Joseph Altuzarra took a healthy half lap of the figure-eight runway at the end of his show last night; later in the evening, he completed the victory tour with a dinner and party at the Gramercy Park Hotel. That dinner, in the hotel’s Rose Bar, wasn’t just about kibitzing (with friends such as Vanessa Traina and Jenna Lyons) and table-hopping. “I was very hungry, so I ate a lot,” the designer reported, having made his way up to the leafy terrace for the after-party. The crowd started pouring in after midnight, which is around the time Altuzarra’s mother (who, like his father, is involved in the company) leaned in to say good-bye. “They think it’s a super-strong point of view this season, which it is,” the designer said, declining to give any particular reason for the tougher, streamlined turn his clothes took. “I think it’s just so intuitive after a certain point—what feels right, what you want to do.”
Downtown at the Jimmy, Prabal Gurung was doing his own after-partying. Jaime King, who’s making the rounds this week, joined the group for dinner, but the guest of honor was Gurung’s mother, Durga Rana, who’s in New York for the first time from their native Nepal.
Bulgari, meanwhile, celebrated the Serpenti Collection with an in-store retrospective of over sixty years of bejeweled snakes and the women who wear them. The timing was cosmic—the party coincided with Chinese New Year, and it’s the year of the snake, no less. A giant sparkling snake puppet slithering through the crowd with the help of two handlers sparked many conversations about ophidiophobia. “I’m not a big fan of anything that bites,” said DJ Mia Moretti. “But I am a fan of diamonds.” Asked why the jeweler took the snake as a symbol for the house, Bulgari’s managing director Cristina Cortesi told Style.com, “I think women like snakes because they’re a sign of resurrection, risurrezione. It’s nice to shed the skin.”
