[T]oday is Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Met Gala (you can stream live this evening here!) with a theme around Punk Fashion. In preparation and celebration of a new punk collection launching, Moda Operandi hosted a midnight supper in The Vault at the prestigious St. Regis New York where the collection will be on display through May 16th.
There is an air of mystery and excitement around midnight suppers, the doors that the instant before looked like an ordinary wall all of a sudden glide open, allowing you to slip into a glowing private room where only those who know, know. The midnight supper, once a legendary tradition created by Caroline Astor in the height and glamour of the Guilded Age, is preserved through the St. Regis and set slightly earlier in the evening so that we may feel the magic of such intimate place settings and celebration.
To me, punk fashion still comes with the same taste and thought as every other fashion moment but ever so slightly askew. The design of the midnight supper room by Bronson Van Wyck has that same sentiment: a beautiful arrangement of tulips is turned into a wall of dangling buds that seemingly dance upside down to their own beat, murals of skulls look back at you laughingly until you realize they are made of a saturation of pills, eye shadow that, in its effortlessly cool way, lands more underneath the eyes than on top, and dinner guests, the elite of fashion, letting their hair down and showing their Punk Fashion side in plaids, leather, and studs ending the evening throwing flowers at each other across the table and making mohawk-esque hats out of the center piece arrangements.
Punk celebrates the unusual beauty, the obscure, the abstract….the balance of beauty that takes you right to the edge.
Going to dinner with Lauren Santo Domingo & Taylor Tomasi Hill would make anyone fret a bit about what to wear, so I found that punk is in the details. Swarovski encrusted studs on the backs of my Valentino heels to go with a red Valentino dress of lace…. all leather lace.
PS~ Remember last year’s Met Gala?