Tatler stoked the society engine a bit more than usual last night, drawing a transatlantic mix of boldfaced names for the New York celebration of its 300th anniversary. Co-hosted by Tina Brown and Diane von Furstenberg at the designer's Meatpacking District HQ, the soirée gave new editor in chief Catherine Ostler an excuse to talk up a publication that came into existence around the same time as Ben Franklin and the piano. "I've been blithely telling everyone we're the oldest magazine in the world, so I hope it's true," Ostler confessed. "No one's contradicted me yet!"

Either way, the magazine's got legs. What's the secret? "It's a chronicle of its time," von Furstenberg suggested. Zac Posen had another theory: "English people are very old." Of course, the media landscape has shifted since Tatler began life as a pamphlet circulated in chic London coffee houses, but Georgina Chapman, who grew up reading it, said she expected to be flipping through the magazine for years to come. "Forever—or as long as England's around," she predicted.

"Society will always want to be covered, and Tatler is the only real social magazine left in the world," offered Brown, whose revamp in the early eighties transformed Tatler into the more irreverent glossy it is today. With the likes of Tory Burch and David Lauren joining David de Rothschild, Nicky Haslam, Jazzy de Lisser, and other familiar faces from across the pond, there were a few more Yanks at this party than there were at the London version a month ago. Still, expat Luke Parker Bowles was gratified—and a bit proud, even—to be in the same room as so many of his fellow countrymen. "To see such fabulous, beautiful people and to realize they're not all American is reassuring," he said.

— Darrell Hartman