At 90 Years Young, Lynn Wyatt Celebrated Her New Book With an Uptown Cocktail Party

Guests gathered in a private salon owned by the jewelry house Verdura, perched high above Fifth Avenue and filled to the hilt with rare treasures. Wyatt held court on a sofa in the room’s center, fielding congratulatory kisses. Her four sons all joined for a toast, and regaled the crowd with some of their favorite memories, some of which can be found in the book’s pages.

“One day, I crossed over the border from Texas to a small town called Nuevo Progreso,” Trey Wyatt mused. “It was almost my mother s birthday, and she was in the South of France, so I wrote a nice little postcard for her birthday and mailed it from the Correos Mexicano. It got to her in the South of France, and amazingly she kept it for all these decades, and you’ll see it in the book.” Indeed on page 28, a tattered postcard sent to the family’s villa in St. Jean-Cap Ferrat reads, “Enjoy yourself! Don’t party too hard!!”

It’s just one of the many mementos Wyatt has meticulously archived in partnership with Rice University in Houston, in addition to menus, seating charts, news clippings, and photographs lensed by the likes of Slim Aarons and Helmut Newton. They will serve as a cornerstone of a forthcoming documentary profiling Wyatt, an effort spurred on after journalist Chloe Russell Kent began filming conversations with the woman of the hour and sharing them on Instagram and TikTok. Her accounts of a glittering, bygone era were catnip for younger audiences on social media, and they couldn t get enough.

“Back in the day, my dad would say to her, ‘Do you want a secretary?,’” Steve Wyatt told Vogue. “She would say, ‘No, I don t want a secretary, I want to do it myself.’ So, she would have a seated dinner for 50 people, and she d call up everybody and say, ‘You want to come to dinner? I m having a dinner for Truman Capote’—and they would all come. She d do all the seating, and work the menu out. She did everything herself, and that s why everybody just loved her, because she was just herself, and she put everybody at ease. Everybody had such an incredible time, like my mother would want you to have at a black tie dinner party.”

The one piece of the Lynn Wyatt oeuvre that remains elusive? Her closet. A longstanding client and close friend of American and French luxury houses alike—before the phrase VIC, or very important client, was even a thing—the full breadth of her wardrobe is unknown but assumed to be museum-like in its collection of rare items.

Alas, her granddaughter Cat Wyatt confirmed she has enjoyed its perks, on occasion. “Well, the closet is the woman, and the woman is the closet,” she told Vogue in the midst of admiring a pair of Verdura earrings behind a vitrine. “My grandmother has always been one-of-a-kind, and her sense of fashion, style, and grace is such a magnificent representation of her soul. She is 100% heart and an additional 100% world-class style.”