![Liv Tyler and Ellen von Unwerth [Patrick McMullan]](http://nyovelvetroper.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/screen-shot-2013-01-09-at-3-24-46-pm.png?w=98)
Bow tie tied, and date in hand I check my email for final confirmation on what I had a hunch was to be one of the best parties of the year, the Weinstein Company and Samsung Galaxy’s premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. I do indeed spend a fair share of my time out in Read More
![Scott Lipps and Byrdie Bell [Patrick McMullan]](http://nyovelvetroper.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/screen-shot-2012-12-10-at-12-14-42-pm.png?w=150)
The society scene had something of a slow start thanks to Sandy, that smarmy super-storm that put the kibosh on what was to be a big week of parties, forcing the likes of our friends at the Cinema Society to scramble to keep their boîtes afloat—which they did with righteous aplomb.
Finally, back in the capable hands of Andrew Saffir, I find myself at the star-studded premiere of Rust and Bone, a delightfully brutal tale of survival, amputation, and mixed martial arts set in the south of France. The screening finds my pal Sophie Sumner doubled over, cringing at the impeccable portrayal of raw human emotion put forward by insanely handsome leading duo Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts. Read More
![Solange Knowles at the MOMA [Photo by PatrickMcmullan.com]](http://nyovelvetroper.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/634849021655412500042153_45_007_dt_10032012001-1.jpg?w=100)
As September shuts and October opens, the health of New York’s social calendar is on a speedy path to recovery—a road that leads us directly into our favorite time of year: black tie season. All of a sudden, the invites popping into our inboxes seem to be on a tiny bit thicker card stock, with just enough engraving to denote the perfect dress code. As one party this month put it, this is a time to dress “extraordinarily.”
We start out the season at a fete to remember: the 2012 Annual Brazil Foundation Gala. Read More
We strolled into the Museum of Modern Art last Tuesday, for a gala honoring the centennial of the birth of the renowned photojournalist Gordon Parks, who passed away at 93 in 2006.
A quick nod to the door guy, and then promptly to the bar. Still off the sauce, we grabbed a seltzer and turned around to survey the scene, only to be immediately interrupted by a bronzed figure that had surveyed our less than macho bar order. “Did you just order a sparkling water, m’boy?” photographer Peter Beard asked us.
“Regrettably so,” we admitted to the man whose legendary life-long bender makes Bowie’s Thin White Duke phase look like rehab. Read More
What allows reality TV to exist so plentifully, and to be so successfully engineered, is perhaps our human tendency to experience the same event different ways. Liquoring up scared, fame-hungry young people gets you most of the way there, but it’s the producer-prodded endless parsing of what historian Daniel J. Boorstin termed “pseudo-events” that fill the hours and hours of cable programming we so happily consume: fights over who is a drunk, fights over who said who is a drunk, fights over what actually happened when everyone was drunk, and so on. (Mr. Boorstin also gave us a handy phrasing for the contemporary definition of a celebrity: “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”)
To test these theories, on Monday, The Observer embraced a full evening’s schedule of pseudo-events featuring celebrities and took a Rashomonic approach to the premiere of the fifth season of the wildly, bafflingly successful reality show, The Real Housewives of New York City. We sent three correspondents with varying degrees of RHONY knowledge to three premiere parties hosted by Housewives, and asked them to write honestly of their experiences.
What we learned: Despite perhaps being unwelcome, ex-Housewife Jill Zarin made the rounds. A couple of the Housewives will really miss their extra-large Diet Cokes (thanks a lot, Mayor Bloomberg). If you hang around with a Housewife long enough, you might run into someone actually famous (Liza Minnelli!?). And the show, when viewed with the celebrity cast members present, is even more uncomfortably hyperreal.
Thus we present: the Occasional Viewer’s Story, the Fanboy’s Story, and the Party Crasher’s Story. Read More
If you haven’t met Priyantha De Silva, there’s still a good chance you’ve encountered him, perhaps when he was pretending to be someone else: cherubic cocktail chaser, uncredited Academy Award-winning producer, conspicuous Condé Nast editor, philandering philanthropist, ICM agent or the creator of the Kardashians. Some say that if you put your ear to a martini, you can almost hear his overdone debonair voice: “What do you mean I’m not on the list? Don’t you know who I am?” Priyantha De Silva was that really, really sweaty guy of Sri Lankan descent who successfully crowbarred his way into progressively higher social circles, ultimately crashing down into of Manhattan’s most closely guarded venues: Rikers Island. Read More
Tinsley Mortimer is an American socialite whose Wikipedia page describes her as a descendant of “Thomas Jefferson (on her mother’s side) and relatives of Patrick Henry and James Madison (on her father’s side).” She has written a tidy little roman à clef titled Southern Charm, and last night, as International Workers’ Day came to a Read More
The marathon that is Tribeca Film Festival has come to a close, so while we gently nurse our livers off life support, you’re invited to click through the gallery for a rundown of our interactions with the ultimate motley crew: HRH The Prince Edward, George Lucas, Bobby De Niro, Ed Burns, Geoffrey Fletcher and a litany of others…
Listen up film festival attendees – if there’s one place you want to find yourself after a long day of film screenings and celebrity sightings, it’s Bombay Sapphire’s House of Imagination. Part art installation, part Fat Radish restaurant, part bachelor pad, we wish it was going to be inhabiting Chelsea’s Cedar Lake for more than just this week. Read More
Has Zac Efron ever wondered if there was more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking? His resume doesn’t lend much insight: Men’s Health cover boy, professional chick-boner inducer, potential cyborg sent here to destroy us—the guy has it all. We found ourselves within point blank range of the Zef at last night’s Cinema Society screening for The Lucky One, a fact we relayed to a female friend later in the evening: Read More
