New York Fashion Week is well underway and the city's front-row crowd -- Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Kirsten Dunst, Lindsay Lohan, among others -- has descended upon the Beatrice Inn. At the club's most boisterous table, girl-girl power-couple Lohan and Samantha Ronson are holding court, as other members of the Ronson clan, Samantha's twin sister Charlotte (whose fashion show took place earlier in the day) and half-sister Annabelle, mill around them. Meanwhile, the eldest Ronson child, Mark, clad in what has become his signature and oft-imitated look of late -— a Quadrophenia-era Mod, English country gentleman-inspired, short, fitted black suit -— is perched atop a banquette. His head nearly touches the club's low ceiling as he looms over the bold-faced crowd. In his slight English lilt, he politely greets those who have come to wish him a happy 33rd birthday, but otherwise Ronson keeps to himself, steering clear of the Page Six-worthy shenanigans unfolding before him. The next day while recapping the night's festivities he quips, "the best part about the night was getting a burger at Corner Bistro across the street."
Mark Ronson likes to keep himself a good head's-length distance above the celebrity fray. "I try to stay out of the limelight as best I can," he says. And though he has been a fixture on the New York nightlife scene since he was old enough to get past the doorman with a fake ID, these days he is most well known for having turned Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen into super-starlets (he produced big chunks of both singers' 2006 albums) and earning several Grammys in the process. His 2007 covers album, Version, which featured soul-laden Radiohead and The Smiths songs as reinterpreted by Allen, Winehouse, Daniel Merriweather and Santogold, rose to the top of the UK charts, selling over one million copies and making Ronson a really big deal in England -- the album earned him a Brit Award for Best Male Solo Artist (he is the first artist who didn't actually sing on his album to win the award). Mark has his hand in upcoming records by aforementioned R&B phenom Merriweather, Leeds-based rock stalwarts Kaiser Chiefs, indie newcomers the Rumble Strips, rapper Wale and electro-troubadour Patrick Wolf. Even as he's hounded by the paparazzi every now and then, particularly when he's spotted out and about with one of his tabloid-prone protégées, he's made a name for himself first and foremost as the man behind the music -- the skinny hipster's Phil Spector, if you will.
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