Category Archives for Uncategorized
Are You A Maxi-nista?
—Romney Leader Continue reading
Valley of the Dolls
Kate Bosworth, Vogue‘s Lisa Love, and Chloë Sevigny hosted an evening of drinks and dancing at West Hollywood’s Soho House last night. Nicole Richie, Anna Paquin, Milla Jovovich, and Alexis Bledel crowded into the new members’ club high above Sunset Boulevard to toast Valentino’s Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli. The invite’s 10 p.m. start time was uncharacteristically late for early-to-bed Angelenos, and more than 200 guests enjoyed tunes from Paul Sevigny and a live performance from the band Chief well into the night. “It doesn’t feel like L.A.,” Shiva Rose remarked. Well, except for the sprawling views and the only-in-SoCal retracting roof.
“We love this city; it’s super and the weather is fantastic,” said Chiuri, who hit the local museums and some vintage shops while in town. Most of the designers’ celebrity pals opted for cocktail dresses, but Bosworth, who arrived with boyfriend Alexander Skarsgård, wore a pair of daring red leather pants with a house signature bow at the waist and a lace top. “I sort of just had to commit to it,” she said.
—Victoria Namkung Continue reading
What Would Liz Do?
Talk about gilding the lily: Last night, in celebration of the company’s 150th anniversary, Chopard injected a whole bunch of extra glitter into the Frick Collection, taking an uptown mansion that’s already full of important art and making it sparkle with diamonds (not to mention a cadre of A-listers, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Claire Danes, who were more than happy to wear them).
The Chopard collection in the spotlight, Animal World, consists of 150 unique pieces inspired by fauna from all corners of the globe. A koala-shaped diamond ring, a whip-tailed gecko bracelet made out of Paraiba tourmaline—there was nothing typical about the baubles on display inside the closely guarded moss-lined boxes. Eugenia Silva tossed her hair back to give the room a better look at the swallow-inspired earrings she had on. “I’m an animal!” she announced, laughing as she took flight toward her dinner seat.
While Chopard’s co-president and artistic director, Caroline Gruosi-Scheufele, busied herself explaining a few pieces to Kate Hudson, Christina Ricci confessed that she’d only opted for big earrings after asking herself what Liz would have done. “I channel Elizabeth Taylor when I’m scared or nervous,” said the actress, who flew over from the London set where she’d been filming Bel Ami with Robert Pattinson. “I’ll just say to myself, ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s not afraid of anyone!’ “
Ricci, it turned out, couldn’t be persuaded to stay and schmooze over dinner. “I’m going to take some pictures with somebody, and then I’m off,” she said. Liz might have done that, too.
—Darrell Hartman Continue reading
Dance Partners
Gilles Mendel is known for floaty evening gowns worn by the social set, but last night he dressed another kind of swan—prima ballerinas—at New York City Ballet’s spring gala. “I thought I was Fred Astaire. Not anymore,” the designer laughed. “It was incredible to see something you design in action like that. I was basically treated to all these individual dances while they were trying them out.”
Mendel wasn’t the only blushing collaborator of the evening. Santiago Calatrava was tapped for set design. “I was completely surprised when they asked me,” the architect said. “I’ve never done something like this before, and I got to play with constraints completely different than I’m used to.” Turns out, stage limitations didn’t hamper Calatrava much. Sarah Jessica Parker, Natalie Portman, and Carolina Herrera, among others, clapped wildly for the backdrop Calatrava created for the premiere of choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s Why am I not where you are. Post-show, Narciso Rodriguez summed it up this way: “The colors, the set, the music—everything was just, well, perfect.”
—Bee-Shyuan Chang Continue reading
It Takes a Village
Thursday night’s Saks Fifth Avenue and Whitney Museum celebration looked like a meeting of the United Nations—a very fashionable United Nations, that is. There was Italy’s Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi, Mexico’s Christian Cota, Nepal’s Prabal Gurung, Korea-by-way-of-New Jersey’s Doo-Ri Chung, and the Turk-in-London Erdem Moralioglu. Each had designed a dress especially for Saks, portions of the proceeds of which will go to the museum.
Margherita Missoni had flown in to co-host the event along with, among others, Amanda Hearst, Devon Aoki, and Alexa Chung, and she was impressed with how the retail giant has pepped up its cocktail parties. “I arrived today a little jet-lagged, so I was nervous about coming here,” she said after a live set from the techno violinist Caitlin Moe. “But live orchestra trance music? That’ll wake you up!”
