Alvin Valley, Sindi and Shoshanna Gruss.
Not even a volcano could keep social star Rena Sindi away from a good party. Eyjafjallajökull, as difficult to pronounce as it was to navigate around, proved no match for the inimitable Sindi, who, on break from her MBA studies at Cambridge, flew into the city to host a lavish affair for Dior celebrating 60 years of lipstick and the launch of its new Rouge Dior Lipcolor collection, out this month.
“I’m on a cloud to be here,” says Sindi, kitted out from head to toe in magenta Dior. “It was impossible to get out of London! I was like, Oh my God! I desperately want to get to New York and I can’t get there! But I made it.”
And make it she did, to a night that for many attendees, aside from being a very chic soirée, was a warm reunion with good friends, many of whom remarked upon greeting each other, “This is just like the old days.” Dior house DJ Harley Viera-Newton played a highly danceable mix of ’80s, ’90s and contemporary favorites, while guests including Tory Burch, Rachel Roy, Vanessa Getty, Bettina Zilkha, Shoshanna Gruss, Andrew Saffir and Daniel Benedict sipped cocktails and caught up, all gamely adhering in some fashion to the dress code: shades of red.
Carlos Mota created the rouge fantasy world that transformed the Magic Room atop the LVMH tower into an art installation, replete with lipshaped tables, red trees adorned with butterflies and plenty of black lacquer accents. “The high lacquer and the gloss—it reminds you of the lipstick,” says Mota. “And I love the Surrealists, so I said, Why don’t we do beautiful tables with a lip shape? I loved that idea.”
Fittingly, the tables were named for Rouge Dior shades—Diorama, Hypnotic Red, Star Fuchsia—and each guest was given a sample of one of the new shades, Favori Red, housed in a glossy cannage tube, a signature pattern of the House of Dior. (Some history: The very first shade of Dior rouge was sold in 1949. Christian Dior himself selected the fi rst eight shades; to date, some 1,500 have been developed.)
A highlight of the evening was Sindi’s heartfelt speech, where she noted how much she missed the “vibe and energy” of the city she’s been away from since 2004. “When they said they were doing a big event again and they really wanted me, I was so touched and really had to be here, no matter what it took,” she says. “So tonight, no more talk of anything erupting—no more volcano talk. The only thing that needs to erupt in this room is the dance floor. And no one is leaving! Cancel your plans for tomorrow—we’re going to be here all night because the elevators are locked until I let people go.”
With that, to thunderous applause and many “woos” from the usually genteel crowd, the evening really began, as guests poured from their seats onto the dance floor. Later that evening, making an exit was indeed challenging, but with some help from designers Alvin Valley (cheekily testing out one of the new Dior shades) and Angel Sanchez, we eventually found our way back out on the street, leaving the serious celebrating to the pros.
