Not Just Another Friday Night
The Opening Ceremony Crew Takes Over the Standard for Help Japan Benefit
A whole bunch of party-ready young things were waiting in line outside the Standard hotel when the Boom Boom Room opened its doors at ten o'clock on Friday night. The funny thing? Most of them got in. That's because Opening Ceremony was hosting a fundraiser to help Japan and hoping to collect as many $20 donations at the door as possible. The hosts (including Jen Brill and the store's Humberto Leon and Carol Lim) also managed to sell 200 raffle tickets before the event, and the tix were a pretty hot item at the party, too—it probably didn't hurt that you could snag a chance of winning a Proenza Schouler bag or a $1,000 Barneys gift certificate for the same price as a glass of the house Champagne.
Leon mentioned that he'd received some "really, really exciting" news recently from the brand's Tokyo store: The manager's mother, who'd been missing for several days, had been found, alive. The tsunami's dramatic damage has been the stuff of headlines, but the aftereffects are in many ways just beginning. "It's a difficult situation for me," said actress Rinko Kikuchi—referring both to what her native country's going through and her own discomfort talking about it in English.
Justin Theroux, sitting next to Kikuchi in a back corner, took a stab. "It's the easiest thing in the world for us to come here and have a couple drinks and hopefully make some money," he offered. "The thing is to keep doing this—it's going to get harder to keep it in people's consciousness as the months go on." Still, Theroux added, "raffling nice handbags helps."
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