Donatella Versace kicked off a night of fashion bashes Thursday with a 70-person dinner for Linda Wells in celebration of her new book, Allure: Confessions of a Beauty Editor. During cocktails at the Gramercy Park Hotel, Jonathan Rhys Meyers chatted with Sophie Dahl, while a designer dream team of Tom Ford, Narciso Rodriguez, Anna Sui, Zac Posen, and Derek Lam posed for a photo op with the women of the hour. "Whenever I go to Italy, I hand-select products to bring to Donatella," said Wells. "She loves product. They're all arranged in alphabetical order in her bathroom."

Versace and Ford then swapped host-guest roles, as Versace showed up at the fête for Ford's new Black Orchid fragrance at the Top of the Rock. Also in the crowd were Carmen Kass, Julia Stegner, and Paris Vogue's Carine Roitfeld, who came to support her daughter Julia, the scent's campaign star. "Tom's part of our family," said the Parsons student, who claimed she barely recognized herself in the ad photos. In typical Ford fashion, the party was orchestrated down to the tiniest detail—from the servers' slicked-back hair and sharp, black suits to the elevators plastered with a black orchid print to the evening's surprise performer, Jennifer Hudson. How did Ford discover the singer, who will appear alongside Beyoncé Knowles in the upcoming film Dreamgirls? "David Geffen is a friend of mine," he said. "I¿m not bragging, but I saw a cut of the movie and asked her to do this."

Completing the evening's designer action, Barneys New York toasted Raf Simons in its Chelsea production studio. Guests—including Men¿s Vogue's Jay Fielden, Serge Becker, and Steven Klein—mingled with the designer, his extensive team, and an entourage of Andy Warhols that will soon inhabit the store's Madison Avenue Christmas windows. In town to shoot the spring Jil Sander campaign with Willy Vanderperre, Simons smoked, talked about his photography collection, and observed that he found the city—and the evening—"cozy." Things started to go Pop at the after-party in the silver-painted club 205, where Michael Stipe shared the dance floor with designers Alexandre Plokhov, Camilla St¿rk, and Nathan Bogle.

— Sarah Cristobal with Laird Borrelli (Raf Simons)