Downtown Double Act
A Pair of Parties in the Meatpacking District Bring Out the Fashionable Crowds
It may be summer, but Tara Subkoff is looking ahead to the holidays—and also way back. For Imitation's 2012 Resort collection, the designer made a short movie modeled on the silent films of yore, complete with scores lifted from Chaplin and Lubitsch pictures and a mix of new and found title cards. "It's very Imitation of Christ—take what's old and make it new again," she said.
With its potted ferns and zebra-print armchairs, the Jane hotel's Ballroom might have passed for Gloria Swanson's private screening room, and as Subkoff's film ran on loop there, she greeted arriving guests by the bar: Mark Ruffalo, Karen Elson, Liev Schreiber, and her current squeeze, The King's Speech director Tom Hooper. Nicole Trunfio, who stars in the film, was off in Paris, but much of her supporting cast dropped by, including the collection's lookbook model, Sasha Owen-Longfellow, who was sporting a heavily fringed Imitation number. "I just clicked through to see what I looked good in," she said. "It was like that scene in Clueless."
A few blocks up, Friends of the High Line hosted its summer fundraiser at—where else?—the High Line. With Coach underwriting, there was a bit more leather involved than usual, including bartenders in leather aprons serving Grey Goose and leather luggage tags that partygoers were invited to have monogrammed on site. The likes of Kellan Lutz and Noot Seear, Coach's face for Fall, did some twilight wandering above 14th Street, and Penn Badgley was enjoying the last of his summer break before Gossip Girl starts up again. He'd just been in Nicaragua, surfing "all day, every day, for 15 days," Badgley explained. Erin Fetherston, meanwhile, was celebrating her first time on the High Line since Calvin Klein's inaugural bash two years ago. Moral of the story? "Thank goodness for fashion parties!"
ERROR:
