American interior decorator and furniture designer Billy Baldwin was BOTD in 1903. Born in in Roland Park, Maryland to a prominent middle-class family, he studied architecture at Princeton University, leaving after two years without completing a degree. After working, unhappily in his father’s insurance firm, he began freelancing as an interior decorator, building a clientele of rich white ladies. His work caught the eye of decorator Ruby Ross Wood, who invited him to join her firm in 1935, becoming one of a very few men working in the profession. After Wood’s death in 1950, he continued managing her firm, and launched his own business in 1952 with Edward Martin. He became one of the most celebrated interior decorators of post-war America, with celebrity clients including Cole Porter, Greta Garbo, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Babe Paley, Pauline de Rothschild, Mike Nichols and editor Diana Vreeland, who regularly featured his work in American Vogue. Noted for his expert sense of order and space, he encouraged the decluttering of living spaces, discarding satin and damask as furniture material in favour of cotton and leather, and popularising built-in bookcases, shutters and slipcovers. He retired in 1973, writing a series of bestselling books about his approach to decorating. Openly gay since forever, he befriended many of the luminaries of New York’s gay scene, and attended Truman Capote‘s Black and White Ball in 1966. He died in 1983, aged 80, and was eulogised by The New York Times as “the dean of American interior decorators”. His memoir was published posthumously in 1985.