Last week, 31 talented designers joined the legendary (dare I say shadowy?) organization known as the Council of Fashion Designers of America, or as it is more colloquially known, the CFDA.

As a first-time attendee to the event, I was half-expecting trumpets, and oaths to never design leather flares, as  I accompanied new inductee Jason Wu (left) to a cocktail party at the Four Seasons Restaurant. What we walked into was a chic and crowded room filled with so many familiar faces, all swept up in the bond of our chosen (or, as it seems for so many, fatefully predestined) industry, and all heralding the new crop. Pardon my gushing, but few industries show the kind of camaraderie and mutual support that fashion does, and on a night like this, it really showed.

Inductees proudly sported boutonnieres as industry veterans like Diane Von Furstenberg and Stan Herman passed through the room offering blessings and whispering pearls of retail wisdom into the eager ears of the newly minted.

With tongue firmly in cheek, I asked jewelry designer and SoHo luminary Jill Platner her expectations for the evening. “Hopefully no naked dwarfs!” she deadpanned. Shoemaker Alejandro Ingelmo channeled a bit of Sicilian sensibility: “Diane always says it’s like a family. Once you get in, there’s no way out.” My date own said he felt like he’d “survived fashion boot camp.” Alexander Wang said the scariest part of the initiation was over—and if the rest of the night turned out to be one big frat party, then he “he always enjoys a good hazing.” The hatmaker Albertus Swanepoel, was more sentimental, however. “As the oldest of the lot, I am honored to have even been included with these youngsters.”

—Kathryn Neale

Late Friday night, after the opening of Gucci’s Icon-Temporary pop-up sneaker store on Crosby Street (where you could browse and buy eighteen pairs of limited-edition styles, including a special Gucci Ronson sneaker), a rare surge of energy sent Frida Giannini, Mark Ronson (above), and Claire Danes to the nearby Bowery Hotel to continue the celebration. Inside, Evan Rachel Wood, Eleanor Ylvisaker, and Leigh Lezark were all awaiting a performance by Chauffeur (Victor Axelrod, Sam Sparro, Theophilus London, and Alex Greenwald), the band put together by Ronson to create the song “Soles on Fire” exclusively for the vinyl given away when you purchase a pair of the celebrated sneakers. Meanwhile, Poppy Delevingne caught up with Mary Charteris, and Genevieve Jones danced. Festivities just before the weekend offer the promise of a Saturday of rest, which means more freedom to play. “I’m so happy there’s a party on a Friday night,” Jones said, summing up what perhaps everyone was thinking—that and I need a pair of those shoes.

—Stephanie LaCava

In After Miss Julie, Patrick Marber’s updated take on August Strindberg’s classic, which opened last night at the American Airlines Theatre, Sienna Miller plays a doomed young woman whose life becomes a nightmare.

But for the 27-year-old star, making her Broadway debut has been, she says, “as corny as it sounds, a dream come true.” Onstage, with her Lana Turner cascade of blond hair, wearing a flower-print dress by costume designer Michael Krass, Miller looked like a G.I.’s fantasy in the flesh. She showed tremendous self-assurance and emotional honesty as she charted the downward spiral of an idle aristocrat whose hankering—and then some—for her father’s handsome chauffer (Jonny Lee Miller) ends very, very badly. And she showed that she knows how to take command of a stage—when she extended a shapely leg as a dare for her costar to kiss her shoe, there wasn’t a wandering eye in the house.

At the opening party at Espace, Miller accepted congratulations from members of the audience, which included Rachel McAdams, Claire Danes, and Hugh Dancy, in a sequined Balmain minidress whose slashes and rips echoed her character’s torn soul—and highlighted her own sexy, punky glamor.

—Adam Green

Click below for slideshow.

With her wedding to Jared Kushner this weekend and her new book, The Trump Card, flying off the shelves, the unstoppable Ivanka Trump takes a time-out to talk to Vogue: 

Question: With only a couple of days to go until the wedding, how stressful are the last-minute details? 

Answer: For me, it hasn’t been too terrible. I think the people who make planning their wedding too stressful are missing the forest for the trees. I think most of my reflection happened before the engagement, but once I was committed to spending the rest of my life with this person, I became very focused on building our lives together.  I have also built a very strong infrastructure in order to help me prioritize all the elements of my life—when you are a busy, working person, having a good team is key. 

Q. What are you most looking forward to?

A. The memories. It’s going to be an amazing time—how could it not be? We have great music, great friends and family. I only wanted people that were close to me to be there, all the people I truly love and respect. So, I think it’s going to be a very fun, very relaxed time. 

Q. On top of putting the finishing details on the wedding, you spent all last week on tour all week for your new book, The Trump Card, Playing to Win in Work and Life. Tell us about it.

