Remember Beige? Remember B Bar? Remember — gulp — the Nineties?
Once upon a time, in a more innocent New York, a wonderful place called B Bar flowered on the Bowery, in part thanks to a weekly party called Beige. The downtown kids adored it. Linda and Naomi and Kate were regulars. On any given week, you could see both Boy George and Jocelyne Wildenstein there. Candace Bushnell wrote about it endlessly in her column “Sex and the City.” And then the magic ended. The Bowery Bar & Grill has stayed open since 1994, but the party long ago moved elsewhere.
On Thursday, for a night only, the old B Bar was back. All over the former gas station on the corner of East 4th Street and Bowery, people were partying again like it was 1999. It was hard not to be wistful.
“Last time I was here? Maybe 17 years? That long ago,” Karen Elson said.”I don’t think I’ve been here in 20 years,” Dustin Yellin said next to her.
They were both back at the scene of the crime thanks to Gucci and Alessandro Michele, a designer who didn’t experience New York in the Nineties but was filled in on its charms by his local PR team. Following the presentation earlier in the day of a cruise show heavy with nostalgia, it made sense in a roundabout way to celebrate at an old throwback.
Bobbing around were a handful of figures who’d seen the place in its glory — Erin Wasson, Leigh Lezark, Genevieve Jones and Arden Wohl. Mostly, though, the scene was dominated by their successors, today’s beau monde — Laura Love, Atlanta de Cadenet Taylor, Tali Lennox and Langley Fox Hemingway.
Yellin and Elson were in a darkened bar in the back, where the model had just performed four songs, though not with The Citizens Band, the group she formed in the early Aughts with a group of other then “It” girls. Even in the band’s heyday, she’d never performed here.
“It’s an honor,” she said.
Artist and model taking in the room, which was covered with pictures of fantastic New York parties of yore. “We have a lot of memories here,” Elson said, letting the thought linger.
For a moment, it felt like the party had never ended at B Bar. “It’s the first time it seems cool again in 20 years,” Yellin said.