2019 Gala | Honoring Fern Mallis, Fashion Icon
Monday, November 4, 2019 | Mandarin Oriental Hotel, New York City

On Monday, November 4, 2019, the Carter Burden Network held its newly named Annual Gala, the Silver and White Night at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City. As we celebrated another impactful year of serving New York City older adults, we were honored to present the Inaugural Silver Star Award to a true role model, innovator and philanthropist - who is showing the world how to age with dignity and impact — Fern Mallis! We also celebrated 4 iconic Silver Influencers on Aging: Iris Apfel, Stan Herman, Joan Kron and Fran Weissler. It was a great evening!

Password = carter. Please credit Hechler Photographers.

For those who could not attend our Gala, there is still time to support our mission to help older people live safely and with dignity. Click here to donate.

Honoree Information

Inagural Silver Star Award

Fern Mallis

We were honored to present the Inaugural Silver Star Award to Fern Mallis—a true role model, innovator and philanthropist who is showing the world how to age with dignity and impact. Fern is the award-winning creator and organizer of Fashion Week in New York and cities across the globe. She has been an industry game-changer in the world of fashion and design for more than 35 years. She is a former Senior Vice President of IMG Fashion and Executive Director of CFDA. Her book, “Fashion Lives: Fashion Icons with Fern Mallis,” published by Rizzoli, features iconic no-holds-barred interviews, combined with never-before-seen personal photographs from interviewees such as Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Tommy Hilfiger, Betsey Johnson, Polly Mellen, Bruce Weber and more. Her very popular series at NY’s 92Y is now in its 9th year. She is the President of her own leading international fashion and design consultancy, Fern Mallis LLC. Fern’s commitment to living her most authentic life -and encouraging others to do the same - makes her the perfect recipient of our Inaugural Silver Star Award.

Co-Chairs

Michele Ateyeh

Michele (Mickey) Ateyeh is widely recognized as a leading corporate business manager, retail director and licensing expert for fine jewelry and designer accessories. She began her career at Tiffany & Co. as a buyer for Elsa Peretti and then as buyer for the launch of the Angela Cummings Department. She later joined Hermes Paris and was responsible for the construction and completion of their first Flagship store in New York City.

She then became President, CEO and Principal of Angela Cummings Designs LLC. In 2009, Michele became President of Carlos Falchi and then transitioned to President of Artisan House where she supervised the growth of Isabella Fiore. Today, Mickey continues working with Angela Cummings, spearheading special projects and partnerships.

Michele continues to share her varied business expertise with young jewelry and accessory designers. She is an active member of the Fashion Group International. She is deeply involved in supporting the arts, particularly Broadway theater, and several New York-based charities.

Jeffrey Banks

Jeffrey Banks is an acclaimed Menswear Designer whose signature American design style significantly impacted the entire fashion world. The Jeffrey Banks Signature Menswear Collection consists of tailored clothing, dress furnishings and sportswear. It established a new benchmark for men of style.

Throughout the last decade Banks has been Creative Design Director for several highly successful private label Menswear lines.

He was selected to be Design Director for the historical launch of the first brand extension for Johnnie Walker Scotch, which includes casual sportswear and timepieces. The perception of Johnnie Walker has now changed making it more appropriate for today's younger affluent male.

Throughout his distinguished career Banks has been honored for his talent and creativity. He has won two Coty Awards for Outstanding Menswear and Men's Furs. He received the Cutty Sark U.S. Menswear Designer of the Year Award for his Extraordinary Contribution to Men's Fashion, an Earnie Award for Boyswear and the Pratt Award for Design Excellence.

Brett Beldock

Interior designer and product designer Brett Beldock is not your average decorator. The former fashion designer now uses her multifaceted talents for combining color, pattern, and personality in the Interiors’ world. In her design work, Beldock helps her clients push limits, expanding on their visions for their homes and adding bits of her signature style to her firm’s projects. She combines elegance with eclecticness in her projects. Her wildly popular wallcovering line, Brett Design Wallpaper, is sold to design lovers from coast to coast. Her wonderfully offbeat collection of furniture and decor for CB2 flies off the shelves and onto the pages of some of the most respected design publications.

Aside from her projects, Brett taught at NYU for 17 years and lectured on color at NYIT for many years. She has also provided color forecasting for products developed by Samsung of Korea.

Silver Influencers on Aging

Iris Apfel

Iris is an American businesswoman, interior designer, and fashion icon who has defied age barriers as a woman ahead of her time, stamping the fashion and art world with her own unique brand for almost a century. Born in Astoria, Queens, she studied art history at New York University and attended art school at the University of Wisconsin. She worked for Women’s Wear Daily, for interior designer Elinor Johnson and was an assistant to illustrator Robert Goodman before marrying Carl Apfel in 1948. Two years later they launched the textile firm Old World Weavers which thrived until they retired in 1992. From 1950 to 1992, Iris Apfel ran design restoration projects. On September 13, 2005, The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York premiered an exhibition about Iris Apfel's style entitled Rara Avis (Rare Bird): The Irreverent Iris Apfel. In 2013, she was listed as one of the 50 "Best-Dressed over 50" by The Guardian. In 2018, her book, “Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon,” was published. Never one to slow down, in 2019, at 97, global agency IMG signed her to a modeling contract. True to her genius, the Museum of Lifestyle & Fashion History in Boynton Beach, Florida, is designing a building that will house a dedicated gallery of Apfel's clothes, accessories, and furnishings.

Stan Herman

Stan, the past president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, has been designing for over four decades. His collections have spanned the complete spectrum from ready to wear and intimate apparel, to uniforms for America’s most prestigious corporations from FedEx to McDonalds to New York’s JetBlue Airways. He is a runaway success as one of QVCs major designers who expanded his brand into accessories and a home collection, furthering his line with books at Random House. In his four decades as a top designer, Herman won 3 Coty awards as the designer of Mr. Mort, a phenomenon of ready to wear in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. As the first breakthrough for animal humanity concerns in fashion, the mayor of New York gave him the Central Park Zoo as a showcase for his faux fur collection. According to the CFDA, Herman also revived the use of chenille in his loungewear collection for Kellwood.

Joan Kron

Joan was contributing editor at large of Allure magazine for 25 years.  There she invented the plastic-surgery beat, winning more than a dozen journalism awards and the respect of surgeons and readers. Her career path to filmmaking was unorthodox, to say the least. In 1948, at age 20, she graduated from the Yale School of Drama, where she majored in Costume Design. She went on to pass the exam for the United Scenic Artists Union and was one of the first costume designers hired by NBC-TV, when TV was black-and-white and live. Joan was a force behind the first East Coast exhibit of Pop Art in 1962, and the shocking visit to Philly in 1966 of Andy Warhol, who arrived with underground films and the musical group, the Velvet Underground. Meanwhile, in partnership with a friend, Joan was producing limited editions of the artists Robert Indiana and Roy Lichtenstein - found today in the top museums.  At age 41, after a personal tragedy, Joan began writing and proved to be a natural, moving swiftly from Philadelphia magazine to the New York Times (covering design), and The Wall Street Journal (covering fashion). Around 2012, Joan was inspired to try her hand at film. She understands how rare it is to have a successful first film and credits the appeal of Take My Nose...Please! to her collaboration with the many talented people who believed in her.

Fran Weissler

Fran, along with her husband Barry, has had a producing career that spans over 40 years. They are the recipients of seven Tony Awards: They met in the mid-1960s. Fran Weissler, then a thirty-something housewife with two children, was filling in for a sick friend at the box office of a theater in West Orange, N.J., where a touring production of The Taming of the Shrew was playing. Barry was the producer, the director and he played a servant. He offered her a job booking the shows into theaters and eventually they married. The rest is history with iconic shows like Othello starring James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer, Fiddler on the Roof with Topol, Gypsy with Tyne Daly, Annie Get Your Gun with Bernadette Peters and Reba McEntire, the 2010 revival of La Cage Aux Folles with Kelsey Grammar, the 2013 revival of Pippin, and Chicago, the longest-running American musical in the world. Other Broadway credits include Zorba, My One & Only, Falsettos, Grease, Seussical, Wonderful Town, Sweet Charity, The Scottsboro Boys and Waitress, a musical adaptation of Adrienne Shelly's 2007 independent film favorite, with an original score by popular singer/songwriter, Sara Bareilles.

A copy of our most recently filed financial report is available from the Charities Registry on the New York State Attorney General’s website (www.charitiesnys.com) or, upon request, by contacting us at (212) 879-7400. You also may obtain information on charitable organizations from the New York State Office of the Attorney General at www.charitiesnys.com or (212) 416-8816.