“I remember being pregnant with my son [in 2019], taking a flight to Los Angeles, where I was for three hours before I flew back on a red-eye that same night, and just thinking, I really wish that I just had a little store that sold things with, like, primitive cows on them,” she told me, pointing toward a faded antique wooden cow perched on a red arrow that the website says will “point you in the direction of the nearest cottage.” The store wouldn’t open for another hour or so, and morning light streamed through the gingham curtains. She’d lit Idyllic Morning, a vegan hemp-soy-based candle made by Cottagecore Black Folks—one of the store’s best-selling brands—that smells of a fresh clothesline. Gelman wore white overalls and a plain white cotton tee, her unstraightened hair clipped half up to reveal her bare face behind thick black frames. This was not the Gelman whose last magazine interview featured her on the cover, bump-cupping in a tight black power dress with a blowout and big promise as a master of the universe, under the cover line “The Women Building America’s Most Inspiring Businesses.” This was Gelman 2.0, minister of the Cobble Hill countryside. “Obviously, yes, the life I am living now is really different than the life I was living, but it was actually, it’s a life that I fantasized about before. It’s not a consolation prize, you know?”
The Wing, and life then, and the Six Bells, and life now, feel foundationally opposite and exactly the same. Aesthetically, the two spaces are diametric. If The Wing looked and felt like the most privileged, most online popular girl, then the Six Bells is her grandmother. The Wing’s workplaces cropped up amid that pussy-hat moment of the hyper-perfect Instagram grid, when FOMO reigned and everyone sold perfection and order and access, the most curated lives you desperately wanted to exist in—yet it was a cultural moment of disorder, chaos. The Wing is where the New York Times Style section sent a reporter to watch what everyone assumed would be Hillary Clinton’s victory in 2016 and, ultimately, where she found a soft place to land in her post-defeat press tour. The Wing was brazenly girly (though Gelman insisted otherwise to Architectural Digest), devoid of clutter, pitch-perfect for the only New York era in recent memory that anointed the try-hards as cool. In Wing sprach, it was intentional. “Our inspiration was the apartment of a really cool Danish artist you wanted to make your best friend,” Gelman told Architectural Digest as the first Wing location opened its doors. Vogue followed her as she and her partner scouted spots for their Paris location, calling The Wing “a perfect, jealousy-inducing blend,” the spatial, cool-girl equivalent of a letterman jacket.
Walking into the Six Bells, on the other hand, feels like taking off your bra the instant you get home. Tucked into a real-life block of nondescript brokerage firms and dry cleaners is the charming fictional village of Barrow’s Green, which Gelman made up, and that is where the Six Bells—both real-life and fictional—is doing business as a “country store of homewares from a world far away,” as the hand-painted sign out front says. A corporeal metaverse for the so-called grandmillennials. Gelman has populated Barrow’s Green with a cast of characters to whom she gave backstories. Inside the store, she’s hung oil portraits she’s collected over the years to serve as avatars for the townspeople, with brass name plaques underneath to identify the likes of the town gossip, the businessman, the rabbi. The name of the store was inspired by a pub in Warborough, Oxfordshire, where several episodes of Gelman’s favorite British crime serial, Midsomer Murders, were filmed (she made a pilgrimage last year). A watercolor map of the town that she commissioned hangs nearby (an interactive version lives on the website). The store is strewn with feather-stuffed frilled cushions, tiny cups and saucers, floral dinner plates designed in Paris and hand-painted by artisans on the Amalfi Coast, mismatched paperbacks in primary colors that may disintegrate if you look at them too long, and enough block-printed linens and precious quilting to fill a farmhouse. The Six Bells sells the work of more than 40 independent brands along with antiques Gelman has selected on trips to Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, Verona, Virginia, and the like. You can practically hear your mother saying, “Look with your eyes, not your hands,” and then, “Go grab that old quilt.”
“We have a motto that is written on a pillow in the store,” says Laetitia Gorra of Roarke Design Studio, who designed the Six Bells with Gelman after doing spaces for The Wing for years. She came onto the project almost as soon as Gelman came up with the idea. “ ‘Out with the new and in with the old.’ So that’s where we started.” Gorra settled on Farrow & Ball’s Cane, a cool yellow, wanting the walls to look like a memory of her grandfather’s living room in Normandy. The rest of the store’s colors—country red and forest green and mustard—were chosen to take people out of the whites and grays of the digital world. Gelman brought on Deva Pardue, a graphic designer who’d also worked with them at The Wing, to add what Pardue called a “handmade” feel to the branding, relying on book cloth and paper textures as backgrounds to make everything feel “intentionally imperfect, not made on a computer.” In a former life, teams would assemble 20,000-square-foot spaces, sometimes at the same time. The Six Bells is 600 square feet and, counting Gelman, employs five people.
