Barnard Gala Nights. (Barnard College/Asiya Khaki ’09)

After the grown-up gala upstairs, which raised $2.3 million for Barnard student scholarships, young Barnard alumnae in cocktail dresses and heels emerged from the Plaza’s second floor elevators.  Older alumnae put on their coats and wandered away as their younger counterparts entered a hall with gilded ceilings and paintings of cherubs. So began the inaugural Barnard Gala Nights, a chance for recent graduates to dance and mingle.

“I don’t know any of these people,” we overheard one blond girl say to another.

A massive dessert station by the entrance offered macaroons and cannoli, and all the tables displayed bowls filled with chocolate lollipops covered in sprinkles. The two bars on either end of the room, however, were stocked to serve adults.

A DIY candy station from Dylan’s Candy Bar further added to the evening’s youthful aura (and was its highlight, in our humble opinion). Delighted guests scooped piles of gummy worms into plastic bags, and we helped ourselves to a generous portion of chocolate-covered Oreos.

The DJ played Pitbull, Ke$ha and Katy Perry, but the hardwood dance floor remained pristine and empty, like any school dance, for the first half of the night.

“Oh, we’re going to dance,” said a girl in a pink floral dress to her date, who wore a matching pink bowtie.  She pulled him toward the empty dance floor.

At the gala earlier that evening, nearly all the speakers made mention of President Obama’s upcoming speech at Barnard’s graduation, and the buzz continued into Gala Nights. A select group of undergraduate seniors, including Nina Ajami, managed to finagle their way into the event and revel in the hype.

“The whole campus went nuts,” Ms. Ajami said, about the moment the class of 2012 learned about their graduation speaker.

Alumnae committee member Ashley Walker Bush expressed excitement about Mr. Obama as well, although she just missed the opportunity to hear her uncle’s replacement speak, as she graduated in 2011.

“That he chose us is a great honor, and it highlights women’s leadership,” she said. “We all think it’s pretty cool.”

Ms. Bush left us for the dance floor, which had been filling up ever since the aforementioned pioneering couple started dancing.  The music remained consistently Top 40, so it may have been a combination of the alcohol and all the sugar that inspired the migration.  Some couples stayed locked together while they danced, but most guests were on the move, making spirals of black dresses and suits with the occasional pop of colorful satin.

In the group closest to our perch in the now almost-empty bar area, a few girls managed to simultaneously joke around with their friends and fiercely scan the dance floor for the most desirable partner.  One of the guys in the group hovered around a girl in a striped dress, hoping for a signal of encouragement.  The girl spent two and a half songs avoiding his gaze and searching for alternatives.  Finding none, she feigned surprise at seeing him next to her, and they both smiled. The committee’s hopes for mingling, it seems, were achieved.

They strutted across the marble floor of the Plaza’s Grand Ballroom while women in little black dresses held the ends of their stylish neon-orange leashes.

“Let me tell you, as a single girl- are you single? A dog is a man magnet!” Mr. Mizrahi said.

The best breeds for attracting a guy’s attention?

“If you’re gay, a really butch dog, like a shepherd, you know? If you’re straight, and you’re a girl, I think a feminine, wonderful little thing, like a shih tzu. I think it has to be on a leash though. That’s what really turns a guy on. It really resonates, because he wants to be on that leash!”

Guests milled around sipping cocktails and petting the dogs. One woman carried a rhinestone-studded clutch in the shape of a sleeping cat, and another wore a floor-length gown printed with rows and rows of dictator Mao Zedong’s portrait in various states of defacement (one with a drawn-on mustache, one with a clown nose, etc).

The only guest that did not seem to be having a good time was a Chihuahua named Jeffrey, who was handed to each passing socialite for a picture on the red carpet. He was doing alright for himself until Lake Bell, in an elegant mint-colored gown, posed with her tattoo-artist fiancée Scott Campbell, who held the dog in his arms. Photographers went ballistic at this photogenic sight, and the resulting explosion of flashing light made Jeffrey wriggle his stubby legs in sheer terror as he scrambled in vain to escape to safety.

“This is the coolest event to come to for animal rights, because you get to dress up in fancy clothing, and not only are humans invited, but also sweet little mutts,” Ms. Bell said, after returning a trembling Jeffrey to his attendant. “Any event where there are mutts at the Plaza is an event worth coming to.”

