THE live 35-foot birch trees were shipped in from Aspen. The couture dresses were brought by couriers from Italy and France. The English movie people flew commercial from London. The American stars hitched rides on private aircraft with friends from Los Angeles. Somehow or other, heeding advice from the evening’s hostess to be prompt at 6:30 for cocktails, the glittering horde arrived punctually at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Costume Institute ball. Or almost everyone did.
Fifteen minutes after the first guests started up the museum’s grand staircase, Patrick Robinson, executive vice president for global design of Gap, raced past the Praetorian Guard of beauties hired especially for the evening, and ducked into place in the receiving line.
“My car was late,” an out-of-breath Mr. Robinson explained to his co-hosts, Anna Wintour and Oprah Winfrey.
“Where was the person that was meeting you?” said an unfazed Ms. Winfrey, flashing her mediagenic smile. “You could have come with us.”
Encoded in that brief exchange was an essential element of the night and a reason the Costume Institute ball is often ballyhooed as the party of the year. Fame is a club, and like any club it operates on the principle that everyone on the inside knows everybody else, or ought to. The advantage to membership in this particular club is that no one requires Google Images to match names to faces already intimately familiar from magazine covers and screens as large as 40 feet and as cozy as the one on a P.D.A.
“What! You never met? You don’t know each other?” said Gisele Bündchen, the phenomenally beautiful Brazilian model and flip-flops mogul to her husband, Tom Brady, the phenomenally beautiful New England Patriots quarterback. This was her way of introducing him to the model Angela Lindvall, another genetic wonder whose 5-foot-10 height in stocking feet reaches point-guard levels when she wears heels. Read more »