Every design is a reaction to what came before it, Gelman points out. “There is such sameness and such a sterile quality in design right now, and this is a very intentional departure from that. There’s an alienation you start to feel when you look around and every coffee shop and dentist’s office looks identical, and it feels connected [to the] dystopia of the world.” She herself felt alienated by all the minimalism, she said. “I just wanted to create something that was the furthest thing from an NFT possible. I’ve always been interested in the idea of opening a door, walking through it, and entering into a different reality, and right now, you enter into so many spaces that are missing any texture or personality. I wanted to create a space that both lowered people’s blood pressures with a space and didn’t take itself too seriously.”
What Gelman does—be it the Six Bells or The Wing or a political campaign or a TV show—has never mattered as much in drawing people’s interest as the fact of Gelman doing it. She is an astute reader of rooms, a generationally gifted flack, a connector of people, willful enough in her control that before I had made a single call for this piece, I got a call from a mutual friend telling me that Gelman heard that I was writing a story about her. She is a storytelling capitalist and a builder of worlds who understands what her customers want before they know they want it—Don Draper if he’d put himself in the ads. She is pretty and rich, unfailingly pulled together, and friends with everyone you hate-watch on the internet. She is not a household name, but if the name Audrey Gelman does ring a bell, you have an opinion about her. She is highly conductive, radiating heat in the current era of guilty pleasure. “I can’t explain it,” she tells me when I ask her why she thinks people have such a strong reaction to her. “I guess I am just not for everyone.”
People started tripping over Gelman nearly a decade ago, when, at 26, she managed to wrangle all the downtown kids and New York celebrities to care about a snooze of a candidate in a snooze of a race for the New York City comptroller. No one had much heard of the candidate, Scott Stringer, yet all the great rags, from Page Six to New York magazine to Women’s Wear Daily, turned up to write about a fundraiser he held at the Maritime Hotel in Chelsea. “Not since Bloomberg banned smoking almost everywhere in town have city hall politics garnered so much interest among the downtown fashion set,” Vogue wrote of the evening. New York called it “the most hip fundraiser in the history of the office of New York City comptroller.” But nobody was there for the candidate. People turned up because of Gelman. She was a thing—Lena Dunham’s best friend who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, dated Terry Richardson (who has been accused of sexual misconduct, though he has said his actions were consensual), and followed the Stringer gig with a stint as senior vice president at the P.R. firm SKDKnickerbocker. “Let’s Go Mets” was tattooed on her inner lip. She listened to speed metal, wore Chanel and Jimmy Choo, and played a recurring role in Dunham’s hit HBO show, Girls, a wink of a cameo, as she plays opposite the character Marnie, who is said to be based on Gelman. After Stringer’s win, before she left politics and P.R. to start what would eventually turn into The Wing, The New York Times called her a “boldface name” in her own right, “dogged” in her pursuits, dubbing her “the Girl Most Likely.” She was everywhere, toggling between meetings and parties, D.C. and New York, a top contender in the Busy Olympics. She got tired of changing for events in Starbucks bathrooms, so she came up with the idea for Refresh Club, a practical place where women could access well-appointed locker rooms, maybe redo their hair, and meet up with friends between work and play. She brought on a cofounder, Lauren Kassan, who expanded the concept to make it more of an all-encompassing coworking space for women. The women went out to raise money alongside other millennial female-founded start-ups like Glossier, Away, and Outdoor Voices. All of them faced the headwinds of seeking funds from primarily male V.C.s and investors (that is to say, women receive less than 3 percent of all venture money invested in start-ups, closer to 2 percent in the last year). Amid the twin phenomenons of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement, Gelman, like many women executives at the time, leaned in (reference intended) to a mission beyond the fundamentals. The cofounders renamed the idea The Wing to hearken back to Virginia Woolf’s notion that women need an entire wing to themselves, and the company began racking up millions of dollars from the likes of Adam Neumann at WeWork and Whitney Wolfe Herd of Bumble, Valerie Jarrett, Mindy Kaling, and Megan Rapinoe. Their “beauty rooms” were wrapped in a custom toile wallpaper of women hopping from taxis to race to yoga and school pickup. Conference rooms and phone booths were named after Lisa Simpson and Ramona Quimby and Christine Blasey Ford. The Perch, its café, sold wine from female vintners and a “Fork the Patriarchy” bowl. They hired women architects, hung women artists, booked women speakers from Serena Williams to Lorena Gallo (formerly Bobbitt). Keychains declaring “girls doing whatever the fuck they want” could be had for $15.
The world that Gelman built with The Wing, as we know, ended up eating her. Her knack for the narrative has been both her hook and her heel. People believed in what she was selling at The Wing so much that when the inherent tensions between capitalism and feminism pulled at its seams, too much had been stuffed inside of it, by her, by the media writing piece after piece about her and other so-called girlbosses of the time, that it could not contain itself. The resulting explosion was both general to the time and specific to The Wing. Gelman, like her contemporaries, was in the thrall of a toxic loop: In order to raise money, they needed to stand for something, be public facing, and hit incomprehensible growth targets. But being public facing and responsible for a mission greater than just creating extreme growth subjected them to intense scrutiny and to the higher standards they themselves had set. At times, it seemed like The Wing was a piñata with Gelman’s face on it, in part because she sold herself as a leader who could cure cultural ills.