Long Nguyen, in fact, was a walking tome of fashion history, much of which he’d lived—and the rest he had studied. This made him impatient when he felt a designer had failed to live up to his expectations the runway. “He definitely thought the runway was an important opportunity for people to perpetuate ideas,” Church said. Last February, while leaving a New York fashion show of nicely tailored suits and dresses, Long railed impatiently that he had seen it all before on other runways. For Long, nice clothes didn’t justify a show. He was looking to be inspired, and to recognize something fresh on those catwalks.
Beyond his remarkable career in fashion, anyone fortunate enough to visit Long’s family’s long-abandoned apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, or to grab Vietnamese food where he did all the ordering, knew he had led a colorful and somewhat mysterious life. Long was a Vietnamese immigrant who casually recalled being helicoptered out of Saigon as the city fell in 1975. He and his sprawling family, heirs, he said, to a pharmaceutical empire that was soon to be nationalized, landed around the world, living in Paris and in Boston. Long later graduated from Princeton University—which led to his habit of wearing Princeton tees and hoodies to fashion shows, and his collection of collegiate letter jackets.
To hear Long discuss his family was often to feel a sense of wonder. He spoke of being the youngest son of the youngest—and thus least powerful—of his late father’s several wives, though Vietnam officially outlawed polygamy in the 1950s. Several years ago, he returned with his family to Vietnam for the first time since 1975. He described returning to one of their ancestral homes and finding it, far from decrepit or occupied by strangers, to have been well maintained awaiting his family’s return. It was the first of several visits.
Shortly before that, Long had invited two friends and me to join him at a Boulevard Saint-Germain apartment owned for many years by his family. Long had recently begun staying there during Paris fashion weeks. The sprawling apartment had an elevator that opened into its foyer, and encompassed, as best as I remember, four bedrooms. We sat on the parquet floor of the vast but nearly unfurnished living room, whose columns of french doors grandly overlooked the leafy boulevard.
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