Late and Later |
An unintended consequence of the Charles James theme at this year's Met Gala? Just how hard it was to move around in those big dresses, especially at the "unofficial" after-party at the Top of the Standard. At one point, Hedwig and the Angry Inch star Lena Hall slipped on the dance floor; lucky for her, her full Jamesian skirt broke the fall: "Oh, it's fine, it's like falling on a bunch of pillows—I feel like I'm wearing a big comforter!" Sarah Jessica Parker spent the better part of the evening in the far back, by the fireplace, her massive Oscar de la Renta train safely out of everyone's way.
The consensus among all of the designers in attendance—Peter Copping, Peter Dundas, Stella McCartney, Alexander Wang, and Joseph Altuzarra among them—was a sense of relief that the event was over. "Well, until the CFDAs next month!" Phillip Lim exclaimed.
The room hushed when Beyoncé Knowles and Jay Z arrived, but only until the DJ queued up "Drunk in Love." Naomi Campbell, Riccardo Tisci, and Lupita Nyong'o led the room in a spirited round of dancing. At one point, Beyoncé enthusiastically approached a woman, believing her to be someone else, and to her dismay, was corrected. "Oh, I'm sorry, that's so embarrassing!" said Knowles. Blame it on her Givenchy Haute Couture net veil, or maybe Queen Bey mistakes strangers just like the rest of us. She quickly resumed her place on the dance floor alongside her sister, Solange.
The crowd danced until well after 2 a.m., when the party moved to Up & Down for an even more "unofficial" after-after-party, hosted by another Met-goer by the name of Rihanna.
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The Dress Code |
"Elegance is not a social distinction but a sensual distinction," Charles James, the subject of this year's Met exhibition, "Charles James: Beyond Fashion," once said. "The mind combines with the body to exploit its senses, its functions, its appearance." No doubt, the guests at this year's Met gala strived to project James' definition of elegance. Not all achieved it. Those in the know, like Karen Elson and Liu Wen, turned to Zac Posen, who, having been inspired by the late couturier throughout his career, is about as close to a modern-day James as one could get.
"If you know Zac Posen, you know Charles James!" quipped Naomi Campbell (who was, in fact, Riccardo Tisci's date) when asked if she was familiar with this year's Gala subject. By and large, the mammoth gowns Posen crafted for the event (he estimates he made eleven) upheld James' aesthetic with integrity. Posen's date, Dita Von Teese, was ravishing in a figure-hugging take on James' iconic Clover Leaf dress. "I know a lot about Charles James," cooed the burlesque star on the red carpet. "He used to dress Gypsy Rose Lee, who was the most famous striptease star of the forties and fifties. Sometimes, people will say, 'What does a stripper have to do with fashion?' And I'm like, 'There's been a correlation for a long time.” She added that her ensemble was not constricting in the least. "I'm ready to go dancing!"
Sarah Silverman, also in Zac Posen, didn't quite share Von Teese’s sentiments. "It's like a fucking second skin!" she screamed sarcastically of her look while kicking, and tripping, up the stairs. "Nothing comfortable is worth wearing to the Met Ball," Rita Ora said at one point. Right or wrong, it was a shame to see so many cumbersome dresses that looked more like costumes than odes to James’ sculptural genius.
"I feel like I'm in Gone with the Wind with all these gowns!" joked Prabal Gurung, who took a smart approach to dressing Hailee Steinfeld. "It's big. It looks deceptively simple from the front. And I thought it was the perfect blend of sportswear with couture ideals, which Charles James was all about," he said, gesturing to the gown. Indeed, the dress was youthful with its easy cut and hidden pockets—a detail for which Steinfeld was particularly grateful. In a bold move, Stella McCartney dressed Rihanna and Cara Delevingne in a belly-baring white look and a bra top and trousers, respectively. The minimal outfits were unexpected—not aesthetically Jamesian in the least, which, in turn, made them entirely Jamesian in concept. Jenna Lyons, meanwhile, pulled inspiration from the men's white-tie dress code for her pantsuit. To her credit, there was a bit of James in there, too. "I think it embodies the spirit of what he might have done if he were alive today," she said, noting that the volume of her trousers, and their satin fabric, were a nod to the couturier.
