On Nantucket, interior designer Nina Liddle is spreading her wings with Birdie, a new boutique that brings her playful, design-savvy mix of home décor and fashion to the island.

Named after her childhood nickname, Birdie reflects Liddle’s penchant for curating the unexpected. The light-filled Washington Street shop brims with distinctive finds from Europe and Africa—pieces that surprise as much as they delight. “I wanted it to feel very curated,” Liddle says. “Things people aren’t seeing everywhere else.”

Liddle has long dreamed of opening a store, even before launching her successful design firm, Nina Liddle Design. But with her interiors business flourishing, retail was put on hold—until now.

Inside Birdie, her vision comes to life. Decorative Jean Roger ceramic frogs sourced in Paris sit alongside whimsical South African pottery by Cape Town artist Gemma Orkin. Handmade Fermoie lampshades, their patterned textiles glowing in the windows, signal Liddle’s signature style: chic yet lighthearted.

Fashion, too, finds its place here. Racks are filled with breezy womenswear from designers such as Paris’s Thierry Colson, New York’s Merlette, and India’s Hemant & Nandita. Accessories—from South African jewelry to handknit Mexican handbags—add an international flair.

Perhaps the most personal touch is a custom pillow program, which allows customers to select from an array of fabrics to create bespoke designs. It’s an idea straight from Liddle’s interiors practice, where textiles often transform a room.

For Liddle, Birdie is the fulfillment of a long-held vision: a boutique that blends her interior design sensibility with her instinct for discovery. More than just another shop, it’s a reflection of her eye, her travels, and her playful approach to living well.

The old script went like this: A lovestruck fellow would save his paycheck—for months, maybe years—to afford an engagement ring. Or a lucky heir would receive a rare bauble handed down across generations, the same one that glittered at a great-grandmother’s cocktail party.

These were natural diamonds: formed more than a hundred miles beneath the Earth’s surface under intense pressure and heat over billions of years, no two exactly alike, and eventually gleaming behind glass in jewelry cases. Romantic, rare, and—let’s be honest—ruthlessly expensive.

But when Spencer’s Mikaela Smith got engaged, she had something else in mind: a lab-grown diamond. Produced in a controlled setting with less labor and less environmental disruption, the stone has the same chemical and physical properties as a mined diamond, at just a fraction of the cost, and even the most experienced jeweler can’t tell the difference by sight alone.

A salon manager planning a June wedding at the Beauport Hotel in Gloucester, Smith says price was the primary driver for her and her fiancé, a high school English teacher. “We talked about it and just looked at the cost,” she says. “We could get a lot more for the value with a lab diamond.”

Smith worked with Wright Jewelry & Design Company in Hudson to customize a 2-carat, oval lab-grown diamond with side stones. The ring cost around $7,000, she says—far less than a comparable natural version. “I didn’t really care about the heirloom aspect,” Smith says. “What mattered was how it looked. And it was really cool to support a local business and get a custom design.”

A $7,000 stone that passes for a $70,000 one would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Today, it’s transforming the diamond industry, with even local jewelers at the highest end selling pieces made with lab-grown stones. “Lab-grown diamonds tend to resonate because they allow [buyers] to invest in something that’s still certified and has a quality design,” says Alyson Iarrusso, who runs New England–based Cove Fine Jewelry. “It’s really gone from ‘What can I afford?’ to ‘What do I want?’” Which, if you think about it, is a pretty big shift in a business that has always depended on the distance between those two questions.

For many Boston couples, lab-grown is more than just a budget-friendly choice: It’s a way to signal values—sustainability, ethical sourcing, smart spending. As Iarrusso puts it: “People buy lab-grown and are proud: They love the sustainability and the accessibility, and nobody is hiding it.”

Woburn’s Melissa Gutierrez Cronin sought out a lab-grown stone from the South End’s Laura Preshong, known for eco-friendly rings. “I had ethical concerns related to mining,” Cronin says. “We also really like the store we bought it at: It’s a small business, women-owned, and they only sell ethically sourced diamonds. That’s so important to me.”

Cronin says she’s never been asked about her ring’s pedigree. In Boston, “Nobody asks you what kind of stone you have. Even if they did, I wouldn’t mind telling them it’s a lab-grown diamond.” A California native, she’s noticed something about her adopted city: “I think people here are very social-justice-oriented, which is nice.”

Westford’s Kayla Prange—whose 3-carat oval-cut ring from Andover’s Melanie Casey cost just over $5,000—feels similarly. “It’s so freeing to just let go of the whole idea of natural diamonds and get what makes more logical sense,” she says—both from a financial and sustainability perspective. Prange did have to explain the lab-grown concept to a few befuddled family members, but she wasn’t losing any sleep over it. “It’s no surprise that the majority of diamond mines are located in places where people have historically been severely exploited,” she says.

But here’s what the diamond industry would rather you not think too hard about: When a whole generation shrugs off the mythology that made diamonds valuable—the scarcity, the sacrifice, the heirloom permanence—the disruption isn’t the stone. It’s the shrug itself.

You’re not going to find a lab-grown diamond at an antique jewelry store, “but that doesn’t make them less meaningful.”

So the buyers are on board. But what about the people who actually sell the things? Hannah Florman, a custom jeweler with a Newbury Street boutique, sees customers of two schools of thought walk into her store. “I see a lot of couples who are in the health and science fields who are genuinely excited and interested in the lab-grown diamond concept, and also those who are eco-conscious,” she says.

On the other hand, she’s worked with Boston clients concerned about the heirloom quality of their purchase. Natural diamonds, she notes, tend to retain long-term value because they’re tied to the whims of mining and availability. Lab-grown diamonds, which can be produced readily as literal carbon copies, don’t command the same scarcity-driven prices. You’re not going to find a lab-grown diamond at an antique jewelry store, “but that doesn’t make them less meaningful,” Florman says. “It just means they’re better understood as deeply personal objects rather than investments.”

That distinction—personal object versus investment—is the fault line running through every jewelry store in the region.

