What happens at the Paris Fashion Week parties?
Rita Zubatov
After the reception of Moncler, fashion editor Rita Zubatova and Wonderzine creative director Sonya Batovrina accidentally went to a party of the Balenciaga brand, where the singer M.I.A. and designer Alexander Wang was talking, and now they are telling us how dances in the middle of the night blur the social boundaries between designers, photographers, models and ordinary people.
Every Fashion Week is accompanied by parties: boring cocktails, where girls in the corners pull a smile and talk about the weather, pompous dinners, where guests eat and listen to the endless speech of PR people, and real parties - here are the designers, the press and other industry representatives who are tired of showing from 8 in the morning until 10 in the evening, come to have a banal fun.
Of course, the success of an event depends on who organizes it. For example, here’s what yesterday’s after-party Moncler looked like: the Chez Castel club with crocodile-studded walls, Anna Dello Russo in a skirt-lamp is pushed between well-dressed men in suits, the music changes from Disclosure to Gloria Estefan. We and a couple of people who do not understand what is happening, are held here by the realization that Farrell is sitting at the next wall and is about to come out and speak: it’s not for nothing that the bracelet says "Pharrell Williams for Moncler afterparty". Farrell, judging by the armor of the guards at the entrance to one of the halls, really sits, but he does not want to go to the crowd of rich clients and investors (he never went out). We know that at this time in the Palais de Tokyo begins the party Balenciaga. Alexander Wang, creative director and fan of street culture, knows a lot about the fun, and "Get Lucky" will still get a taxi driver down the road.
The super-closed party is somewhere in the basement of the Palais de Tokyo. 10 people are deployed in front of us, I come up, already about to say something, when the guard sees the bracelet (from the last party), says: "Oh, how good that you came!" - and let our company inside. Lucky so lucky.
Indoors it becomes clear why getting to the party is so difficult. We run during the live M.I.A., pulling on the scene screaming "Live fast, die young!" guests. Youth idol Jeremy Scott and Saint Martins graduate Nazir Mazhar are embracing from the left - it seems they only met today, although, apparently, they could work together all their lives. Crowd of models - Joan Smalls, Kasia Ostrich, Hannah Gaby and Megan Collison - dance under Major Lazer, but our creative director Sonia and fashion director WAD Jean-Paul Paula make them. Carolyn de Maigret, Fatima Al Kadiri and Alexandra Richards roam between people. The crowd is smashed by Alexander Wang, who suddenly ran down the handle with Georgia May Jagger and began to twirl 50 cm from me. People cluster around the couple in a circle and start jumping even higher. Photographer Ivan Rodich comments: "The classic American party, only with the French, sitting in the corners with glasses of vodka, tonic."
Here, the social roles are erased: the designers just showed the collections for which they were preparing for six months and exhaled, the press watches the show every day and wants not to think about fashion for at least a couple of hours. What to say about the fans of the brand who just came to have fun. Do you really want to go to an after-party show to see people who have heard so much about, in all its glory? Then you will be disappointed. Young and talented Simon Port Jacqui shoots his cocktail girl dancing alongside, Venus X tells how he had fun on his last visit to Moscow, and the owner of the party, hell, creative director Balenciaga and all that, slaps you on the shoulder and waves his hair in time with the music . Well, something like this.