Freedom of Art
Grunge was embraced again at Marc Jacobs' uptown party, Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges premiered their emotional film "Ben Is Back" and Art Basel Miami Beach got under way with Max Mara and Judy Chicago. BY LEIGH NORDSTROM, MAXINE WALLY AND RACHEL FELDER
Madison Avenue turned grunge for a night on Monday, as the newly opened Marc Jacobs store stayed open late for a private party in celebration of the Redux Grunge collection.
Guests including Gigi Hadid, Kaia and Presley Gerber, Sofia Coppola, Sandra Bernhard, Stella Maxwell, Lindsey Wixson, Karen Elson, Anna Sui and more joined Jacobs and his fiancé, Char Defrancesco, donning their flannels, combat boots and Nirvana Ts for the night, which featured a performance by Kim Gordon later in the evening.
“The whole grunge thing was so evocative in its day,” Bernhard said from the first floor of the store. “It's fun to revisit it — I like the philosophy of it and the freedom of art, of music.”
She's been loyal to the grunge trend since Day One. “I still wear my flannel shirts. I always wore flannel shirts. I'm the queen of grunge, day-to-day,” she said.
Those experiencing grunge fashion for the first time around — we're looking at you, Gerbers, Hadid and the rest of the model crew — were more silent throughout the night. Gordon's daughter, Coco Gordon Moore, stood by as her mother was snapped by photographers, opting out of her own press. “Sorry, I'm about to go up the stairs,” she said.
Over at Lincoln Square, Peter Hedges was trying to keep back the tears.
He cries during interviews; he cries on set of the movies he's directing; he cries when he is joyful, and he cries when he cannot find the words to express how he's feeling. Monday night at the AMC Loews movie theater, where his latest film “Ben Is Back” premiered, was no exception. While introducing the movie, which stars Julia Roberts and his son Lucas Hedges, he got choked up while Roberts and costar Courtney B. Vance whooped and catcalled from the front row of the theater.
Prior to the screening, Roberts agreed that Peter Hedges crying wasn't a bad thing, though.
“He is emotional and intelligent,” she said, nodding. “He cries a lot at work, Peter. He's probably somewhere crying right now.”
For all the comparisons being made about Lucas and Peter Hedges, the 21-year-old is unlike his father in one way: He doesn't shed as many tears. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lucas Hedges stated he was growing weary of playing sad or depressed characters. He's not sure the specific role he'd like to fill next, he said, but he does know the world he'd love to play it in.
“I really want to do a sci-fi movie, in space. Also, a baseball movie would be fun,” he said. “For some reason, I'm really romantic about those two genres in film. There's something that feels magical about them."
In Miami, the parties of Art Basel got up and running with a Max Mara and ICA Miami dinner held in Judy Chicago's honor.
Since Chicago is best known for her groundbreaking installation “The Dinner Party,” it's no surprise that Monday night's party to celebrate her work was — what else? — a dinner party, held upstairs at Soho Beach House in Miami in its large outdoor eighth floor space.
To mark the occasion of Chicago's exhibition at the ICA, she created a limited-edition T-shirt for Max Mara that was unveiled at the event and will be sold in several of the brand's boutiques. Attendees included artwork cognoscenti such as Jeffrey Deitch, Casey Fremont, Nina Johnson and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.
Although the T-shirt's striking image is based on a detail from “The Dinner Party,” Chicago said it took three weeks to perfect a graphic that was right for the partnership. “I didn't know that much about Max Mara's color palette,” she confessed. “I actually did 10 drawings to use this image but melded it with something that was more suitable for Max Mara's brand.”
For Chicago, the dinner posed one major challenge: how to make the pale pink lace Max Mara dress she wore work with her own fashion sensibility, which is usually a bit more brash. The solution came a couple of weeks ago, on a day of gallery-going in Santa Fe with her family. “I slipped out and went to a vintage store that I shop at in order to accessorize,” she says, showing off her finds, like a pair of diamante chandelier earrings. “It took me an hour and a half, but I did it. I tried to do it in a way that fit my style.”