Anto Aboyan, co-owner of Adamas Fine Jewelry, a luxury jeweler in Newton, admits he was initially skeptical of the trend. Over three decades in the business, Adamas has catered largely to deep-pocketed clients, and natural diamonds accounted for most of the business’s sales. “In the beginning, I really felt that it’s going to be negative. But it really hasn’t been a negative: This is another avenue of selling engagement rings to a certain consumer who generally couldn’t afford a $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 diamond,” he says.

His sister and business partner, Veronica Sagherian, believes the trend is ushering in a more egalitarian era for the jewelry industry. “It’s basically opened up the opportunity for a younger, less affluent person to be able to afford something that would normally be only for a luxury market,” she says.

Natural stones continue to make up about 75 percent of their business, Aboyan estimates. The remaining 25 percent comes from buyers requesting lab-grown diamonds, often in larger sizes or elongated cuts. “If the consumer is asking for lab-grown, then we’ll be in the business of delivering lab-grown,” Aboyan says. “If the [demand] changes and 90 percent want lab, we’ll supply 90 percent lab.”

Boston Diamond Company, meanwhile, began carrying lab-grown diamonds about three years ago, but only after extensive vetting. Founder and CEO Stephanie Binder’s initial hesitation stemmed from quality concerns: Many lab grown diamonds are mass-produced and, despite strong certificate reports, at first weren’t up to the company’s standards. Certificates give baseline metrics like color, cut, clarity, and carat, the gemologist says. “But you can’t grade things like light, scintillation, brilliance, if it has haze or milky tones.”

Today, Binder estimates that about 90 percent of her clients choose lab-grown diamonds, and she believes they’ll be fully normalized within five years. In Boston, “We’re in a newer luxury market where consumers are no longer impressed by buzzwords,” she says. “They want to understand what they’re buying, how it performs, how it’s set, and how it will last over time.”

In other words, Boston’s jewelers say they haven’t been disrupted so much as recalibrated. The question, then, isn’t whether they can survive the lab-grown revolution; it’s whether the thing they used to sell—not the stone, but the story around it—can make it through.

Pull back a bit, and the bigger picture is hard to ignore. In 2015, lab-grown diamonds accounted for one percent of the overall market; in 2024, they accounted for 20 percent and have caused natural-stone prices to drop as demand shrinks. They’ve also upended a long-standing social ecosystem built on price, status, and meaning. In the past, “For a long time, the size of the diamond signaled what someone spent,” Iarrusso says. “Lab-grown diamonds are changing that equation.”

And while many of the Boston buyers in this story are proud, open, and even eager to sing their ring’s lab-grown status from the rooftops, not everyone is. One local jeweler who often works with clients in swanky enclaves like Palm Beach describes a quieter dynamic: buyers who choose lab-grown stones discreetly, especially in traditional or luxury-oriented circles. “I’ll hear, ‘I only want natural,’” says another local jeweler. “But then, privately, they’ll say, ‘I do want that. Can you create that for me? Nobody needs to know.’”

Then there are those who still gravitate toward natural diamonds—and don’t apologize for it. When Emily Baer was on the cusp of getting engaged, she says her fiancé, real estate agent Hans Nagrath, was firmly in the natural camp. “He was more in the heirloom, traditional, in-the-family-forever, work-of-art type mindset,” says Baer, a therapist and yoga instructor.

While Baer was initially indifferent to what type of stone her fiancé chose, she says her ring—a three-pronged teardrop stunner with a gold band from Boston Diamond Company—is perfect. “I trusted him with the design, and it’s beautiful,” she says. “It’s simple and timeless, and that’s where the heirloom piece ties into it.”

Beverly’s Noelle Guerin, meanwhile, went the other direction, eventually. When the hospitality and lifestyle marketing professional got married 23 years ago, she was proud to sport a natural diamond. But after it popped out of its setting on Thanksgiving last year and required replacement, she did some research: “I’d never considered lab until I did some digging and learned more about them: They’re ethically sourced, more affordable, and with great clarity,” she says.

Despite its lab-grown status, Guerin still considers her new ring an heirloom and plans to pass it on to her daughter someday. After all, it’s about the symbolism, not the stone. “To me, the ring signifies a beautiful marriage that I feel blessed to have and the journey to get there. That’s where the importance lies. I think there’s a misconception that lab-grown isn’t ‘real’ and therefore can’t be an heirloom,” she says.

And maybe that’s the real disruption—not that lab-grown diamonds exist, but that they’ve made the whole question of “real” beside the point. The scarcity is gone. The high cost is optional. The mythology has been politely yet firmly shrugged off. What’s left is just the ring on your finger and whatever story you decide it tells. For a lot of Bostonians, that’s turned out to be enough.

Moments before it all fell apart, Suhail Kwatra—the most coveted stylist in Boston—was entirely in his element. It was already dark, just after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, November 18, and he was in his second-floor office within the exclusive Fifth Avenue Club inside Saks at the Prudential Center. This was his domain—a gold velvet couch, champagne, and racks of clothes he’d personally selected for each client.

It was chilly in the store that evening, and Kwatra was dressed in a Roberto Cavalli purple python-print puffer. He was styling the resident of one of Brookline’s grandest estates, and she wanted more sweaters and purses to peruse. Kwatra told her he’d venture into the store to fetch them.

Downstairs, a shopping bag full of Chanel knits and purses in hand, Kwatra was about to head back upstairs when he was approached by two men in dark suits from asset protection: Tim Wade and John Wells, according to a police report. Kwatra says the men suggested he follow them and ushered him past the designer shoes, through a code-locked door, and into a small office.

By the time Kwatra left the room, he no longer had a job—and police were waiting to charge him with larceny and fraud. The allegation: He had returned unclaimed merchandise and pocketed the funds on Saks gift cards for himself. The total: $11,707.51.