Speaking of white-tie, the boys pretty much ignored that, save Stuart Vevers, Christopher Kane, and Benedict Cumberbatch—leave it to the Brits! "I so often get accused of being a posh actor, I don't know what people are talking about. Of course I didn't own tails," laughed Cumberbatch. He commissioned a suit from Ralph Lauren. Kane's version was by Brioni, and he didn't mind the suit one bit. "We're used to wearing kilts in Scotland, so it's not much more uncomfortable than that." True to form, Balmain's Olivier Rousteing donned leather biker pants with his tails—a perfect match for his date Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's leather dress. "Elegance is about attitude. It's not about clothes," he told us. "It's something that you can't buy, and you can't make," concurred Tisci, who, in addition to dressing Naomi, designed Beyoncé and Jay-Z's Met attire. "It's something that you have inside you. And sometimes, simplicity is elegance."
Enter Lupita Nyong'o. Before I even got off the red carpet, I was hearing about the flak she was getting for her breezy netted Prada number. To that, I say pishposh. Along with Erykah Badu, who wore a giant white hat and suit (custom Givenchy, of course), she was one of the most Jamesian starlets in attendance—if not in form, then in attitude. Amidst all the guests stumbling over their frocks and grumbling up the stairs, Nyong'o was effortless, and utterly radiant. And judging by the actress' smile, her dress looked like a hell of a lot of fun to wear. To be able to come off so at ease at an event like the Met Gala? Now that is elegance.
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Fully Booked |
Net-a-Porter closed down the Waverly Inn for a private dinner for Christopher Kane on Saturday night, and the restaurant was packed with the designer's ardent supporters. There is no shortage of those. In her toast, Net-a-Porter president and the evening's host, Alison Loehnis, revealed that the site shipped Kane pieces to women in eighty-six countries last year. Alexa Chung was one of them. "There are a lot of things you'll just wear for one season," she told Style.com. "But Christopher is so funky that you'll have it forever. Like these pockets," she said in reference to Spring 2014's teardrops at her waist. "The cutouts seem odd at first, but they're just perfect."
Kane spent the evening catching up with the likes of Caroline Sieber and Dree Hemingway. "Obviously it's always good to see old friends," he said. "But what I really love is to just walk around when I'm here. I think you can see so many things on the street in New York."
Meanwhile, on Friday night, Domenico Dolce was the guest of honor at a Metropolitan Club dinner hosted by Saks Fifth Avenue's Marigay McKee. And early on Sunday evening, a special appearance by Kirsten Dunst and Rodarte's Kate and Laura Mulleavy lured partygoers to Nevena Borissova's Curve boutique. The designers signed limited-edition copies of their book hand-painted by the artist Rebekah Miles.
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Where the Art Is |
With Frieze around the corner, the art world was out in full force this weekend. First up on Friday night was Black Eye, Nicola Vassell's new exhibition. "It started with Thelma Golden's 1994 show, Black Male," Vassell told Style.com at a jam-packed (and about 20 degrees hotter-than-hell) exhibition space in Tribeca. "I thought about how controversial and at the same time how seminal that show was in the art world: It basically birthed the whole notion of the post-black generation." Twenty years on, some things have changed, others haven't—an actuality that Vassell, formerly a director at Deitch Projects and Pace Gallery, explores in the show. Bringing together twenty-six established and emerging black artists (from Nick Cave to LaToya Ruby Frazier to Steve McQueen), Black Eye looks at black experience in a post-Obama moment world. After the opening, André Saraiva, Johan Lindeberg, and Waris Ahluwalia were among the guests at a dinner at All Good Things.
On Sunday, revelers decamped to Dustin Yellin's Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for the first annual Village Fête fundraiser. "If there's a boat trip involved, you know it's going to be a good party," said one attendee. And from the ferry ride to the family-style meal courtesy of The Fat Radish to performances from Ariel Pink and MGMT, Yellin delivered. The Pioneer Street warehouse on Red Hook's waterfront was acquired by the artist nearly three years ago, underwent a gut renovation, and is now a combination studio, education, and gallery space that lists Liv Tyler and Maggie Gyllenhaal among its supporters. The event raised dollars for the sight's educational programs and upkeep. As the sun began to set, Yellin remarked, "There's been so many highlights since we started that it's like the sun has been in front of our moon. It's really all about how when people come together, they can change the world."