—Derek Blasberg Continue reading
Bend It Like Gwyneth
It was a fit and fashionable crowd at last night’s benefit for Bent on Learning, a charity that brings yoga to New York City public schools. Board member Eddie Stern‘s devoted following includes a cadre of design-world types who have a way of making the practice their own. “I sometimes do yoga in lace bodysuits and weird outfits,” Alice + Olivia’s Stacey Bendet said, adding that she usually hits the mat at 5:15 in the morning.
Gwyneth Paltrow also knows her way around a vinyasa—and her children do “kid yoga,” she told us. “My daughter does handstands. She’s six.” Mommy, on the other hand, spends more time these days doing high-intensity workouts with celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson. “It’s the absolute opposite” of yoga, Paltrow explained, but it certainly has its benefits: “I just had my blood checked, and the doctor said I had the best cholesterol levels he’d ever seen.”
Paltrow took a moment before dinner to sign a pair of Alice + Olivia sequined Keds, which will be auctioned off at a later date. (The entire evening raised $500,000.) She also got a word in with Anderson, who was making the rounds. The trainer’s other high-profile student (with whom she had a high-profile parting of ways last year), Madonna, arrived after the dinner seating. Hilary Rhoda was there early, though, and happily admitted she’s “obsessed” with Anderson’s system of ballet bars and resistance bands. “It looks like a circus in one of the rooms,” she explained. Even so, Rhoda said she’d convinced her boyfriend, pro hockey player Sean Avery, to give it a shot. “He was like, ‘I’m not gonna sweat at all’—and he was dying.”
—Darrell Hartman Continue reading
Live at the Odeon
“This is the glamorous part of the gig,” said Selma Blair, a Tribeca Film Festival juror, at Chanel’s annual Odeon dinner party last night. “They’ve really kept me busy this week.” Of course, as part-time jobs go, there are worse things than looking at movies all day, and the same goes for Leigh Lezark‘s latest assignment. The MisShape was just back from Saint-Tropez, where she worked with Karl Lagerfeld on a secret project. Well, not so secret: It’s a film that will debut at Chanel’s resort show in two weeks. Lezark’s reward? In addition to the clothes on her back, all the pommes frites she could eat. “How did I end up with three orders of French fries?” she asked. The real question is how she stays sample size eating all those fried potatoes.
Elsewhere, Terry Richardson and Olivier Zahm occupied themselves by snapping the ladies’ footwear, and Julian Schnabel, with son Vito in tow, signed copies of his book, one of the art tomes given away as gifts to every guest. In the middle of it all, at a table with Angela Lindvall and a top-hatted Yoko Ono, was festival co-founder Robert De Niro. Deflecting compliments as usual, he said, “I really should be thanking Chanel tonight. My wife looks beautiful.”
—Derek Blasberg Continue reading
Saluting SAMO
Jean-Michel Basquiat arrived in Manhattan at 17, sold his first painting to Debbie Harry for $200 when he was barely 20, and by age 25 was a millionaire and a celebrity. At 27, he was dead. Pretty much anyone with a passing interest in twentieth-century art or the downtown New York City scene in the late seventies and early eighties knows the basic story already. The boy from Brooklyn who helped introduce street art to museums and galleries is the art world’s James Dean or Kurt Cobain, its shooting star. Last night, at a special preview screening of Tamra Davis’ documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, the audience got a chance to peer beyond the Basquiat bullet points and meet the man.
For many in the theater at MoMA, it was a reintroduction. Julian Schnabel, Jeffrey Deitch, Fab 5 Freddy, Glenn O’Brien, and Kenny Scharf—all of whom appear in the film—knew Basquiat back when. Ditto director Davis, who framed her doc around old, unseen footage of an intimate interview with Basquiat she shot not long before he passed away. Plenty of new fans turned up at the NOWNESS-sponsored screening, too—notably Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, model Lily Donaldson, Another editor Jefferson Hack, and comedian Chris Rock, who had the theater in stitches when, during the post-film Q&A, he cut short a rambling questioner’s disquisition on the mystery of “What killed Basquiat?” by heckling, “Long questions kill people, too.”
Off to the party, then. Rock and a host of downtown demimonders new and old showed up at the Club Formerly Known as the Boom Boom Room (Formerly, for short) to raise a toast to director Davis and her subject. “It’s really incredible, the people who came out for this tonight,” noted Hack. “It’s really a testament to Basquiat’s life and the relevance of his work.” That was a notion seconded by NOWNESS editor Zoe Wolff and by the film’s producers David Koh and Lilly Bright. “Any film like this is a labor of love,” commented Bright, as she rubbed elbows with partygoers like Leigh Lezark, Elise Øverland, and Hope Atherton. “But you don’t always get this much love back.” Still radiating, in other words.
To see NOWNESS’ exclusive Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child trailer, click here.
—Maya Singer Continue reading