But that wasn’t it. Wade and Wells handed police a handwritten letter from Kwatra in which he apologized and admitted to stealing $429,400 by way of fraudulent returns, mismanagement of promotional cards, giving away merchandise, and abusing his corporate credit card over the course of his career at Saks. (Kwatra denies the charges and says he was forced to write the letter under duress.) He was then marched out of the store, flanked by management and police, for all to see.

By midnight, everyone in town knew. Kwatra’s life, as he’d built it, was over. And so, too, was an era in Boston society.

By midnight, everyone in town knew. Kwatra’s life, as he’d built it, was over. And so, too, was an era in Boston society.

Originally from New Delhi, Kwatra was not just any stylist. Over more than two decades, he had cultivated a cult-like following among Boston’s social elite, powerful professionals, the married-well set, and anyone else with tens of thousands of dollars a year to burn on clothing, bags, and jewelry. Starting in the early aughts, he was the man who enabled the city to transition out of country-club attire into avant-garde fashion replete with flashy markers of wealth—something unheard-of among Boston’s Brahmin set. He amassed a client list that read like a social register, became the gatekeeper to Boston’s fashion world, and orchestrated the look of the city’s entire social scene.

And then there was Saks, his stage. As a prized stylist with the Fifth Avenue Club—the store’s exclusive personal-shopping program—the company gave him a private office and, it seemed, free rein to build an empire inside its walls. It sent him to Fashion Week in Paris with his clients and to the galas around Boston for which he dressed the guests. His black book made him invaluable. And—according to some former employees and clients I spoke to—untouchable.

Along the way, he became a fixture of Boston society himself. “It was part of the social fabric of the town to go to Saks and go to Suhail,” an heir to a real estate fortune explained. And clients’ relationships with Kwatra extended far outside the confines of the Fifth Avenue Club. They texted with him at all hours, accompanied him to lunches, parties, and clubs, and traveled all over the world with him. They introduced him to the ins and outs of Nantucket. They told him their secrets and gossiped about other women with him. Among his most frequent lines when talking about someone—“Tragic!”

Despite his power and popularity, rumors began circulating among clients and coworkers that he could play things fast and loose—double-billing, charging for items that weren’t purchased, and capitalizing on women who didn’t pay attention to their credit card bills because an office or a husband handled them. These stories mostly stayed quiet. “In Boston, it’s old Brahmin—we don’t say anything,” one spouse of a finance titan and former Kwatra client explained. But some took their complaints straight to the management at Saks—and they say they watched as the company seemed to simply look the other way.

Until it didn’t.

The question is why. Why now, after two decades? The answer may have as much to do with Saks as it does with Kwatra. By the time security pulled him into that small office, the company was drowning in billions of dollars of debt. Vendors hadn’t been paid in months—some had filed lawsuits; others had simply stopped shipping. A dying institution, it seems, needed someone to blame.

Or so Kwatra claims.

Gossip moves fast in Boston, and news about what happened to Kwatra escaped Saks almost immediately. That evening, just down the street from the department store, the Australian luxury brand Zimmermann was opening its first Boston location on Newbury Street. Inside, moving between elegant clothing in muted colors and passed canapés, was a carefully curated crowd consisting of the city’s power glam spenders and socialites. Many were Kwatra’s clients.

The whispers arrived mid-party: Did you hear? Phones lit up. Jaws dropped. Shock registered on carefully made-up faces. “I’m not even sure people looked at what was happening at Zimmermann that night,” the spouse of the finance titan said.

By midnight, the police report had traveled far beyond Newbury Street—forwarded, screenshotted, texted from one boldface personality to the next. As it moved through the city’s gossip circuit, it triggered a kaleidoscope of responses among current and former clients: disbelief, hurt, satisfaction, and no small dose of schadenfreude. Others scrambled to find old Saks receipts.

The finance mogul’s wife, who said she’d spent “upward of a million dollars” with Kwatra over the years, told me the news left clients feeling “violated in the same way as having a husband cheat on them.” Another client—fabulously wealthy and close to Kwatra—began to wonder if his attention to her parents and her pets was only a ruse to get her business. Following the news, she read a 2014 Boston Globe profile of him for the first time. When she came across the part where he said he had a “folder” of notes about clients’ pets—and their favorite treats—to endear himself to them, she said it “kind of made me throw up in my mouth.” Yet she concluded that there must have been other elements of the relationship that were genuine. They had been such close friends. For all the public galas she attended, there were few people she let into her selective social circle like she did with him. Reflecting on their relationship in this new light was “hurting my heart,” she said.

Kwatra denied any strategy or “agenda” behind remembering a client’s dog’s name. But, if a client mentioned the name of a pet or brought a dog to the store, he said he would have one of his assistants take note. “You want to make the clients feel welcome,” he said.

Some clients rose to his defense, more disgusted by certain women’s reactions than by the alleged infractions. “There are people who almost want to see him fall,” noted one well-known gala regular on the philanthropy circuit. “People always love to see people on their knees. The glee in some people’s faces. You can hear it in their voice.” Sure, Kwatra could be pushy and sometimes judgmental, and, upon further reflection, she acknowledged he did charge her twice for an item—but it only happened once. She insisted she continues to “like him very much.”

One former client, who said Kwatra had long been one of her best friends, described his bill infractions as “just something we were used to.” She had learned to “accommodate it,” she said, because she assumed it was either an honest mistake or an assistant screwing up.

Others saw the charges Kwatra was facing as his just comeuppance. “Karma is a bitch, isn’t it?” said one local businesswoman. “I couldn’t be less surprised.” She guessed Kwatra had gotten away with it because “there are a lot of idiots who just pay their bills without looking at them.” In her experience, “the receipts would be screwed up all the time.” She would get charged for items she didn’t buy and alterations that never happened. “He deserves all of this,” she said. (Kwatra says that many of these issues were a result of wider billing and administrative problems at Saks.)

But many of the women left reeling by the news were also perplexed—after all, some said Saks had known about the issues with Kwatra the whole time. The socialite who had spent more than a million with him said she complained to the store years ago after noticing he had billed her four times for the same item. She had warned management: “Something is drastically wrong at Saks right now, and it’s all in the hands of Suhail.” That was years ago—and nothing happened.

Which leads to the obvious question one former client posed: “Who is worse: Saks or Suhail?”

Before the scandal, there was just a kid from New Delhi. Kwatra grew up in a large, extended family, the son of the owner of a third-generation clothing business that specialized in European styles. “Fashion was always in my blood,” he told me.

His family had Boston ties, and he’d spent time in Weston growing up. He got a job at Saks in 2005, then moved to New York to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology—working for Saks there, too—and by 2007 was back at the Pru.

Saks opened in Boston in 1971, a few years after a store official brushed aside the notion that Bostonians are a drab lot, and insisted in an interview with the Boston Globe that the city was “receptive to high fashion.” The Globe’s fashion editor agreed, writing that Saks could be the “giant hand that whips Boston fashion into place.”

It would take a while. But by the time Kwatra came to work there some three decades later, Boston was in the midst of a cultural and economic renaissance. There were more people flashing money and fewer Brahmins around to turn up their noses at them. Even if the rich were no longer strictly old school, they were still playing Brahmin games: the fundraisers, the galas, the tables at charity events—all of which required designer looks that could compete with New York’s social scene. There were also ambitious women rising in real estate, medicine, and law, looking to close big deals in an increasingly global world. They needed to look the part. They needed someone to help. Kwatra—with his infectious love of luxury and his preternatural ability to immerse himself in his clients’ lives—would become their guide, their gatekeeper, their man.

Around 2013, Kwatra said, the store’s marketing manager told him that she wanted to get him out into Boston—“outside of these four walls.” Saks sponsored luncheons and charity events, inviting Kwatra to attend. At one of these luncheons, the manager introduced Kwatra to a group of very social women of means—whom Kwatra calls “the girls”—telling them they needed to visit him at the store. “After lunch,” he recalled, “I went back to work, and the gaggle of girls rolled in.”

The rest is history. Kwatra was a smashing success on the floor, and in 2015, after a record-breaking year of sales—some $7 million, he says—he was promoted to the Fifth Avenue Club, where he built something unprecedented: a personal-styling empire within the store.

His second-floor office at Saks became a destination. The champagne. The personalized, special treatment. The racks of clothes preselected for each client. He would have all the outfits before the big events, dressing each woman to ensure no duplicates. Kwatra made regular trips to New York to get special items, then messaged his clients—and they would come to what he called his “magic closet.”

A lot of boldface names moved in and out of that closet: Tiffany Ortiz, former wife of Big Papi; Christy Cashman, an author and equestrian well-known in Boston society; Janet Sharp Kershaw who co-owns Cheers and private events venue Hampshire House with her husband; socialites Laura Baldini and Ashley Bernon-Miller; swimwear designer Sinesia Karol; Madhu Chopra, mother of Priyanka; and Sarah Mars, of that Mars family—to name a few.

Along the way, he shifted the fashion culture of Boston. “I’ll take credit for it,” he said, explaining that Boston is “a knit city” where women “love their cozy knits.” He pushed them to expand their tastes. Women back then were wearing Escada and Malo—“those were tolerable.” Then Rick Owens. He got them interested in Yigal, then Issey Miyake. And on it went, until he had elevated an entire city’s sense of style.

Dressing the powerful made Kwatra powerful in his own right. He controlled the velvet rope at after-parties with designers—a you-can’t-sit-here attitude—and was often in charge of the seating list. Women would let him pick the guests at their fundraising tables. He would also hold his own events, which he refers to as “thoughtful experiences,” that many people wanted to get in on so they could connect with his clients and climb the social ladder. Some people wanted to spend time around his clients because it was “good for their business,” he says. “I was doing my job well, I was successful, and I had the right contacts. A lot of people in this Boston social scene that I don’t think need me, I come to find out that they do because they want to be seen and they want to be included in these events. And it wasn’t me chasing after them—it’s them chasing after me.”

If Truman Capote had his swans, Kwatra had his “girls.” They partied with him. Shared their secrets with him. Gossiped with him. Beyond “tragic,” his clients recalled him calling other women “peasants” and “D-list.” And they loved it. The former client said Kwatra was “totally fun to be mean with…I could not wait to be mean with him.” She would go to Saks to find out “who had gotten fat and who had gotten skinny. If I was having a moment with somebody that I was a little jealous of, I’d have Suhail look up what size they’re wearing these days just to make myself feel better.” (Kwatra denies making fun of his female clients’ weight, and says that though he may have used “peasants” in conversation, it was all “silly talk.”)

Meanwhile, his coworkers watched with amazement—and, Kwatra says, no small dose of jealousy—at the loyal and highly profitable relationships he built. “The women would flock to him,” said Bianca Carney, who worked as his assistant in the early 2010s. His clients loved him and enjoyed having him around. Willem Learn, who worked in Saks’ jewelry department during Kwatra’s tenure, said Kwatra could be pushy and rude to his clients, but they seemed to eat it up: “There is some skill set that he has that was addictive to them.”

Still, there were rumblings that underneath the glitz, glam, gossip, and success, something was rotten. Coworkers had warned Learn that Kwatra played things “fast and loose.” But Learn understood why nothing would ever come of it. Kwatra was more powerful than Saks “because he owns the book”—meaning he had the contacts. “With that much power, it would be dangerous to mess with him,” Learn said. “He could have gotten in trouble a long time ago—he shouldn’t have lasted this long.”

Another former employee, Steven Ertel, who sold shoes from 2017 to 2018, agreed. “If you are a top seller at the store, selling millions of dollars, they are going to look the other direction.… It’s all about whoever is a top earner—they turn a blind eye.”

For many years, little about Wendy Appel suggested she was a woman of means. She drove Subarus or Volvos, and one of her only extravagances was buying a designer purse every few years. In reality, she was fabulously wealthy. She ran both the real estate company her father had founded, and the family’s charitable foundation, through which she donated quietly and generously to the Museum of Science, GBH, hospitals, and arts organizations.

