His first retail job was a summer position at Heelas, a department store in Reading, now owned by the John Lewis Partnership.
[3] Invited to dress his windows by the proprietor of Maxfield, a department store in Los Angeles, Doonan moved to the United States in 1978.
While working at Barneys he consulted on various other projects including The Warhol Look exhibit at The Whitney Museum in 1997 and the Christie's auction of the estate of Marilyn Monroe in 2000.
In 2008, his second memoir, Beautiful People, became a BBC TV series starring Olivia Colman, Layton Williams and Luke Ward-Wilkinson.
For The Moth podcasts, he read "Fear of Squat"[5] on 20 September 2006 and "Every Expense was Spared"[6] on 9 February 2012 about his wedding to Adler.
[7] In Gossip Girl's fifth season (third episode: "The Jewel of Denial"), he escorted Blair Waldorf on Jenny Packham's show.