A. I think I have had less balance this week than any other week in my life. I have been actively managing several real estate deals that are about to come to fruition, and at the same time I was on this full-fledged radio-and-television tour for the book. I was on Good Morning America and doing interviews from the back of my car, and all the while, the wedding is on Sunday. 

Q. How are people reacting the book?

A. It’s been a really positive experience. I am getting so much feedback. I have been Twittering as of late, and I think, 400,000 people are following me. 

Q. Why did you write this book?

A. I thought it was a really underserved audience—women in the first quarter of their working cycle. My reader is probably not getting married or having children quite yet, so it’s the perfect time to set the foundation of their career while they still have the flexibility. It is a period I have already gone through and reflected on, and I think I have a lot to say, both as a woman and as a manager, about what it takes to succeed. 

Q. You have been working nonstop—are you planning to take some time off before or after the wedding?

A. (laughs) I don’t really take breaks. I am leaving the office on the Friday before the wedding, and I will be back at work on Monday. I have a lot going on and Jared has a lot going on, so, after the wedding, we will be right back at it.

Q. Aren’t you going to take a honeymoon?

A. Oh, I think we will take a honeymoon eventually—probably at some point around the holidays. 

Read It Now:

The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life by Ivanka Trump, $24.99

bn.com

Three marvelous retreats for urban escape.

 
Mayflower Inn & Spa, Washington, Connecticut
For authentic fall foliage and New England charm, without an authentically arduous car ride, visit the Mayflower Inn, in Litchfield County, Connecticut. Only two hours from New York, the country house and full-service spa tucked into verdant grounds make it hard not to relax. Weary city skin? Try the Mayflower’s new Midnight Honey Body Buzz massage, an exfoliating treatment with warm honey from a regional apiary. Afterward, settle in to a deep chair in the spa house and take in a view of the pond and Mayflower Mountain. Then, head to the restaurant for lunch (you can wear a robe) and try the inn’s signature fall item: the poached New England Apple Salad with local watercress. Rooms from $550-$830, suites from $900-$1700; (860) 868-9466. Continue reading ›

“The best part of the evening was definitely watching people like Blaine Trump and Diane von Furstenberg seeing themselves in the book for the first time and watching their surprise,” said Vogue’s Style Director (and mother-to-be), Alexandra Kotur, about last night’s cocktail party at Calvin Klein celebrating her and Hamish Bowles’s latest collaboration, The World in Vogue: People, Parties, Places, hosted by Francisco Costa and Italo Zucchelli. Vogue staffers like Virginia Smith, Tonne Goodman, and Lauren Santo Domingo joined Eva Mendes, Oscar de la Renta, Josh Lucas, the sisters Traina, Brooklyn Decker, Maryna Linchuk,  Amanda Brooks, Lauren duPont, Dree Hemingway, and photographers Jonathan Becker and Arthur Elgort for pomegranate fizzes (delightful!) and merriment.

After cocktails, the evening continued around the corner with a seated dinner at the not-yet-opened Le Caprice, London’s much-buzzed-about boîte of boîtes at the Pierre Hotel. The evening couldn’t have been a more fitting way to celebrate the massive and elegant book, which features 300 photographs that appeared in the magazine over the past six decades.

—Genevieve Bahrenburg

Click below for a slide show:

Photo: Hannah Thomson

Brian Fee, Vogue’s Design Associate and avant-garde aesthete, spotlights his picks for the week’s most rewarding art, music, and film events.

WEDNESDAY
CMJ Music Marathon, through Saturday. This downtown Manhattan (and Brooklyn!) music festival is hot stuff. There are hundreds of bands playing local venues and some of it is quite dope — SOME of it, that is, so permit me to sift through the wackness and find the dope jewels for you. Below entries tagged “CMJ” are festival-related music events. Visit cmj.com/marathon/ for the full lineup, if you don’t trust me.

* CMJ: Depreciation Guild + ZAZA @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p/$8. Insound and Kanine Records’ CMJ party is my #1 hotspot for Wed night. The heartthrobby Depreciation Guild sound a bit like My Bloody Valentine crossed w/ 8-bit electronica, in the dreamiest possible way. They share the bill w/ Brooklyn’s equally dreamy (or druggy, whichever you prefer) ZAZA. w/ Drink Up Buttercup and Dinowalrus.

* CMJ: Oh My Rockness Showcase @ Santos Party House / 96 Lafayette St (NRW/6/JMZ to Canal St), 6:30p/$15 (advance tix available at Other Music, 15 E 4th St). One obvious benefit of CMJ: loads of dope bands in one space, but mind those set times! Come early for Greenpoint’s finest surf-rocker Beach Fossils, stay late for glo-fi alchemists Small Black and Real Estate’s smooth, informed indie rock.