Starting in 2012, she suffered a series of strokes. That’s when, according to multiple people close to the situation, everything started to change: her appearance and—perhaps most tellingly—the boxes upon boxes of unopened merchandise from Saks that began piling up in her building’s lobby.

According to spending records I reviewed, she became a regular Saks shopper in early 2013. Her purchases mostly consisted of skin care, makeup, and handbags. But as the months went on, her expenditures increased dramatically—more bags and expensive jewelry, often topping thousands of dollars each. By the end of 2013, she had spent close to $100,000 at Saks.

The next year, her jewelry purchases increased, and she started buying big-ticket items more frequently. She bought two $20,000 Chanel watches in a single day. One day in October, she made three jewelry purchases totaling more than $154,000, followed by a necklace for $320,000 in December. The total for 2014: $1.2 million. In 2015—Kwatra’s biggest sales year ever—she spent just under $3 million.

That year, Appel’s son Michael had started to grow concerned about his mother’s spending. After he confronted her about it, Appel was adamant there was no problem. That July, Appel sent Kwatra an email—which I reviewed—asking him not to share information about her account with anyone, including family members. When Michael reached out to Kwatra directly, Wendy caught wind of it and left Kwatra a voicemail—I’ve heard it—apologizing for Michael’s actions. “For some reason he thinks I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “I told him, ‘I can assure you I know exactly what I’m doing.’”

In December, Michael tried to get Saks to intercede, meeting in-person with the company’s head of northeast security to ask for help. Nothing came of it. In the first two months of 2016 alone, according to sales records, Appel spent half a million dollars at Saks.

Then, in February 2016, Michael received a text message from a Saks employee warning him about his mother’s relationship with Kwatra. “They are taking advantage of your mother,” it read. The employee added that Kwatra “made her buy a leather top from [Louis Vuitton]. Is that a joke? I don’t see your mother wearing that…. He is terrible.”

Michael had had enough. In May 2016, his attorney sent Saks a formal cease-and-desist letter: “Michael is concerned that Wendy is being taken advantage of by Suhail Kwatra, a salesperson at Saks…. It appears that Mr. Kwatra is exploiting Wendy and taking advantage of her diminished capacity by suggesting that Wendy purchase large amounts of merchandise, most of which is quite expensive.”

Appel was subsequently diagnosed with dementia. She can no longer communicate verbally.

Kwatra says the sales associate who sent those texts to Michael did so because the colleague was “jealous of me and my success.” In one message I reviewed, the associate wrote: “I am the number one sales associate in this store and they are just trying to ‘beat’ me in sales by using your mother.” As for Michael’s efforts to get Saks to stop selling to his mother? Kwatra says Michael was “freaked out because I’m sure he’s thinking, ‘Well, there goes my inheritance.’”

Kwatra says he doesn’t think he did anything wrong—morally or otherwise—in his dealings with Appel. He was doing his job, he says, and Saks encouraged him to keep selling to her. “She was a number one client, and they wanted her to keep going. So they would say, ‘Well, if she’s not buying jewelry, then you should show her handbags.… Cross-sell, don’t just focus on one thing.’ Nobody ever said stop.… I got a huge pat on the back from leadership and executives that I was able to develop a cosmetics client into a top client of the store.”

One current store employee—no fan of Kwatra—agreed that the store encouraged Kwatra to sell to Appel. “They said, ‘There’s this trunk show, do you think there’s anything Wendy might like?’ That’s encouraging someone.” (Saks declined to comment on the record about matters pertaining to Appel.)

But Appel’s family members weren’t the only ones with complaints. I spoke to seven people who claimed Kwatra had mismanaged their accounts, either charging them for items they didn’t buy or overcharging them for items they did. Some said the discrepancies were in the thousands—and yet some of these women continued to shop with him.

Most who spoke to me did so on the condition of anonymity. Some were embarrassed to publicly admit how much they spent on clothes; others were concerned, they said, about how much Kwatra knew about their personal lives and what he might say about them, given the way he had talked about other women in the past. “A lot of us went through divorces with him,” one said, adding that she wished Saks had required him to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Kwatra says he would never reveal information about his clients.

Amber D’Amelio, a former client who is now an animal-rights activist, was willing to tell her story. She met Kwatra in 2011 when she was new to town. As they became friendly, he helped fill her charity foundation tables, and she threw his 30th birthday party on her yacht. She considered him a friend.

Then, a few years later, her husband “clocked a big charge” on her credit card bill for a “very expensive Chanel bag” she had never ordered. When Kwatra told her he had ordered it for her, she said she didn’t want it and asked him to return it. When the refund didn’t materialize, D’Amelio says, she reported the issue to Saks’ general manager, who refunded the charge. (Still employed by Saks, the general manager declined to comment for this story.) Incidents like that kept happening, D’Amelio says, and Kwatra made excuses, blaming his assistant.

Kwatra said that when D’Amelio was new in town, she “wanted to climb the ladder, and I was her ticket”—something D’Amelio denies. As for the billing issues: “If Amber had any issues with any of her charges, they were taken care of by the store manager,” Kwatra said.

Zach Haroutunian, who runs a private investment firm, had a similar experience. As a student at Suffolk University, he began shopping with Kwatra and believed they were truly friends. As the relationship progressed, he says, Kwatra began telling him he needed to hold charges on his card so Kwatra could bring items from New York to Boston for him to try on. Haroutunian initially agreed, but then “it snowballed into him sending racks of fur coats to my house.… I told him, ‘Suhail, this is a little bit too much,’ and he would be like, ‘Well, of course you need clothes.’” Haroutunian believes that management knew “exactly what was going on.” (For his part, Kwatra says that if anyone brought any discrepancies to his attention, “it was addressed right away.”)

When he tried to return items Kwatra sent him, Haroutunian says Kwatra made him “feel cheap,” suggesting that returning items was distasteful. People who return items were “tragic,” he recalls Kwatra saying. Later, Haroutunian says he found he had been charged for items he didn’t purchase at all. “Suhail took advantage of the fact that people weren’t checking their credit card statements,” he said.

