Anyone who can date the moment when parties stopped being parties and turned instead into elements of a retailing stimulus package gets a gold star. Make that a gold paillette.
At some point in the distant past, people dressed up in clothes that they actually owned, went out in the evening, drank too much and enjoyed themselves. Now people dress in clothes provided to them by fashion designers, parade in front of a battery of photographers, sip water (still, please; sparkling is, as Valentino Garavani once pointed out, too bloating) and skedaddle as soon as politely possible.
“This is about processing,’’ James Reginato, a special correspondent to Vanity Fair, said Thursday night as he surveyed a room full of incredibly swell-looking people — many models on the arms of designers — circulating through gilded chambers at the Plaza Hotel in celebration of Bergdorf Goodman’s 111th anniversary.
Mr. Reginato was using the verb in its ceremonial sense.
The evening’s procession — more of a stampede, really — of people like Carolyn Murphy, Hanne Gaby Odiele, Alana Zimmer and other occupational lovelies took them up a flight of marble stairs, past the photo-op station, straight to the bar, then into the ballroom for a quick circuit. The smart ones got out as quickly as possible and headed for a local hamburger joint.
There was food, of course, in what was billed on the invitation as a supper. But who in her right mind is going to risk ruining a Zac Posen confection with the drippings from a lamb-chop lollipop?
Borrowed or not, all the finery made a powerful case for the continued existence of specialty retailers like Bergdorf Goodman. High Street dressing is charming, but you’ll never hear anybody say they want their ashes scattered at H&M. (“Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s’’ is the title of a new documentary about the fabled store.)
“This is what fashion is about,’’ said Linda Fargo, the store’s fashion director, who with her silver hair and pale shoulders set off by an asymmetric dress resembled an MGM glamour puss on her way to a George Hurrell sitting.
Many guests seemed to have taken seriously the invitation’s suggestion that they riff creatively on evening wear. There were the style writer Amy Fine Collins draped in acres of tulle; the club promoter Chi Chi Valenti sailing through in a hat resembling a schooner; the social moth Michelle Harper, dressed in a cock- feather cloak and with her silver hair styled like a Noguchi sculpture walking hand-in-hand with the former model and tattooed biker chick Jenny Shimizu; Anna Wintour, looking like Anna Wintour; and the eccentric Iris Apfel so richly arrayed in fur and feathers it looked as though she’d run amok in a petting zoo.
And the men … well, of course there were men there (Michael Kors, Oscar de la Renta, Jason Wu, Mr. Posen). But, honestly, who looks at them?
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