The Four Seasons Restaurant in midtown Manhattan and the house of Chanel may be located on different sides of the Atlantic, but they have a few things in common. Both require wait lists for the good stuff (a prime table or a particular handbag), and both have had a long association with artists: Coco Chanel was linked to Diaghilev, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Cocteau, while Mark Rothko famously hoped that the paintings the Four Seasons commissioned from him would "ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room." Luckily, perhaps, for the joint's five decades' worth of diners—including those who attended last night's Chanel Fine Jewelry-sponsored Memorial Sloan-Kettering fundraiser—Rothko ended up withholding his art from the restaurant.

After the dinner segment of the Fête d'Hiver, there was a live auction. Diane Kruger, a co-host with Blake Lively and Camilla Belle, orchestrated the bidding for a package that included a stay at the Paris Ritz, two Chanel J12 watches, and two tickets to the fashion show. At first, the actress appealed to the husbands in the room, but she quickly changed tacks and sold not two but six tickets to the Chanel show to a table of ladies—for a cool $24,000, no less. "What can I say? I'm German. We're shrewd," she smiled afterward. Some of the other guests got similarly inventive with dessert. When large bowls of white cotton candy hit the table, Jen Brill and Lauren Santo Domingo started making hairpieces out of them. "Look!" said Brill. "It's the Chanel version of the Louis Vuitton Spring Afro."

— Derek Blasberg