FABIOLA BERACASA MAY HAVE BEEN BORN WITH FORTUNE AND BEAUTY, BUT SHE'S MAKING NEW YORK HER OWN PLACE NO MATTER WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY ABOUT IT
The Upper East Side penthouse apartment that Fabiola Beracasa shares with her mother, Veronica Hearst, has been her primary residence since she was 11 years old. She remembers moving into the apartment with her then-new stepfather Randolph Apperson Hearst, just before she was sent off to a boarding school in Switzerland. “The thing is, I didn’t live here for any real amount of time,” she explains. “I was always somewhere else.” Somewhere else included the summer vacations of her teenage years not milling about New York in the heat but working as an intern for Karl Lagerfeld on the Chanel Couture collection in Paris. “That was the time of the supermodel,” she says. “I would have done anything for those women, they shook the world.” The last summer of high school, when she was dating a guy with an aristocratic last name, she had the models write dedications to him on their fitting Polaroids. “You know, love Claudia, love Cindy, love Naomi,” she laughs. “I made him a book. He still has it.”
These are not the sort of memories that frame the typical teenager’s prelude to adulthood. Even for the beautiful children of New York, Beracasa’s early years seem itinerant and international, ones that move between powerful families and elaborate houses. She was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1976, where her father, Alfredo Beracasa, heir to an influential banking family and the largest Venezuelan leather-goods distributor, still resides. “Why do they always call him a banking scion?” she asks. “‘Scion’—the press loves that word.” They love that word because it sounds dangerous and romantic, as do wealthy, attractive young women connected to the Hearst name. For the past several years, Beracasa has been increasingly inked in the city’s society and gossip pages, oftentimes ranked as socialite number one in New York. Socialites, in theory, are supposed to be free of restrictions, oblivious to the anchors that weigh the rest of us to our meager routines, our paychecks—even our families. It must have been a shock for the scandal sheets to find Beracasa moving in with her mother six years ago when her stepfather died of a stroke. “I wanted to be back with her,” she explains of the homecoming. “Otherwise she would have been living here all alone.” By then, Beracasa had spent four years at Boston College and had just left a job in the production department of Christian Dior. “It’s not like I have a curfew again or anything. We are always coming and going. And it’s a huge place.”
At 31, the thin brunette has a childish smile and large, sharp eyes that seem able to cut the truth from a compliment. She’s quick to laugh, runs three to five miles a day, and isn’t afraid to say what she thinks. “I hate Hugo Chávez,” she says at one point about the president of her homeland. “Let him come and get me. He’s done no good for anybody. At least if you promise to do good for the poor, do good for the poor.” Beracasa also wasn’t always the comely social force living around elegant marbles and old masters and wearing a Givenchy dress to the Costume Institute gala. “At one point in my teenage years I was goth. I got a tongue ring, wore Doc Martens, had jet-black hair with blonde tips,” she says. “I was trying to find myself then. I went through a lot of phases. Except prissy. I never wanted to be girly growing up. To me that was an insult.”
What you don’t expect is for Beracasa to be following her own fortune, turning to business while most of her peers are dabbling in art or magazines. Perhaps her work ethic is something she learned from her stepfather, who she remembers as a “silent giant” who took her fishing and race-car driving. Around the same time Beracasa moved into the uptown penthouse, she began working as the creative director of Circa, an operation that is the largest global buyer of estate and antique jewelry. Beracasa met the owner when she went to him to sell a “junior Rolex.” A few days later he called, offering her a job as well as a share in the company. “I was disheartened by the idea that I was always just a number at all the other places I worked,” she says. “Circa’s what I needed. It gave me hope, because it’s partly mine. No matter what you do in other companies, the big fat cats will always be the big fat cats. You may go up in the ranks, but for what? To make sure what’s-his-name has a house in Saint-Tropez? I don’t think so.” That kind of practicality comes with her almost preternatural resistance to outside opinion. Many friends dissuaded her from the less-than-glamorous prospect of buying up estate jewelry and reselling it on the side. “People saw that as a hurdle,” she says, “because they didn’t think it was chic. It didn’t bother me one bit.” The company has grown massively since her arrival, with Beracasa involved with everything from sales to opening new offices in a number of major cities like Las Vegas and Hong Kong.
“What you’re seeing in the photos you took are the common areas,” she explains of the photographs on these pages. “It’s not really the place in the house where I get my mojo on.” She has her own section of the penthouse decorated rather simply with a large dressing closet. Her theory is that people only throw things away because they need to—because they don’t have the space (or, in her chosen jewelry field, presumably because they need the money). She has the space. She’s definitely got the wardrobe, although it’s not all designer dresses. During the photo shoot, she was wearing jeans as she straddled the antique horse in the hallway. “I wasn’t expecting my mom to be there, but she just stopped by,” she remembers. Mrs. Hearst gracefully walked by her daughter and out of the room, before having her secretary interrupt. “Mrs. Hearst says it is inappropriate to be on the horse. Please get off the horse.” Thankfully, Beracasa got her picture before she climbed down. Christopher Bollen
Photography Douglas Friedman
Makeup Scott McMahan (Artists by Timothy Priano)
Hair Sam Leonardi for Redken (Ray Brown Productions)