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Karl Lagerfeld's All-Mango Diet Is the Secret to Eternal Life |
At the dinner he hosted with Silvia Venturini Fendi and Pietro Beccari last night at Sotheby's on New Bond Street, there was a curious, emphatic little something in the way Karl Lagerfeld said he liked Londoners, which suggested he wasn't that crazy about London. He certainly doesn't cross the Channel that often. But if the city obliged the opening of Fendi's new London flagship by displaying the chilly, drizzly side of her personality, the Londoners laid it on thick for Lagerfeld with all the funky, flirty, funny weaponry in their arsenal of charm. At dinner, he even downed the shades that usually render his reactions impenetrable, all the better to appreciate the pictures Cara was showing him on her phone. He showed her his, too. Given that Poppy and Suki and Lily and Charlotte were the width of a dinner plate away, Lagerfeld's table was quite the sparkly social mediacracy. "You'd never get people like this in Paris," he said while he waited for his main course to arrive. (He had what looked like slices of mango. We had sea bass.)
The evening was not simply to celebrate a store opening. Fendi had also commissioned ten "Iconic Women" to customize a Peekaboo bag each for a blind auction to raise funds for Kids Company, the London charity founded by force-of-nature Camila Batmanghelidjh to support abused, vulnerable children. The appalling statistics she offered in her speech highlighted the depth of the problem in a city like London, where ludicrous extremes of wealth and poverty cast a critical spotlight on each other. It's quite within Venturini Fendi's questing character to connect with a social initiative such as Kids Company, in the same way that her female "icons" ran the gamut from Gwyneth and Cara (of course) to Adele, Zaha Hadid, and Kate Adie, once the BBC's most famous war reporter. (Her Peekaboo was lined with a hyper-colored camouflage.)
Sotheby's auction spaces had been converted for the night into an exhibition of decades of Fendi's experiments in fur, mounted and lit like paintings on a gallery wall. If Venturini Fendi's own personal favorite—the tantalizingly titled Intestino from the late seventies—was missing, there were plenty more examples of the extraordinary, idiosyncratic hybrid of the sophisticated and the primitive that her family has mastered under Lagerfeld's tutelage. "Forty-nine years, forty-nine years," he mused, sounding like he scarcely believed it himself. But he's not stopping anytime soon. Ten minutes after the mango was gone, so was he, out into the night to continue wrapping up the finer points of his trip to Dubai next week, where he will show Chanel's Cruise collection.
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A Hollywood Hello |
Emanuel Ungaro creative director Fausto Puglisi touched down in Los Angeles for a dinner in his honor thrown by Arianne Phillips, B. Akerlund, and Barneys' Tomoko Ogura last night. "It's a great emotion," the famously enthusiastic Sicilian designer said, looking around at the party, which reunited him with the one of the women who helped launch his career. "For me, to meet Arianne was a goal," Puglisi explained of his teenage dream to move from Italy to America. "I said, 'I'm coming and I'd like to show you the collection,'" he recounted, with Phillips clarifying that their first exchange actually happened over fax. "You know, those old, rolled faxes?" she remembered. "Arianne was so open-minded," Puglisi said. "After three months I saw Madonna wearing my pieces."
As guests made their way to an elegant seating inside Bungalow 1 at the Chateau Marmont, Gwen Stefani took a seat next to Shirley Manson before passing baby photos back and forth across the table with Fergie. "One of the things that I absolutely love about Fausto is that he has this incredible energy that is completely contagious," Barneys' Ogura said, addressing the crowd. "You can feel it the moment he walks into the room, and it's really fused and integrated in his collection and his clothes." She too had a story about a younger Puglisi. At 17, he apparently walked right into Barneys with five dresses in hand that he hoped to sell.
Earlier in the week, Puglisi was in New York celebrating the arrival of his signature label at Bergdorf Goodman. Chanel Iman and the teenage singing sensation Zendaya chose looks from his Spring collection. On Thursday in Manhattan, Prada, in association with Friends of FAI, hosted an evening benefitting the restoration of the Abbey of Saint Mary of Cerrate in Puglia, Italy. Lake Bell was among the bold-faced guests.