Kwatra, though, contends Haroutunian “was an impulse buyer. He would buy and return and buy and return.” Kwatra also said Haroutunian would try to return items he had worn, clothes that came back with “stains on them and gum wrappers [in the pockets].” (Haroutunian denies he ever returned or attempted to return used merchandise.)

Whether Saks knew what Kwatra was doing—whether it was part of their business model or they simply never bothered to look into the complaints they received—is now a matter of legal dispute. What is not in dispute is that the whole thing was about to come apart at the seams.

By the time Kwatra was pulled into that small office by two men from asset protection, Saks was in trouble. Within two months, the company would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $4.7 billion in debt. The company owed Chanel $136 million; Kering (the conglomerate behind Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga) nearly $60 million; Christian Louboutin more than $21 million; Brunello Cucinelli more than $21 million; Georgio Armani upward of $10 million; and Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, and Vince more than $9 million each, according to the company’s bankruptcy filing.

It was a staggering turn for a brand that opened its flagship store on Fifth Avenue in 1924, the brainchild of two merchant families who dreamed of a store synonymous with gracious living. Back then, department stores were grand symbols of commerce—glittering public sitting rooms for affluent women to socialize while they spent. They shaped urban areas and were once so powerful that in 1939, industry titans successfully lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving one week earlier to lengthen the holiday shopping season.

The department store reigned for decades, but it could not reign forever. In 1992, department stores claimed 14 percent of all retail sales nationwide. Then came the Internet, and brick-and-mortar stores were hit across the board. Analysts believed luxury retailers were resilient—above a certain price point, customers want to try items on before buying, with a tailor on site. Going to a department store was not an errand, but an experience—the kind people like Kwatra provided.

Yet few foresaw that designers would find ways to connect with consumers directly and, through a series of mergers, become powerful enough to challenge the department stores. Brands worried that department store sales—especially online—would interfere with the strict price discipline and perception of exclusivity on which their success depended. Some brands began pulling their products from department stores altogether.

Saks fought back, purchasing Neiman Marcus and becoming Saks Global in a July 2024 deal, hoping that together they would have more leverage with brands. Executives put on a strong face. But behind the scenes, Saks had a crisis on its hands. Suppliers weren’t getting paid. Smaller companies couldn’t take the hit. Designer brands began refusing to send merchandise to the stores.

Kwatra, who earned commission from his sales, felt the successive hits the company was taking. Over the previous few years, he had started talking about a move within the company. He thought Saks Global would be an opportunity to expand into international markets, but when he received notice that he would no longer be able to take clients to Paris Fashion Week, he began to take more seriously an offer he had gotten from a competitor.

The merger may have affected Kwatra in another way. One Saks employee theorized it may have been the Neiman deal that set everything into motion. “If this merger with Neiman’s had not happened, it never would have come to light, because I think when Neiman’s came in, they started looking at the books and exploring. I think that’s when it really started to crumble.”

Kwatra claims that Saks heard about his outside offer and tried to retain him with a $50,000 bonus. When he didn’t accept, he says, it became clear he was leaving. He believes Saks knew that if its top earner left, he’d be taking the “city’s elite” with him.

His theory is simple: An already spiraling Saks couldn’t afford that hit, so they tried to destroy his reputation and keep his clients. Kwatra—the man who had operated in the gray zone for two decades, whose arrangements with Saks had seemed to be more handshake than policy—made an easy target.

Kwatra’s since-deleted Instagram account was my first introduction to his aesthetically dark and dazzling world. There, in video reels set to Kesha dance tracks—do I have your attention?—and Chris Brown instrumentals—gimme that—he could be seen in jewel-encrusted velvet sport coats with a string of colorful gems down his chest, glittering turtlenecks, and an array of black leather statement boots, posing, hip cocked to the side, in Italy and Paris. Then there was his Facebook account. In one video, he is clad in a leather trench coat, posing in an open elevator and strutting down a hall, a lobster-shaped Louis Vuitton clutch—complete with dangling claws and a rumored price tag of $18,000—in his hand. “Have your people call my people,” his bio read.

So I did. Joe Baerlein, a crisis communications adviser, got back to me and set up a meeting at the Post Office Square offices of Goulston & Storrs, where Kwatra’s lawyer, Jennifer Furey—who is representing him in a civil complaint against Saks—is a director.

Kwatra did not disappoint. I found him in the lobby, where most of the couches and chairs are white leather, wearing a black fox-fur coat, an R13 cardigan—distressed, black, and covered in chains and safety pins—and black patent platform cowboy-style heels with a gem-encrusted toe. He clutched a small silver lunchbox-shaped purse, “FENDI” printed in bold across the bag. His wrists were wrapped in bangles that chimed as he shook my hand.

Kwatra told me he is innocent. The charges are bogus. This is not a story about a thief, he insisted—it is a story about a flailing corporation that knew about and encouraged the very practices for which it later fired him. They did it, he believed, because they feared he would leave and take his client book with him. When asked about Kwatra’s allegations, Saks only said: “We take any allegations of employee misconduct seriously and conduct thorough investigations when matters are brought to our attention.”

Kwatra described the moment he was standing there in his purple python-print puffer, a bag of Chanel knits in hand, when the “mall cops”—as Baerlein calls them—led him into a secluded office, through a door with a lock code he didn’t know. There were no security cameras documenting what unfolded, Kwatra noted. The omission, he claims, was to ensure there was no record of what happened.

At first, Kwatra told me, he had no idea where the conversation was going. Wade explicitly mentioned that he knew Kwatra was in talks about employment elsewhere, insisted Kwatra knew why he was there, and said that if he didn’t come clean, Saks would destroy his reputation and ensure he never worked in luxury retail again. Kwatra felt “trapped.” (Wade directed all inquiries about this case to Saks public relations. Wells declined to comment.)

