Do You Want to Party?

Early in the evening, Pharrell Williams and Daniel Arsham unveiled a joint art project at the penthouse in the East Village's Standard Hotel. Arsham had made a series of casts of an important keyboard—the one that Williams made his first music on, in the late eighties.



One was made of hardened volcanic ash, one of powdered crystal, and one of rusted steel. Arsham had poured in conflicting materials to achieve an eroded effect, giving the instruments the look of remnants from some apocalyptic meltdown. The artist hovered near the glass case that contained them, explaining the idea—"taking something from the recent past and projecting it over the present into the future"—to the likes of Terry Richardson and André Balazs . Meanwhile, guests in the adjacent rooms posed for photos with a fourth keyboard. That one, they were allowed to touch—provided they put white gloves on first. Steps away, Williams kept a crowd of well-wishers and autograph seekers happy.



Mario Sorrenti summed up this season's Purple magazine get-together best: "Where's the dinner?" A smaller affair than usual, this one doubled as an after-party for Proenza Schouler. It went down at Paul's Baby Grand, a surprisingly genteel new club in Tribeca from Paul Sevigny, where waiters in bow ties passed around trays of finger food and strawberry-garnished cocktails.



Paul's is, for a certain crowd, the hot new place. Robert Longo offered some perspective on that. "Hot new places don't mean anything to me anymore. They mean soon-to-be-not-hot new places," the artist said, before recalling memories of raucous times in the eighties at The Odeon just down the street. "I spent a couple nights there in the basement. You go down to the bathrooms and there's a broom closet where you'd go in and do drugs and stuff like that, or fuck. Or sleep."



Jack McCullough could use some of that (the sleep, that is). He and partner Lazaro Hernandez had moved their show from their usual evening slot to noon, and paid a few consequences. "We wanted natural daylight, just to switch up the palette a little bit—but it's hard. That last night is a killer."



The bigger, later Purple party at the Boom Boom Room coincided with one that André Saraiva was throwing next door at Le Bain. Traffic flowed freely between the two spaces; Leonardo DiCaprio rolled in a little after midnight. But the wilder bash may have been over at the Hudson, where M.I.A. , A$AP Rocky , and legions of the designer's devoted fans showed their support for Jeremy Scott .

—Darrell Hartman