Who

Tinsley Randolph Mercer Mortimer is one of the reigning queens of New York's socialite circus.

Backstory

The daughter of an interior designer and real estate investor/rug dealer (we'll get to that), Tinsley grew up in Richmond, Va. and attended boarding school in New Jersey, before enrolling at the University of North Carolina and later transferring to Columbia. After graduating in 1998, Tinsley worked briefly as an assistant at Vogue. She then enrolled at Parsons, only to drop out after four months. But thanks to her longtime boyfriend Topper, she soon landed at the PR firm Harrison & Shriftman, where she planned parties and worked various events around town. That, too, didn't last very long: In 2002, she gave up on the notion of a day job when she tied the knot to the wealthy heir. She's since focused her energies on rising to the top of the social ladder and some five years later, she's established herself as one of the most popular young socials on the scene.

Of note

Tinsley earned A-list social status the old-fashioned way—relentless self-promotion. It's paid off nicely: Designers scramble to dress her and feature her in their glossy ads (Douglas Hannant), luxury brands pay her to endorse their goods (Dior hired her in 2007 to serve as its "U.S. Beauty Ambassador"), she's been recruited to "design" products (she created a line of handbags for the Japanese accessories brand Samantha Thavasa), and in 2008 a real estate firm tried to mooch off her glamorous image by hiring her as its "lifestyle director." The blitz of exposure has brought with it the inevitable backlash. Fellow socialite Plum Sykes created a character named Tinsley in her novel The Debutante Divorcee, a vapid twit who claims she can "only dress for evening… so obviously office life doesn't work for me." And there's been no shortage of anti-Tinsley sentiment on blogs and message boards. But Tinz's popularity seems to have subsided a touch since the glory days of 2006 when nary a week went by without a Page Six mention. With newer (and decidedly younger) socials infiltrating the scene by the day, it may take a more momentous act of some sort (divorce, pregnancy, etc.) to recapture the spotlight.

Drama

Tinsley's pedigree came into question in 2006 after several gossips reported that her father, George R. Mercer Jr., ran a carpet company called Mercer Rug and Carpet Sales Inc. Branded a "rug dealer" in the tabloids, Mercer shot back that the rug business was just one company in the family's empire and that in fact the family traced its roots back to Thomas Jefferson. Further controversy surfaced in April of 2007 when Tinsley was said to have elbow-checked fellow social climber Olivia Palermo at a fashion show. Tinsley denied shoving Palermo, claiming she was never "within an arm's length of her."

Family ties

Tinsley's husband, Topper (his real name is Robert Livingston Mortimer), is the great-grandson of Henry Morgan Tilford, a former president of the Standard Oil Company. That makes fellow social ubiquity Minnie Mortimer Gaghan, who married filmmaker Stephen Gaghan in May 2007, Tinsley's sister-in-law. Other members of Tinsley's extended family by marriage: scenester and occasional writer Peter Davis (he's her half-brother-in-law, not her brother-in-law), city planning commissioner Amanda Burden, and actress Brooke Shields. Tinsley's younger sister is girl-about-town Dabney Mercer.

Personal

Tinsley and Topper originally married in a quickie ceremony in Florida when they were 18, but their parents forced them to annul the union almost immediately. They stayed together, though, and remarried in 2002 in Richmond. Unlike his wife, the low-key heir—who works for the investment firm Guggenheim Partners—stays far away from the glow of flashbulbs. He rarely attends events with Tinsley and is almost never photographed at parties. The couple lives in a second-floor co-op apartment on East 79th Street with Tinsley's beloved Chihuahuas, Bella and Bebe.