Boys Do Cry: The Kristian Laliberte Story

I want to be New York's answer to Rachel Zoe . . . Yeah, Nicole Richie did fire her and called her a bitch, but you know she worked her way up to that. She's one of my idols.

Mr. Laliberte isn't exactly a Horatio Alger story. He grew up on Nahant, an exclusive little island off Massachusetts. His father is the famous contemporary painter Norman Laliberte. His mother, Laurel, is a designer and a philanthropist. The yard in front of their 14,000-square-foot house was landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted. Mr. Laliberte said he never had to hide his sexuality from his parents growing up, and he remained out while attending Milton Prep and Columbia, where he graduated in 2005 with a degree in European history.

Oh but wait. Uh oh. Stop the internet-presses! We can't hate Kristian because he is a Victim.

In December of that year, he and a female friend were walking out of a gay bar in Lynn, Mass., when a man yelled "Faggot!", threw Mr. Laliberte against a car and beat him unconscious. He spent a month in the hospital and had seven operations to restore sight to his eye. "At first I was petrified to leave the house, and then the panic attacks started in three months after," he recalled. "But it gave me a huge perspective and also that much more drive."

He spent most of last year working as a buyer, stylist, publicist and creative director of Caravan, a high-end boutique in Nolita. "Basically, my boss, Claudine Gumbel, couldn't deal with the fact that me and Bridget would go out every night and network and like promote the brand," he said. "She would send us pictures off Patrick McMullan and be like, 'What were you doing?'" He said Ms. Gumbel made him cry nearly every day. He resigned in December. "You know you have other people working here too, and Kristian has a bite about him sometimes, so maybe I made him cry, but he definitely made other people feel shitty too," Ms. Gumbel said on the phone. "My frustration was that he's going out so much that he can't come to work on time. Kristian had days where he worked very hard, and then he had days where he didn't show up when we really needed him.

Kristian Laliberte: New York's Rachel Zoe? [NYO]

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