Then, Kwatra says, the conversation turned to gift cards. He would go on to be accused of mismanaging $50,000 worth of promotional cards. Kwatra said he didn’t understand what they were asking about—in Kwatra’s court filings, he noted the cards were generated by his supervisors in management. Kwatra himself couldn’t generate gift cards, and Saks knew it. Kwatra’s court filings also claimed that his manager and previous manager created numerous “accommodation” gift cards and encouraged salespeople to distribute them to high-spending clients. His manager at the time, Kwatra alleged in court filings, was generous with gift cards and “frequently provided them to clients and club stylists.”

As for the accusation that Kwatra kept unclaimed merchandise or returned it in exchange for gift cards for himself—he’d eventually be accused of doing this with $375,000 worth of merchandise—Kwatra claims everything was known to management. There was a lot of unclaimed merchandise lying around storage closets, he says, and after a year, Saks managers told him and other stylists to distribute it as gifts to clients or take it home. He alleges that they encouraged him to wear the items at events or on social media to promote Saks and the brands. It was better to take the abandoned merchandise for personal use rather than reselling it at a deep discount or donating it, he says management told him.

A Saks employee pushed back on this, saying no one else had a designated room full of merchandise like Kwatra did, and that it was odd that all the billing problems people complained about seemed to happen only to him. (Kwatra says he had more merchandise because he had more clients, and that billing issues were a broader problem at Saks, and no fault of his own.) But the employee agreed with Kwatra on one point: Whatever was going on, management knew about it. “I’m just saying that the executives were also complicit. I mean, they allowed it to continue to happen. And in a small way, I even think they sort of encouraged it.”

Back in that room without any cameras, Kwatra says, Wade claimed to have a folder of “evidence” on Kwatra but refused to show him the contents. Wade claimed that Saks had been building a case against Kwatra for more than eight years—though Kwatra points out that they had offered him a retention bonus just weeks earlier and repeatedly praised his value to the company.

Kwatra recalls that they wanted him to guess the cumulative value of all the unclaimed merchandise he had turned into gift cards over the years—in writing—and they would “make it ugly” for him if he refused. “In my mind, when I heard that ‘make it ugly,’ I’m thinking, if I don’t sign this document, I’m gonna be handcuffed in the store.” The visual impact would have been immediately devastating.

Kwatra says they told him that if he confessed, they wouldn’t call the police—no one external would have to know. So he started writing. “Anytime I wrote something that didn’t really align with them, they would make me cross it out and be like, ‘No, no, no, cross that off and write this instead,’” he said. (By presstime, Saks had not responded to questions about Kwatra’s claim that he was coerced into writing the document.) Kwatra didn’t know the letter was legally enforceable. He figured he could get an attorney later, and if he signed, he could leave with his reputation intact.

That’s not what happened. When Kwatra was done, his store director came in, and he signed papers agreeing not to return to Saks. Then a police officer entered the room. Kwatra’s Prada tote was collected from his office, and he was escorted out of the building. “Do we have to make a scene?” Kwatra asked as he was led out. “Because I thought no one’s gonna make a scene.”

On a frigid January morning, Kwatra arrived at Boston Municipal Court near Haymarket for his arraignment on larceny and fraud charges. The date had been pushed back once already, and socialites had been calling me about it for weeks, wondering how the first scene of this legal drama might unfold. When the day came, Kwatra appeared in a relatively demure Hugo Boss blazer—black with a silver-tipped collar—and Alexander Wang boots in some kind of reptile skin. He looked smaller than usual in low-cut heels. Local TV crews arrived five minutes too late. I was the only reporter in the room.

After sitting through a morning robbery hearing involving an opioid-addicted amateur hockey player, Kwatra stood before the court, his face deflated, as the prosecutor read the charges alleging that he had appropriated $429,400 via “fraudulent returns and mismanagement.” The hearing did not go well for the state. The prosecutor requested $5,000 cash bail in what she said was a case carrying “state prison time” and asked that Kwatra be ordered to stay away from former clients. But Judge Paul Treseler released Kwatra without bail and ordered only that he stay away from Saks property and employees.

Then came another blow to the prosecution. Kwatra’s criminal defense attorney, Joseph Eisenstadt, demanded to see specific evidence to support the more than $429,000 figure—and Treseler agreed. Saks had turned over video evidence and records from three recent transactions, purportedly totaling more than $11,000 in fraud, but nothing else. “It looks like an $11,000 case right now,” the judge said, questioning the state’s evidence—as if “someone just threw a $429,000 figure out there.… You come up with that big number, and you have to explain the big number and explain where that number came from.” The prosecutor conceded that Saks had not yet provided the state with any additional evidence. Beyond Kwatra’s handwritten confession, the prosecution could not explain the number either. The judge ordered the state to turn over the evidence before the end of March; the next hearing is April 10.

Weeks earlier, it had been a very different scene. Kwatra stumbled out of Saks in his Gucci platform clogs, dazed. His phone died, so he couldn’t reach his partner, Michael, a music teacher who was teaching a class that evening. It wasn’t until he caught a cab and made it home to his Fenway apartment that the reality of what had happened hit Kwatra. He recalls feeling as though he “got hit by a bus.”

Then Kwatra mentioned the letter to his partner. “I wasn’t thinking. I maybe signed something,” he told Michael, who started freaking out.

“Where is the document?” Michael asked.

Kwatra told Michael they didn’t give him a copy.

“Why didn’t they give you a copy?”

The next morning, Kwatra called Jennifer Clark, a client who also happened to be general counsel at the commercial real estate firm RMR Group and was nearing retirement. Clark thought the absence of a copy was strange. The charges didn’t make sense, she says, because Kwatra’s assistants rang in the merchandise—“so there would have to be a conspiracy.” (Kwatra’s supervising manager, who was on maternity leave at the time of his firing, was due back in December. She has not returned to work and did not respond to my inquiries.) Clark sprang into action, connecting Kwatra with a civil attorney, who in turn connected him with a criminal attorney and crisis manager. Two weeks later, Kwatra attended a party thrown by Clark at Contessa—Kwatra in a long-sleeve fishnet top with shoulder pads and glittering silver pants, as seen in a screenshot from an Instagram story that was promptly passed around town. He was not hiding.

