Far too fashionable for Rico

Guy Trebay has an article in The New York Times about a party to which Rico wasn't invited:

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 at 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 forty feet and as cozy as the one on a PDA.
“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.
Once upon a time, the Costume Institute ball was another kind of party, a gathering of New York’s birthright elite. Having grown up together, and traveled along a familiar circuit of approved schools and drowsy summer places, the Old Money people actually did know each other, and also tended to hold the quaint-seeming view that birth, marriage, and death were the only valid reasons to find one’s name in print. Their world, as we all know, is pretty well kaput now; its definitive passing was not lost on Ms. Wintour when she first commandeered and then resuscitated the Costume Institute ball by rendering it a celebrity version of the wildebeest migration.
Now the famous folks thunder— or clatter, anyway— into town on their Louboutin stilettos, strike practiced poses in borrowed finery, sip Champagne, and then sit for a dinner no one has any intention of eating. They give each other practiced two-cheek kisses, or try to when it comes to Ms. Wintour, who could give Krav Maga practitioners a lesson in stiff-arm tactics when it comes to deflecting a close approach. They hug each other with the ardor of reunited lovers. They keep their ice-picks and their agendas concealed.
“I’m so proud of you, so proud,” the producer Harvey Weinstein was telling the designer and debut director Tom Ford, who, having given up drinking, was one of the few people in a sculpture court of the museum circulating without a glass in hand. Mr. Ford thanked Mr. Weinstein and then, adjusting the gardenia in the lapel of his jacket and subtly turning up the wattage of his well-practiced grin, pressed into the crowd.
Across the room, Desirée Rogers, the former White House social secretary, was remarking to the Vanity Fair correspondent Amy Fine Collins that she was trying out her not-altogether-welcome new life as a civilian, weighing the decision to settle back home in Chicago or else in New York; and the R&B singer Mary J. Blige stood with her husband, looking statuesque in a chiffon column and as elegant as a person can while chewing gum; and the British actress Carey Mulligan was explaining to the actor Eddie Redmayne that she had decided to grow out her trademark cropped hairdo because acting feels so much faker when one wears a wig; and the actress Jessica Biel stood forlorn by a classical statue while her boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, shared celebrity face-time with Usher; and Whoopi Goldberg and the Vogue eminence André Leon Talley made stately progress through the room in voluminous white Ralph Rucci robes reminiscent of vestments worn by Mormon prophets.
The scion of a publishing fortune remarked that his wife was so busy these days that he’d made a date to see her for an Italian getaway weekend next July; and the Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn conceded that the reason she looked so fresh and camera-ready after screaming to the finish of her downhill races was that she was fully made-up; and a passel of models that included Jessica Stam and Sasha Pivovarova and Natasha Poly stood huddled together like children after a storm.
The actress Zoë Saldana, whose one-shoulder Calvin Klein dress was made lovelier by the wearer’s elegant carriage, was explaining that having starred in the largest grossing film in history had not changed her as much as one might think. “That’s already happened and it’s probably not going to happen again in my career,” she said. “So I can relax.” Besides, Ms. Saldana added, “My mom keeps me real.” How, exactly, does she do that, Ms. Saldana was asked? “She makes me do the dishes and take out the trash.”
Away in a hallway a small, wizened man with a deeply grooved face who turned out to be Mick Jagger trailed along behind his girlfriend, the designer giantess L’Wren Scott (nee Luann Bambrough), who walked arm-in-arm with the buxom artist Rachel Feinstein; and dozens of waiters wearing military-style black Gap jackets navigated their drinks trays through a maze of trains that trailed the flowing gowns celebrity princesses like Anne Hathaway are expected to wear to a ball.
And Donatella Versace, who had brought her security guard to the party, remarked that the most startlingly fresh and inventive objects in American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, the new Costume Institute show celebrated at the fete, were three dresses by the prickly but little-known Anglo-American design genius Charles James. “I was saying to Franca,” Ms. Versace said, referring to Franca Sozzani, the Italian Vogue editor in chief, accompanied at the party by her boyfriend, the novelist Alain Elkann, “that those dresses are so modern you could take them out of the museum and wear them today.”
Presumably you could. But, at this point, there are just a few places left where real people, even the richest ones, actually wear clothes like those shown on the mannequins, living and otherwise, at the Metropolitan Museum. By now everyone understands that the true function of awards shows and charity benefits is as cross-branding promotional opportunities. This is far from a bad thing, of course, since a significant percentage of the budget for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was raised on this one night.
It is worth remarking, though, that the extraordinary stuff Charles James created for heiresses like Millicent Rogers or Elizabeth de Cuevas or Austine Hearst was designed for a specific form of social theater, and that no news release came out the day after a party tagging what Mrs. Hearst had on. That particular society spectacle closed down some time ago, of course, and it should probably be noted that the stage of New York nightlife might well have dimmed had Anna Wintour never brought her own kind of carnival to town.