Thanks to Her, Be Cool Without Breaking a Sweat
Dany Levy sits in the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at Beverly and Robertson clutching her New York Times as a badge of identity. She flashes her newsprint accessory and telegraphs her East Coast otherness to a sea of airheaded Angelenos blissfully gulping down their nonfat, decaf iced-blendeds.
“This is the first time I’ve read the paper since I’ve been out here,” she confesses.
Green-eyed, ambitious, fast-talking and refreshingly high-strung, Levy, 29, is the founder of www.dailycandy.com, a Web site that sends free daily e-mail tips on everything from beauty products to restaurants and fashion finds. It is, in short, a guide on how to be hip. Daily Candy would never say that, of course. That would not be very Manhattan, where irony and self-deprecation still rule. “We are careful never to call it a style guide, or cool guide, or a hip guide,” Levy says. “To say it would be to discredit it.”
Dressed in a tiny black tank, even tinier low-rise jeans and pointy black shoes with heels a girl can actually walk in, the diminutive Levy does not come across as the out-of-place New Yorker she seems to think she is. But in case you missed the point, did she mention that she is a New Yorker and that she feels very pale, uncomfortable and foreign here?
That fact, however, has not prevented Levy, her New York-based skeleton staff of five, a part-time Los Angeles staff of two and a stable of freelancers on both coasts from launching a Los Angeles version of their Web site. Daily Candy Los Angeles debuted in December. Levy flew out this month for an official launch party at Drake’s, a sure-to-be-cool club in Venice that isn’t even open yet. Like its New York counterpart, Daily Candy Los Angeles aspires to suss out the newest restaurants, the quirkiest services and the hottest new trends, and write them up with authority and sass. The goal is to reach urbanites who are short on time and want to be in the know.
The writing style is smart, irreverent and breezy. (“That sweet little doggie is starting to out-style you,” begins a pet-focused fashion item. “So he’s bored with his Burberry sweater. Is finicky Fido Finkelstein ready for Passover?”) While items promote products and places, Levy insists that her site is editorially pure. If Daily Candy doesn’t like it, she says, the staff won’t write about it. Levy, former editor of New York magazine’s Sales and Bargains section and creator of that weekly’s GothamStyle section, forbids staffers to accept a gift worth more than $50. The daily e-mails are formatted in digestible bite-size chunks with a lot of zing.
Daily Candy has become popular in New York among the “Sex and the City” demographic of young women who apparently have more disposable income than they know what to do with. (Levy claims that 30% of subscribers earn more than $100,000 a year.) Since it was launched in 2000, Daily Candy has amassed 90,000 subscribers, she said, with new ones signing up at a rate of 300 to 400 a day. Five months after she created an L.A. version, she has 12,000 subscribers here.
Levy’s small network of cool hunters is constantly working the city. Correspondent Sally Horchow, 32, a freelance journalist and shoe freak, spotted some cool sneakers and followed them. Eventually, her obsession led her to a shoe collector, whose home is filled with rare Nikes and faux snakeskin Adidas. Horchow wrote an item the day his Web site, www.shoehypes.com, launched. He sold out in a day. Other items have included where to get the best, most fun manicures (Robert Bachelor Salon in Toluca Lake, where beauticians affix swatches of vintage scarves to your big toes; Lanny’s Nails on 3rd Street, where pedicures cost only $9); where to find cool corduroys (Marc Vachon on Melrose Avenue) or to get a yarmulke and tallis for your dog (the Woofery in Century City.)
Daily Candy may seem like the realm of flighty, style-obsessed chicks, but big corporations are starting to take heed because, as Levy points out, the site “moves product.” The day Daily Candy wrote a feature on “Sam the Cat and Other Stories,” by Matthew Klam, the book shot from No. 10,000 to No. 38 on the Amazon.com bestseller list. Two Barnes & Nobles in Manhattan sold out by lunchtime that day, according to a spokesman for Random House, Klam’s publisher.
Daily Candy has caught the attention of some big-time Arbiters of Cool. Levy recently met with Ian Schrager to discuss penning the in-room guides for his clubby luxury hotels. According to Levy, the New York site became profitable a year and a half after it launched, by charging for ads and sponsored links.
Given her site’s exuberance, perhaps the most striking thing about meeting Levy is to find out that she hates L.A..
She’s tried to like it. Really. She even wrote a piece for Elle magazine about her failed attempt to “loosen up and love L.A.” During a week in January she bleached her mousy hair blond. She bronzed herself at a tanning salon. She got a feng-shui pedicure and got her toes painted Far East fuchsia. She dutifully got a bikini wax and flashed some backside cleavage L.A. style. She even went to Utta, whom she described as the “infamous Hollywood fat pincher.” (Daily Candy had an item on Utta’s Body Sculpture in Beverly Hills, where Utta is said to knead away cellulite at the rate of $150 an hour.) But, as Levy wrote in Elle: “Put simply, Los Angeles and I don’t get along. I’m a New Yorker. A die-hard one.”
So why bother writing an insider’s guide to Los Angeles?
New York and Los Angeles, she explains, are “aspirational cities” or “style hubs.” For all its superficiality, sigh, Los Angeles simply can’t be ignored. Levy said she is still trying to figure out Los Angeles. “In New York, items on restaurants go through the roof,” she said.
“Here, it seems like people could care less about restaurants.”
Angelenos seem to be much more responsive to quirky and unusual services, such as Doody Dude, who scoops up dog feces. “They love services in New York, too, but here it is more of a status thing to enlist a staff of people to do various things,” said Horchow.
And there have been some miscalculations, based on preconceived notions of this city’s star-worshiping tendencies.
“I thought people would be more susceptible to celebrity name-dropping, like so and so carries this bag ... but that is not necessarily true,” Levy says.
Ava Scanlan, 26, is a Daily Candy devotee who moved from New York to Los Angeles. She said Daily Candy serves as a virtual network of girlfriends in the know, something she doesn’t have here yet.
But the similarities between the two cities are undeniable she says.
“I swear to God,” she said, “there is a tunnel that runs between L.A. and New York and bypasses the rest of America.”
