Before publicity refreshed itself by the second, James LaForce delivered it by hand. He would leave an office carrying a printed account of the previous night’s parties, walk it to the home of a society reporter at Women’s Wear Daily, slide the pages into the right hands, then return on foot. The arrangement feels less like media relations now than a scene from a slim New York novel: gossip with sensible shoes, a deadline measured in blocks, and a young publicist learning that information only matters if it arrives where someone will use it.
LaForce has spent the four decades since inside that same transaction, even as everything around it accelerated. The paper became a feed. Guests became publishers. An event stopped waiting for the morning column and began broadcasting itself before the first drink warmed. Through it all, his instinct has remained editorial. Find the live wire. Give it shape. Know when to let people close and when a little distance will keep the idea alive.
It is an old-fashioned skill thriving in a permanently new-fashioned business. LaForce, founder and CEO of the independent New York agency that bears his name, can discuss earned media, creators, retail, hospitality and social content without pretending they are separate planets. His real subject is attention, that skittish creature everyone wants to capture and few bother to understand.
The boy who had already left Wisconsin
LaForce grew up in Green Bay. By ten, he was imagining a more glamorous life in New York. The fantasy proved durable. He came east to study English literature and writing at Columbia University, where the city supplied an extracurricular education of its own. Studio 54 and the Mudd Club became second homes, two very different rooms sharing the valuable quality of being impossible to explain properly to anyone who was not there.
The English studies mattered. Public relations, done well, is applied reading: of language, timing, rooms, vanity, appetite and the small behavioral clues that tell you what people might care about next. LaForce found his way into the business in the early 1980s and, with improbable luck, landed beside Eleanor Lambert.
Lambert had helped build the machinery of American fashion publicity. By the time LaForce joined her, she was in her eighties and still ran days that would flatten a younger staff. Mornings might begin at 7:30 at Kenneth’s salon. Under the hair dryer, she passed LaForce handwritten notes, letters and lists. The hair might survive lunch. The work carried on into the afternoon and evening.
Curiosity was Lambert’s renewable fuel. If a client’s product interested her, she went deeper. If it did not, she found something compelling in its audience. If both resisted, the resistance became the challenge. LaForce absorbed that habit and kept it after leaving her office. He also inherited a Midwestern respect for work hidden beneath the glamour. Lambert’s social world was dazzling, but her mantra concerned the clients. The client, after all, is usually the one paying for the flowers.
A generalist with a very specific appetite
In 1995, LaForce and Leslie Stevens founded LaForce + Stevens. The firm worked across fashion, beauty, retail, food, travel, technology and consumer brands. When that partnership ended, LaForce founded the current agency in 2016. The name became shorter. The appetite remained broad.
He calls himself a generalist, a modest label for someone whose specialty is moving between categories without flattening their differences. Luxury used to seal itself inside exclusivity. Mass retail dealt in access. LaForce watched those walls become porous, especially through years of promoting Target’s designer collaborations. High fashion learned from the reach and speed of mass culture; mass brands learned to stage desire with a designer’s eye. His own agency became fluent in the traffic between them.
His favorite recent fashion moment in 2014 was the Missoni for Target launch. The choice says plenty. It was not a hushed salon presentation but a collision of design, anticipation and democratic shopping. He had already seen the fashion conversation spread beyond a small set of newspapers and magazines into blogs, video and social platforms. More voices made the work noisier. They also made it more international and open.
LaForce did not greet the new openness by throwing every door off its hinges. He argued that social media should extend a designer’s vision, not become a hard-sell annex to online checkout. Luxury needs access, but it also needs restraint. Show too little and the audience cannot enter. Show everything and the dream becomes a factory tour with bad lighting.
This is where his old-school training becomes useful rather than quaint. Editing is the art of omission with a purpose. In a culture that rewards relentless output, LaForce’s counsel is to turn the stream on and off deliberately. A brand story needs air around it. So does a joke, a gown and nearly every person one enjoys at dinner.
From cookies to a field full of champagne
LaForce has a wonderfully elastic definition of an event. Invite fashion editors into a conference room, add flowers and cookies, and you have one. Build a giant public shop in Battery Park City and spend millions realizing it, and you have another. Scale changes the logistics. It does not change the obligation to give people a reason to be present.
The Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic shows how that reasoning grows over time. The original assignment was to place champagne in a lighter daytime world, away from formal interiors and evening dress. Polo offered sun, picnic blankets and a sporting frame. Celebrities and stylish guests created pictures and press. Then public demand changed the proposition. Tickets turned the backdrop into a commercial experience. Social media added another layer, prompting scenic sets, GIF booths and abundant opportunities for guests to make images of their own.
One event, three expanding measures
The event did not abandon its first purpose as it acquired new ones. It accumulated ways to succeed: press, product, hospitality, participation and content. That is a more convincing picture of modern communications than the usual funeral held for whichever medium came before. The older layer remains. The newer layer makes it answer harder questions.
His test for a great event is pleasingly unscientific. It is the event you missed and regretted missing. The line works because it understands a durable fact about gathering people: an event is valuable partly because it ends. LaForce calls the resulting fear of missing out useful. Social media can make an ordinary room appear thrilling, certainly, but it can also remind a tired invitee to say yes, arrive on time and wear a smile. In New York, this qualifies as both marketing theory and moral instruction.
The Paris Lip and other evidence of proportion
A long career in publicity should produce at least one story that sounds invented. LaForce has the Paris Lip. The cosmetic procedure used filler to emphasize the cupid’s bow above the mouth. For its launch at the Ritz in Paris, Lauren Bacall stood at a podium and invoked her famous whistle scene from To Have and Have Not. The press came. The procedure, LaForce later observed, did not really catch on.
The anecdote contains glamour, absurdity and an honest ending. It also reveals his tone. He can admire the craft of getting attention without confusing attention with immortality. Publicity moves the spotlight. It does not guarantee that the object beneath it deserves to stay.
His advice to young designers is similarly unsentimental: do not quit the day job, or get a side hustle. Retail accounts once seemed like the beginning. Now he places a following and a story earlier in the sequence. Find people who are genuinely interested. Give them reasons to wear, borrow, photograph and discuss the work. Selling comes later, which is inconvenient but considerably more useful than pretending invoices are paid in exposure.
Independence, delegated
LaForce describes itself as independent and scrappy, with no parent company, shareholders or outside board. Its stated culture prizes candor, manners, teamwork and celebration. The clearest proof is an actual Chief Joy Officer, a role held by LaForce’s husband, writer Stephen Henderson. The brief includes celebrating employees and company milestones, an institutional admission that morale deserves an owner.
There is seriousness beneath the whimsy. Many senior staff members have served for long stretches. Olita Mills rose from a mid-level position to become president. She has credited LaForce as a mentor and described how, during a period of uncertainty, he empowered her to rethink the agency’s structure and pursue growth. Founders often speak movingly about trust. Delegation is the version that can be audited.
In 2026, the agency appeared at number 27 on the Observer PR Power List for work completed the year before. The cited campaigns ran from Maybelline and Miley Cyrus to Moët & Chandon, Uber, Target and Motorola. The range was unmistakably LaForce: beauty beside mobility, luxury beside mass retail, celebrities beside strategy. The list also reported 102 employees and strong approval among those surveyed. Scale had arrived without a holding company attached.
A private belief made public
LaForce and Henderson began their philanthropic work in the late 1990s and later formalized it as the LaForce Henderson Foundation. Its giving concentrates on human rights, education, cultural life, natural resources and community organizations, with particular attention to women and LGBTQ+ people. Together they have donated more than $2 million. In 2018, Bailey House recognized them with the Rand Skolnick Social Responsibility Award.
The geography of the work follows their lives. There are New York institutions and national organizations, as well as preservation and service groups around their Hudson Valley home. LaForce has served on the board of the Municipal Art Society of New York and previously on the board of Housing Works. The same curiosity that makes him a generalist in business produces a wide field of civic attention.
At ten, LaForce imagined New York as glamour. He found plenty of it. He also found the less photogenic machinery that keeps glamour running: early appointments, handwritten lists, client calls, press drops, measurement, mentorship and the patient construction of trust. His career survived the journey from paper to real time because it was never really about paper.
It was about noticing what the room wanted before the room could say it. Then it was about making the introduction, setting the table, putting out the cookies and trusting someone would show up.