Speed Dial

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Matt Nye's Nokia 8860 is even better-looking than he is. With that tousled blond hair and those blue bedroom eyes, the 34-year-old designer is indisputably a dreamboat—but oh, that phone! Sleek and silver and smaller than a pack of cigarettes, it is truly dazzling. "It's the sort of thing Mariah Carey would carry in a James Bond movie," Nye says, grinning wickedly. So shiny he uses it as a mirror—"I check for salad greens in my teeth in the reflection"—the phone stays home in the sunshine-yellow studio where Nye works, on the top floor of the Upper West Side town house he shares with his companion, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. "I don't receive calls on it because I think it's really obnoxious," Nye says. "I only use it to make calls." And what a lineup on this speed dial! There are his former boss Calvin Klein ("I ask him for advice") and major clients such as Bergdorf Goodman Men's and Saks Fifth Avenue, which have been snapping up Nye's classic American sportswear. There's the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which anointed Nye as a hot new talent with the Perry Ellis Award for Menswear last spring. There are friends: Yoko Ono ("She loves to gossip"), Bette Midler, and television newswoman Elizabeth Vargas. But despite the famous friends, it turns out that the Trophy Boy is really a wholesome midwesterner at heart—asleep by 10 P.M. (or so he claims) and at his desk at 9 A.M., with Mom and Dad still taking pride of place on that jazzy speed dial: "I'm a real mama's boy," Nye says, looking anything but. With this phone by his side, he'll never seem boring. "Every time I pull it out, everyone goes nuts," he says. "It gets everyone talking—and in this business, you gotta keep 'em talking, because the minute they stop, the game's over."

LESLIE BENNETTS