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Kate The Great |
The hundreds who turned out for Kate Moss at Topshop last night blended in so artfully with the hordes of commuters trying to get home on the first day of London's Tube strike that there were probably thousands of people jamming Oxford Circus by the time Moss took to a temporary structure that elevated her over the throng. She could have been a 21st-century Evita greeting her adoring public. Just like Sra. Perón, there is something of the secular saint about Kate. Or fashion saint, at the very least. Her appearance marked the debut of her new collection for Topshop. On its first day in store, the pieces most glamorously redolent of Saint Kate (among them, a fringed jacket and a beaded dress, worn later in the evening by Sienna Miller) were the ones that sold out first. They were also among the most expensive. No wonder Topshop's owner, Philip Green, was in such a good mood when he arrived at the Connaught for dinner after the store event, by which time Moss, ever the best advertisement for her own product, had changed from a pantsuit with a gold pinstripe into a fringed, beaded bolero over a column of silvery, bias-cut slink that would have done her old mate John Galliano proud.
As these things go, dinner really was nearest and dearest—family and old friends like Naomi Campbell, Fran Cutler, Jaime Winstone, Elizabeth Saltzman, André Balazs, Katy England, and Bobby Gillespie. The oldest might have been 76-year-old legend of the lens David Bailey, sat to one side of Moss, with Stella McCartney next to him. But on Moss' other side were the newer friends, the London girls who are the Spawn of Kate: Suki Waterhouse, Cara Delevingne… (Moss clearly feels protective. She and Delevingne were working on a shoot together when one of the grips offered to swap his top with Delevingne's. Fortunately, Mother Moss was there to weigh in as the firm voice of reason: "No, we won't be taking our top off and giving it to the grip.")
Most intriguing overheard: Pat McGrath wondering if she could get away with her signature headband rather than a hat when she goes to Buckingham Palace tomorrow to receive her MBE from the queen. Sarah Mower, who's already been there, done that, said she could. But "Pat in a Hat"? Surely that's the sort of picture Instagram was invented for.
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New Arrivals |
Last night in New York, Gia Coppola unveiled her debut feature film, Palo Alto, based on James Franco's book of short stories about growing up in the California suburb. The film, starring Franco and Emma Roberts, wasn't the only thing that Coppola (the niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis) revealed at the Tribeca Film Festival event.
"I had never watched The Godfather until recently—no one in my family would watch it with me because they have all seen it so many times," said the director of her grandpa's iconic movie, as she made her way down the red carpet at SVA Theatre on West 23rd Street. "I finally just watched it with James [Franco], and we started watching at, like, 11 p.m. at night, so he was, like, hitting me to stay awake. But it's a great film," she told Style.com.
No one needed help staying alert during last night's screening of her coming-of-age tale. The film, a story about the universal emotions involved with being young and growing up, prompted everyone to think about their high school days. (Franco, however, left the screening early for his Of Mice and Men evening show.) "I was homeschooled, so I was kind of mellow and cool," said Roberts. "I just tried to get through unscathed."
Afterward, the crowd, including Zac Posen, Atlanta de Cadenet Taylor, and Gina Gershon, regrouped at Up & Down bar, where the party continued with a performance by the movie's composer, Dev Hynes. Coppola arrived with her high-school-appropriate party shoes in hand—Converse high-tops, of course.
Meanwhile in Soho, new clothes means new context. Such was the case, at least, at the Dior Homme store, which the brand has just adapted with modular racks and shelves for the arrival of designer Kris Van Assche's Autumn 2014 collection. Conceived by Parisian duo M/M, the one-month setup incorporates cylindrical standing lamps (twenty-six in all, each smeared with a different letter of the alphabet) and gallery-esque lighting effects, a fitting complement to a collection inspired by Van Assche's art-student days in Antwerp.
"They used to be pre-deliveries of the main collections, and it's really important to insist on the fact that they are no longer that," Van Assche said of the merchandise. "They're really a different story, and so we tell it in a different way."
The party moved to Acme, where the likes of Shala Monroque and Peter Brant Jr. joined. Brant clacked the metal fingertip covers he was wearing, insisting they weren't purely decorative. "I had an accident with my fingernails," he said.
Like the installation, Van Assche's stay was a fleeting one. He'd be on a plane less than twenty-four hours later. "All this is fun, talking about collections that are finished," he said. "But I need to get back to work."
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