Amitie In America

Alexandre Mattiussi, the young French menswear designer behind Ami—that is, “friend”—launched his first collection at Barneys New York last night. The casual, affordable line, which now hangs in the retailer’s Co-Op stores, drew an appreciative crowd of editors, bloggers, and the occasional actor. (That’d be Bryan Greenberg, who was overheard to recall that the fifth-floor surroundings looked familiar…because his character on How to Make It In America had been fired from them on the show’s first season.)

Barneys is fêting its new acquisition with the pomp you’d accord to a new chum, and so before it sends Mattiussi out on a national tour—”it’s my Lady Gaga tour!” he exclaimed—it threw him a cozy dinner at Le Bilboquet on the Upper East Side. Old friends and new came to celebrate, including Barneys’ Mark Lee, Dennis Freedman, and Amanda Brooks, Matt Kliegman and Carlos Quirarte, designer couple Alexander Olch and Jennifer Murray, and Joseph Altuzarra, who’d known Mattiussi ever since the two worked at Givenchy years ago. (“He’s exactly the same,” Altuzarra reported.) The designer’s next stops: Chicago, San Francisco, and L.A., all for the first time. Before that? A surprise birthday cake, courtesy of his new pals. Five days ago, l’ami turned 31.