Last night’s Paris fashion week festivities started at 57 Avenue Montaigne, where Montaigne Market’s Liliane Jossua threw a party for Jason Wu. She’s been selling his collection for four seasons, “but it felt like the right time to celebrate,” the designer said. “Liliane puts things together in ways I wouldn’t have thought of, she buys my collection differently than anyone else.”
Just up the street, Valentino designers Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri were on hand to greet a steady stream of guests at the house’s freshly revamped Avenue Montaigne boutique. “We wanted to bring the idea of an Italian palazzo to Paris,” said Piccioli. Now that the Avenue Montaigne store is done, the duo is turning their attention to new venues: a men’s shop on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, due this summer, another in Shanghai, in November, and “a lot of collections in between,” said Chiuri. “I can only think about it step-by-step, one thing at a time.” After the cocktail party, it was on to the next step: a lavish dinner party at the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, site of Valentino’s haute couture shows. Tables were set with Delft china that mirrored the prints and embroideries on the designers’ Fall runway, and purple blooms spilled out of vases. It was all beautifully done. “I spent the same amount of time on this dinner as I did on the collection,” Chiuri said with a laugh.
Most of the Valentino dinner guests, including the designers themselves, joined the mob at Carine Roitfeld’s black-tie fete at the gilded upstairs salons of the Shangri-La Hotel. (Mercedes Benz, which has provided Roitfeld the CR-emblazoned SUV she has been making the runway rounds in this season, threw its weight behind the bash, too.) The occasion was the second issue of CR Fashion Book, dedicated to dance. The ballerina Marie-Agnès Gillot, who through the miracle of technology shares a CR editorial with the late, great Vaslav Nijinsky, was on hand to perform a pas de deux to “O mio babbino caro” with Vincent Chaillet, who then took Roitfeld’s hand for a much-applauded turn on the floor. “Carine got sick of Pilates and yoga, so she found a good teacher and has been taking classical dance lessons at home for three years,” said Christian Restoin. “She’s always asking me to come take African dance lessons with her,” added makeup guru Tom Pecheux. “But so far, I haven’t.” Karl Lagerfeld, a late arrival, was more game. “I’ve always known Carine was a good dancer,” he said, “because I dance with her.”
Though the party was studded with megawatt stars, guests such as Jessica Chastain, Amanda Seyfried, and Kanye West mingled undisturbed, their presence somewhat eclipsed by the past-midnight entrance of Kate Moss, wearing a see-through diamanté catsuit fresh from the Saint Laurent runway, toned down (but only slightly) by a short black jacket. “With Carine, it’s family,” said Riccardo Tisci, as he moved in to join the Roitfeld-Moss-Lagerfeld cluster for a little group dance.
