The insulated bubble that is New York’s fashion crowd can be quite cliquey — a reality that was all the more apparent at Monday night’s Purple magazine dinner. As cocktail hour shifted into the dining room, a slight panic washed over the crowd: There were no formal seating assignments. And with that, Narcissa became something of a high school cafeteria, albeit a very chic one.
There were the untouchable seniors, the queen bees, Kim Gordon and Natasha Lyonne, confident enough to immediately snag a large corner banquette. Across the room, sat the cheerleaders, a group of top models including Jessica Hart, Eniko Mihalik and Daria Strokous. With the event doing double-duty as Rag & Bone’s postshow dinner, designers David Neville and Marcus Wainwright took their seat at the jocks’ table, accepting praise on their big win earlier in the day from Andrew Rosen. But it was the arty, hipster kids who dominated the space — Dustin Yellin, Mark Ronson, Theo Wenner, Adam Selman, Waris Ahluwalia, Petra Collins, et al — with Olivier Zahm as veritable class president. “The magazine is all about creating a community of people,” the editor said. “Life has been vampirized by the Internet, so we wanted to give it life.”
If that was the case, Gordon was performing the exorcism as cover girl of the magazine’s latest issue. “She’s an icon to me,” Zahm said. “She was in the first issue of the magazine. She’s really the Purple woman.” Perched in her dinner seat, Gordon pondered the finished product. “It’s good, yeah,” she shrugged.
Just as second-course plates were being cleared, a lithe blonde breezed in, swathed in several layers of clothing: Uma Thurman, honorary prom queen, had arrived. She made a beeline to Neville and Wainwright’s table, flashbulbs closely following. Greeting the pair, she preened for photos before doing a U-turn toward the door. Too cool for school.