Ms. Moynihan said, "especially now with the tragedy. Business is on hold. Tourism has dropped."
Ms. Moynihan transforms luminous antique fabrics embroidered with beads, brocade and finely spun gold and silver thread into blouses, dresses, pants and the coats that gained popularity as Nehru jackets but are known as sherwanis in India (Joseph's technicolor dreamcoat meets Sergeant Pepper). Her clothes are now sold at Portantina, on Madison Avenue.
"Her fashions are timeless," said Barbara Bergreen, the owner of Portantina. "They override trends while managing to look trendy."
As Ms. Moynihan elaborated on each piece of clothing, the women rifling through the racks of brightly colored garments included Vera Blinken, wife of Donald Blinken, the former ambassador to Hungary, and Sheila W. Schwartz, whose husband, Richard J. Schwartz, is the chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts. Lynn Forester, founder and co-chairwoman of FirstMark Communications, sent her assistant, who picked out - with Ms. Moynihan's help - a pale blue blouse and gold evening jacket for her boss.
"The clothes are wonderful," said Ms. Schwartz, as she purchased a gauzy, three-quarter-length evening jacket ($400) and rushed off to a benefit at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Pam Putney, an international public health worker, modeled an electric-blue coat and announced, "Blue is the color of communication, the throat chakra." She bought it for $400.
Is seems axiomatic that all well-heeled, well-connected people must at some point travel to India and return with inspired fashions. Certainly, India has long been a source of fascination for spiritually and stylistically bereft Westerners, from the Beatles and Mia Farrow to Madonna, not to mention all those caught up in the recent craze for pashmina shawls and Sun Salutation.
Ms. Moynihan sat down on a multi-colored tapestry. "I know, everybody has a line," she said, laughing. But she sees herself differently, disregarding people who assume she leads a dilettante's privileged existence. "I've never used my connections to get into the boardrooms of Wall Street or Hollywood but into the slums of Katmandu," she said.
Choli is a for-profit business, and at the sample sale Ms. Moynihan pulled in a few thousand dollars, but she says that her company is not just about money.
"doing design in Nepal is not the easiest thing\240 in the world," she said. "It would be much easier sitting in Manhattan. Working in the third world is totally unpredictable. The tragedy now is a case in point. But I have to do it, I wouldn't be my father's daughter if I didn't."