p.r. too sad to party
DONALD Trump is the Grinch who is ruining the holidays for some fashionistas.
Manhattan fashion p.r. company LaForce — which reps Target and Banana Republic, to name a few — has canceled its holiday party because of Trump’s victory.
James LaForce (right) had booked Irving Plaza for a thousand guests on Dec. 19 and designed an invite showing Hillary
Clinton as an American flag-waving Santa with the words, “Make America Merry Again.”
LaForce had bought thousands of feet of redwhite-and-blue bunting, and male models were lined up to pose in nothing but stars-and-stripes
body paint.
Instead, LaForce sent out a letter stating, “We envisioned an extracheerful celebration of Hillary Clinton’s presidency . . . Alas, Election Day did not go as we’d hoped. So it’s with deep regret that we are canceling this year’s party.”
LaForce sent the money that would have been spent on the party to Planned Parenthood, Housing Works and the Stonewall Foundation.
“We just decided we couldn’t go through with it,” LaForce told me.
The p.r. exec said he and husband Stephen Henderson were on a bullet train in Japan following the election results on his iPhone, as his employees in New York were crying. “I felt so bad. We thought of cutting our trip short,” LaForce said. LaForce isn’t worried about blowback from Republican clients such as Perry Ellis president Oscar Feldenkreis, who contributed to the campaigns of Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee. “Everybody gets where we are coming from,” LaForce said.