HOUSE PARTIES
PARIS — “I thought the house was going to explode,” squeaked Cordelia Lanvin, after the crowd began to drain from her apartment late Monday night. “We had 200 in here.”
Two hundred guests — and a belly dancer gyrating to blasting music — must have rattled the neighbors when Lanvin and her husband, Hubert, threw open the doors of their 16th arrondissment flat for a Moroccan dinner honoring Emanuel Ungaro and young clients at his couture showing earlier in the day. Taken together, the gaggle of fresh-faced beauties with familiar last names represented the couture’s New Front Row.
Jessica de Rothschild, Cornelia Brandolini, Mina d’Ornano and newlywed Melonie Hennessy perched together like the pledge-class of an exclusive sorority — perhaps still a little giggly from their recent initiation.
The photographers loved it. Whether any of the girls actually called around to the ateliers to place an order the next day is another question entirely. But no doubt the day will come.
They certainly kicked up their heels chez Lanvin. After dinner, when the belly dancer began to show her moves, some guests jumped in for a duet. Ana Lucia Adam — one of the three de Theresa sisters of Mexico City — got a little push from her friends.
“They tried to throw me on the dance floor,” she said. “Like a chicken!”
Meanwhile, John Galliano called in the Dior extended family — including friends Stella McCartney, Gwen Stefani, Todd Rundgren, Liv Tyler, India Hicks, Tamara Yeardye, Nadja Swarovski and muse-in-training Brooke de Ocampo — for a Moroccan feast at Tanjia, a restaurant off the Champs-Elysees.
“It was exactly what people think happens in Paris during the couture — glamour girls, rocks stars and John Galliano — all together in a Moroccan restaurant,” pronounced New Yorker Marjorie Gubelmann, before adding with a laugh, “I felt right at home.”