Daily Front Row

2012 March 23

Frick Frack

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Caitlin Davis, Jenn Wight, Clare McKeon, Lydia Fenet, Joann Pailey, Elisabeth Saint-Amand, Sloan Overstrom, Sarah Irwin, and Lucy Lang, all in Donna Karan
SHAUN MADER/ PatrickMcMullan.com View Gallery

(NEW YORK) In Woody Allen's latest, Midnight in Paris, Marion Cotillard's sentimental flapper yearns to abandon the (very) roaring twenties in favor of a time-capsule airlift to the romantic, and just a touch bawdy, salon scene of la belle époque. She's not the only one feeling moonstruck. On Thursday evening, the Frick Collection hosted its Young Fellows Ball under that very guise—an apt choice (perhaps the only one) given the museum's current exhibition, Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting. A semi-private viewing of those works, which celebrate la vie parisienne in the 1870s and 1880s, was well worth the ticket price, provided you didn't find the thumping house music in an adjacent gallery a touch incongruous.

Lydia Fenet, one of the evening's Donna Karan-clad chairs, had just arrived from Singapore, and she spent the bulk of her 18-hour return flight devouring the first season of Boss. (Don't worry—the second installment is currently filming in Chicago). Her fellow hosts—Olivia Chantecaille, Clare McKeon, Joann Pailey, Sloan Overstrom, and Claiborne Swanson Frank, whose new Assouline tome American Beauty will be fêted next week by Tod's—ushered the 600 or so revelers into the Garden Court and Music Room. (No champagne in the galleries, people.) 

Bill Cunningham: shooting ballgowns with abandon. Lesley M.M. Blume: sporting a headpiece that appeared to be straight off Ann Demeulemeester's Fall 2012 runway. Aliza Licht: still Tweeting, but sparingly. As the gyrating began in earnest around 10 p.m., an apparently world-weary Tinsley Mortimer had perched on a banquette, awaiting her public. Sure enough, a smattering of young male suitors peacocked in her direction. What's wrong with a little nostalgia?
ASHLEY BAKER