The Big Frieze

Just when London starts getting dark and cold and thoughts turn to nesting…bam! The Frieze Fair starts and everybody's inner party animal is freed. First up on Monday night was a dinner at Berners Tavern hosted by Jefferson Hack and Ian Schrager's new hotel, the London Edition, to celebrate the art of film—that is, the five Johnnie Shand Kydd -directed clips Edition created with online mag Nowness. Lily Cole , Jade Jagger , Lily Donaldson, Annabelle Neilson , and Bella Freud dropped by. Dinner was followed by a private view of the exhibition Brutal, held in the basement venue of 180 The Strand by the man who discovered Banksy, Steve Lazarides. On Tuesday, collector Valeria Napoleone invited Roksanda Ilincic, Osman Yousefzada, Mary Katrantzou, and Erdem Moralioglu to her place to celebrate the Judith Hopf exhibit—all this and Frieze hadn't even officially started. When it finally did kick off on Wednesday, the VIP preview attracted not just deep-pocketed collectors but models (Saffron Aldridge), royalty (Viscount Linley and Lady Helen Taylor), and pop stars (Nick Rhodes).



But the most elegant affair came last night. Together with the founders of Frieze, Alexander McQueen's Sarah Burton hosted a candlelit dinner at the seventeenth-century Christ Church Spitalfields, where, poignantly, McQueen presented his epic Fall 1996 Dante collection. Instagrammers went nuts for the huge oak tables laden with crystal and exquisite floral displays, the majestic nave, and the paintings of Henry VIII. If the gospel choir didn't get you, the sight of Kate Moss palling around with Florence Welch , Rachel Feinstein Currin , and Tracey Emin did. "Frieze is an endless source of inspiration. I mean, just look around at the people in this room," Burton told Style.com. "It is a time, I think, when everyone's creative juices are turbo-powered, even if just by osmosis."



The party didn't end there, though, as many went on to celebrate the launch of Acne Paper's Issue 15 with editor Thomas Persson at Mr. Chow in Knightsbridge. Well past the witching hour, sleepy waiters tried to shuffle an energetic crowd out the door, but the likes of Christopher Kane , Louise Wilson , and Haider Ackermann were having none of that. "I don't think they know what they are up against with this crowd," Richard Nicoll said around 1 a.m. "Poor guys don't know the party hasn't even started for us yet."

—Afsun Qureshi