Meanwhile, Kwatra’s attorneys at Goulston & Storrs have filed a civil claim against Saks Global alleging that the company owes Kwatra punitive and compensatory damages for firing him, ruining his reputation, and false imprisonment for holding him in the interrogation room. The lawsuit calls it “a calculated campaign by a global luxury retailer to silence one of its most valuable employees” while attempting to “shift blame amid severe financial distress.” But perhaps Kwatra’s strongest argument is this: Why would Saks offer him a retention bonus in October if the company claims to have evidence of him conducting fraudulent returns in September? (Saks declined to comment on Kwatra’s claim that he was offered a retention bonus, as well as many of the allegations set forth in this story.)

Then I discovered something startling: Kwatra wasn’t the only stylist Saks had allegedly gone after.

In May 2025, Antonio Ferreira—reportedly a leading personal shopper at Saks Beverly Hills—claims he was also pulled into a room by asset protection and accused of involvement in improper use of gift cards. Ferreira filed a lawsuit against Saks three months later, alleging discrimination, defamation, and a hostile work environment, claiming the charges were brought in retaliation and that they stand “in stark contrast to Saks’ tolerance of similar conduct by others,” the complaint reads—including by management itself.

Both of these lawsuits are on pause due to Saks filing for bankruptcy. But on Newbury Street, the question isn’t really about the legal case—it’s about what happens next in a town that just lost the man who told it what to wear. Gala season is here, and this article comes out in the first days of it. Some women may be scrambling to find dresses—yet the ones who’ve been around Boston forever aren’t too worried. Kwatra was the one who created the pressure—new, avant-garde, no repeats. Turns out it’s more Brahmin, and more contemporary, to re-wear an old outfit. “You even get bragging rights if you can fit into a dress from 10 years ago,” says one gala regular.

Still, not everyone has moved on. Madhu Chopra, for one, remains loyal—calling Kwatra “impeccable and forthright” in a statement provided by her niece. Real estate developer Deborah George is also unwavering. She has been devoted to Kwatra for more than a decade, ever since he told her that her Ralph Lauren outfit looked “awful” and switched her over to Dolce & Gabbana. She insists that the allegations against Kwatra came about because Saks was “scared that he was going to leave.” In George’s eyes, Kwatra “is not a man who’s driven by money at all. This is a man who’s driven by things that we Americans don’t always put great value into. You know, honesty, beauty, art forms, things like that. I’ve never known him to be money hungry.”

Others have not been so generous. A group excursion Kwatra had organized to India—costing tens of thousands a head—fell apart when his clients backed out after news of Kwatra’s legal troubles broke. They want their money back. Kwatra says he told them to buy travel insurance at the outset and isn’t responsible for their decision to back out; in any event, he says, their beef is with the travel agency. He says he didn’t profit from the trip.

And then there are those who suspect Kwatra will somehow come out ahead of where he started. One former client called the whole saga his “sex tape”—a spectacle he’d find a way to profit from. Several compared him to Anna Delvey, the fake socialite who parlayed infamy into a Netflix deal. They wonder whether Kwatra will do the same.

As for Kwatra, he wants to keep doing what he loves—styling women of taste, like his fashion icons Daphne Guinness, Maye Musk, and Moza bint Nasser. He says the job offer he received from a Saks competitor was rescinded, and he’s thinking of a life beyond Boston, hopefully somewhere abroad. But as Baerlein, his crisis manager, says, it’s hard to plan a future “when you’ve had so many of these false accusations thrown at you in a short period of time.”

Asked how it feels to go from the center of Boston society to the fringes, Kwatra rolled his eyes. “In fashion,” he told me, “like they say—one day you’re in, one day you’re out.”

This article was first published in the print edition of the March 2026 issue with the headline: “”Tragic!”.”

Unlike most cancer charities, Find the Cause Breast Cancer Foundation isn’t racing toward a cure—it’s trying to prevent the disease by determining the environmental factors that cause it. That mission drew a surprisingly robust and stylish Wednesday-night crowd to the Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport for the 2025 Prevention Party.

The silent auction included items like a Gucci bag, fine wines, and a three-night stay at Wings Neck Lighthouse, and the lush floral tablescapes were worthy of Martha Stewart. Prominent among the the throng: honorary event committee members Katie Lee Biegel, Marcy Blum, and Brooke Burke; party cochairs Gretta Monahan and her husband Ricky Paull Goldin; honoree and environmental health expert David Sherr; board chair Peter Zschokke; award recipient and tech investor Tommy Wynn; ultra-glamazon Emma Pickard; hotel honchas Barbara Lootz and Jennifer McMahon; investment bigwig Dalia Nuwayhid; podcast host Kim Carrigan; and one woman who asked a friend, “Why haven’t I seen you?” To which the answer was: “We haven’t been on the same continent in six months.”

Looking around, another guest observed, “This crowd skews young,” to which a friend said, “Or maybe you’re just getting old.”

Meanwhile, when a photographer asked a woman, “Which is your best angle?” she responded, “It doesn’t matter. They all need Botox.”

The chicken Marbella was surpassingly delicious, and the speaking program blessedly brief. When it was finally time for the live auction (which included a Taylor Swift autographed guitar), one guest turned to the man next to him and asked, “Are you bidding on anything?”

“I’m bidding on being in bed by 10 p.m.,” he said—and given how perfectly the evening flowed, it’s a safe bet that it was lights out at 10 past.

Food, Glorious Food!

More than 800 people converged on the Artists for Humanity EpiCenter for Boston magazine’s lip-smacking event Taste, which featured delicious little tidbits from 30-plus restaurants featured in the November issue’s “Top 50 Restaurants.” As the crowd grazed, chefs like Mida’s Douglass Williams schmoozed with the guests, and DJ Mike Amado amped up the festivities. Everyone seemed to understand the assignment: Sip. Nibble. Repeat.