* CMJ: Let’s Wrestle w/ Surf City @ Bell House / 149 7th Ave, Carroll Gardens (F/G to Smith-9th St, F/M/R to 9th St-4th Ave), 7:30 p/$14. Much as I’d love to see UK’s Let’s Wrestle (1st caught ‘em when they shared the bill w/ The Pains of Being Pure at Heart this past spring), my anticipation is augmented like a thousandfold due to Kiwi imports Surf City, who do proper indie rock very very well. Only thing that would make this all-import show even cooler is if Hatcham Social was on the bill.

ART: * Anish Kapoor “Memory” @ Guggenheim Museum / TK (456 to 86th St). I’ve a ‘thing’ for Cor-Ten steel (see: Robert Serra, Mark di Suvero and now Rebecca Warren), but Kapoor’s properly futuristic take has got me really going. The massive, 24-ton titular work, jammed in one of the Gugg’s side galleries like the outsized apple in Rene Magritte’s “The Listening Room”, bears an unavoidable weightiness belying its 8-mm thick skin, like a rusting steel eggshell. Continue reading ›

It takes acting talent to time travel from modern day Paris to sixteenth-century Auvernge, even more skill to do so while pretending to be a grieving daughter and a princess’s confidante, respectively.  Joséphine de la Baume is up to the task. The beautiful young actress has been working overtime, appearing onstage at Théâtre Le Lucernaire in Paris in the play L’Une de l’Autre in between shuttling to the South of France to work with Bertrand Tavernier on his latest film based on a Madame de Lafayette story. “It’s kind of a little girl’s dream,” she says of the latter, period costumes and all. “I never thought I’d get to wear this sort of dress one day—and with good reason on top of it: a story that I love.” This summer, we were lucky enough to have de la Baume in New York while she worked on Adolfo Doring’s film The Locust and Nemo Librizzi’s A Night at the Opera. The multitalented It girl is also recording an album, produced by Nellee Hooper, with the band SingTank. We can’t help but mention her style, which somehow switches between tomboyish (“I love men’s clothes on women, like suspenders or men’s jackets, tightened with belts”) and feminine (“bodysuits, or really tight fifties dresses”) while maintaining her wild child signature. She loves Rodarte and Vivienne Westwood, and Olivier Theyskens’s last show for Nina Ricci holds a permanent place in her (fashion) heart. “I can’t take anything off that people I love have given me,” de la Baume says of special gifts. “They keep adding up. So I don’t know what to do about that.” Picture de la Baume’s arms filled with beloved bracelets thrown upward in questioning gesture. This last season, Louis Vuitton was the only Paris show de la Baume was able to fit in, considering her busy schedule. Back to the stage and corsets, for now.

—Stephanie LaCava

“I grew up in the city and am very into New York history. El Morocco and the Stork Club are some of the places that have been influential for me,” says art director Eric Adolfsen, whose past projects include working on the walls and windows of Paris’s Colette for House of Waris. Now Adolfsen has a new project, known as the Wooly, located at 11 Barclay Street, right across from City Hall Park. The endeavor began in August, when Adolfsen decided to use the overflow space from his father’s restaurant in the Woolworth Building to create a new space for private events. This collaborative mission included finding the charming pieces that make up the decor: vintage Belgian wallpaper from the sixties, blue trompe l’oeil tufted paper from the fifties, an eclectic assortment of lamps and sconces, octagonal Gothic chairs, Vanderhurd Studio rugs, faux bois beams—and a mantel complete with a collection of woolly mammoths. “In many ways the Wooly’s an art project that’s intentionally left unfinished,” says Adolfsen. “The fun of the place is that it’s a growing collaboration with friends.” Since its creation, the Wooly’s been open for only a few private events, like tomorrow’s get-together with an acoustic set by Rory Guinness. Come Halloween, it will be the site of a party hosted by the likes of Rosson Crowe, Sean Lennon, and Waris Ahluwalia to celebrate not only Halloween but also the upcoming independent film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead and its soundtrack, created by Lennon.

—Stephanie LaCava

Entering the Whitney Museum for the fall gala and studio party last night was like stepping into the swirling palette of one of the Georgia O’Keeffe canvases on exhibition. The invitation called for “Art Chic,” and everyone in the lower gallery interpreted that code differently, from Versace-clad luminaries like Shakira, Alexa Chung, Leigh Lezark, Chanel Iman, Hana Soupukova, Jennifer Hudson, and Donatella herself (Versace sponsored the evening) to socials like Lauren Remington Platt, Amanda Hearst, Bettina Prentice, and Dalia Oberlander in Skittles brights (there was a lot of pink, including the fuchsia lighting!) and sequins everywhere. Every year this is one of the best events on the social calendar, and this incarnation did not disappoint. The highlights were definitely Taylor Momsen spinning with DJ Berry and the huge wall that was set up in the lower gallery for everyone to color on with markers. Many of the guests who capped off their evening at the after party at Rose Bar had Sharpie marker ink all over their fingers.

—Genevieve Bahrenburg