Star Jones, whose parents recently adopted their dog from the ASPCA, brought her own dog Pinky along for the festivities. A tiny creature whose long white fur was pulled into a ponytail at the top of her head and tied with a pink ribbon, she blinked up at us from within Ms. Jones’s handbag.
“She loves the bag!” said Ms. Jones. “Look, if I take her out now, she’ll jump back in.”

A jazz band played onstage in the dining room, and several paintings by Hunt Slonem of minimalist white rabbits and colorful birds stood on display. As they settled down for dinner, guests noticed that their seats were already occupied by a paper cutout of a cat’s face attached to a popsicle stick, to be used for bidding at the auction. Some guests laughed and waved the cat head at their neighbor, and others looked a little unsettled.

We left for the evening tut-tutting to ourselves about a woman we spied wearing a white mink stole. After seeing no less than a dozen fur coats swinging ominously on their hangers at the coat check, we wondered what Jeffrey would think.

We made it inside just as Mr. Cocker was stepping off the stage. Pictures of Kurt Cobain in his famous white-framed sunglasses covered the fall wall, and rainbow spotlights lit the room. Tennessee Thomas was next on the turntables, and her whole set was inexplicably devoted to music from the 1960’s (perhaps because of Kurt’s mod glasses?). Nearly the entire soundtrack to Dirty Dancing was played.

The party was in photographer Jesse Frohman’s honor, but he sat outside the main room, sipping a drink in the hotel’s restaurant area.

“I knew Kurt was not really into publicity and fame, so I thought, well, maybe he’s not gonna be into it,” Mr. Frohman said, remembering the day of the photoshoot. “Plus, he came down three hours late. But he let his guard down completely, he really reveals himself in his gestures.”

Around midnight, The Virgins started their set, and the room, which had been half-filled for a while, was packed again.
Ms. Siad danced next to us with her date, until he stepped back into the crowd and disappeared. Ms. Siad looked around in confusion for a moment, then grabbed our hand and danced with us until he returned 30 seconds later.

“I love your necklace!” she said.

All line-cutting was forgiven, obviously.

Mr. Frohman mused about what Mr. Cobain’s reaction would be to a party thrown in honor of his photographed image.
“He’d think it was silly and ridiculous,” Mr. Frohman said. “He represents something much more now than his music, and I don’t think he’d appreciate that.”

The closest the DJs came to playing Kurt’s music (at least before we went home) was David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” which Nirvana covered.

Boardman. (Marc Dimov/PatrickMcMullan)

The guests at Longchamp and Paper Magazine’s Celebrate Spring were all dressed to the nines, including a young man wearing sequined Mickey Mouse ears and a tall blonde woman whose stole was decorated with large three-dimensional teddy bears formed of golden beads.

“This party has everything: booze, snacks, girls taking their clothes off!” said a guest to her snickering friends.

We saw no evidence of girls taking their clothes off, and worried that our showing up fashionably late (our editor had left us to the wolves) had made us miss it. But then Paper Magazine’s fashion editor Martha Violante stood up on the modeling platform and pulled off a model’s dress and shoes, until the model stood on display wearing nothing but a nude jumpsuit. The model lifted up her arms and held out her feet one by one as Ms. Violante, who’s about a third the model’s height, dressed her in a new outfit.

“We thought it would be a good idea to see the behind-the-scenes in front of the scenes, and show how we decide what looks cool,” said Ms. Violante.

“Do you think they’re embarrassed?” We were curious, and thus looked up.

“They’re professionals,” she said.

DJ Steven Rojas’s booth was positioned halfway up Longchamp Soho’s elaborate staircase, which looked like a waterfall made of wood and metal, but he wasn’t upset about missing the action of the party upstairs.

“I know half these people, so I’ll just socialize later,” he said.

We found self-proclaimed “bag hag” Mickey Boardman giving fashion advice. (“Love it!” he said of a red satchel that was being swung around by a young man clad entirely in leather. “But maybe in a different color.”) He admitted to being amused by the quick-change models.

“I love that panty hose jumpsuit thing they’re wearing,” Mr. Boardman said. “They’re very un-smiley models, but the clothes are fun. You know we all have such short attention spans now, so it’s fun to turn away to get a Coca Cola, and when you turn back, they’re in a different outfit.”