The ever-fashionable Lady Gaga, umbrella ensemble and all.

Do you hear those sleigh bells ring-a-ling too? Every year we think we’re going crazy when the radio starts playing Christmas songs the moment the organic Whole Foods turkey has turned to Thanksgiving leftovers. (It’s been especially unnerving this year, considering the temperature has us repacking our winter sweaters.) We’re happy to get an early jump on the shopping—er—giving this year, as long it means that we can stuff our stockings with toys from Lady Gaga’s workshop at Barneys. Only $95 for an Alexander McQueen shoe replica made out of chocolate? That’s less than we paid at the Met to see the reel heel!

Another holiday treat has been the silence on Wall Street. Maybe everyone made peace on Thanksgiving … you know, just like the Pilgrims and Indians did before the former wiped out the indigenous culture with smallpox. (Zuccotti Lung, anyone?) Those annoying drum-a-drum-drum circles were quickly replaced by Miley Cyrus’s YouTube remix of her song “Liberty Walk” to show her support of the protests. Listening to her high-frequency noises accompanied by images of marches and American flags was like taking a little
Salvia trip without leaving your executive suite.

If you prefer your screeching in a higher octave, please write in to Fox News and demand that pundit/non-token blond lady Megyn Kelly take us up on our offer: After describing the pepper spray used on UC Davis students as “a food product essentially,” we invited her down to our offices for a mutual Mace-off. Think of it as a modern day pie-in-the-face gag, except with more eye irritation.

Those looking for a mob scene last week didn’t have to travel to California—or Wall Street—to stand behind police barricades while shoved by strangers. You could just go to the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This year’s giant Spider-Man float was either a tribute to the upcoming film, or an effigy to the Marvel gods after Turn Off the Dark made it a whole year without being shut down. Worker’s comp: it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Just like Powerball. Which at least this year, is more like a gag gift. Three Greenwich money managers just won $254 million in the lottery, proving once and for all that there is no God—or perhaps there is, and he’s just sitting in his executive suite taking a little Salvia trip. Either way, we’re just going to down some holiday spirits and enjoy ourselves.

Lady Gaga arrives at Barneys (Photo via Patrick McMullan)

It's a parent's worst nightmare before Christmas: Lady Gaga's new holiday stocking-stuffer line at Barneys, unveiled on Monday, which is sure to be included on every little monster's wish list this year. Cookies shaped like meat dresses? Yes. Necklaces that look like exploding disco balls and/or guns? Yes. A chocolate Alexander McQueen shoe styled after Gaga's own wardrobe? But of course! And all at(relatively) low prices...how could you say no?

Lady Gaga's Workshop--which looks like Andy Warhol's Factory had a drag baby with Willy Wonka's-- offers items ranging from expensive couture (Erickson Beamon's exploding disco ball necklace retails for $1,630) to surprisingly cheap (seriously, less than $100 to eat a shoe replica of McQueen's? Why didn't the Met think of this??)An egg that opens to reveal a miniture Gaga herself is only $35. As the singer herself told The New York Times:

“Oh, it’s fun...It’s the dream of what music and culture are all about, and those are things that can get lost when you focus too much on commercialism. This is, for me, a much more whimsical approach, a Pop Art approach.”

That's right. Sometimes there is too much focus on commercialism in the art world. That's why we put out lines at Barneys as well.

Installation view of "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“You could identify one another in the Castro by a certain leather jacket in the ’80s,” the photographer Catherine Opie said last Thursday afternoon. “Your jeans rolled up, a pair of Doc Martens and cock rings on your jacket: ‘O.K., I know exactly who you are.’ And then Michael Jackson wore the leather jacket and it fucked us all up.”

Ms. Opie, 50, was sitting on a stage in the basement of the New York Public Library as she explained the sartorial codes of San Francisco’s queer community. She was wearing a flannel shirt, a brown newsboy cap and chunky white glasses. Next to her were sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the women behind Rodarte, the Los Angeles-based fashion label that, after only six years in existence, has reached the pinnacle of couture.

The three women, along with Minneapolis-born photographer Alec Soth, have just released a book through the Swiss art publisher JRP-Ringier. Ms. Opie photographed some of her longtime models wearing the Mulleavys’ clothes. The Mulleavys sequenced Ms. Opie’s photographs in the book. “It taught me to give up some of my control,” Ms. Opie told the crowd, which was filled mostly with women, most of them very young.

Mr. Soth’s role was more unusual. The designers explained that they furnished him with a map marked with California sites that have inspired their work, which he used to embark on a two-week road trip, taking photographs along the way—a project that sounds more like a process-based conceptual artwork than a fashion shoot. Not a single piece of Rodarte clothing appears in his images.

As evidenced by this new book, which includes a text by the chameleonic critic and artist John Kelsey, and Rodarte’s recent show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the boundaries between fashion and art have, if not collapsed, at least become very blurry in recent years. Not that the fashion/art nexus is anything particularly new: artists and designers have long dabbled in each other’s fields. The midcentury art dealer and patron Peggy Guggenheim once quipped, “I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract art.”

“Every few years someone asks, ‘Is fashion art?” Dilys E. Blum, the curator of costume and textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, told The Observer. As Fashion Week drew to a close, we’d called her with roughly that same question, after attending the Rodarte event, and eyeing the banner attendance numbers that the Metropolitan Museum of Art posted for its recent Alexander McQueen retrospective.

But maybe it’s not a very interesting question anymore. Maybe a better one is, “How are the two industries transforming, learning from and feeding off of one another?”

“Savage Beauty” was in almost every way a triumph, bringing in 661,509 people during its three-month run; it’s the eighth-most popular exhibition since the Met began tracking such figures about 50 years ago. Critics, including New York Times art critic Holland Cotter, swooned. Depending on one’s perspective, the response to it seemed to present the possibility of either a terrifying or a tantalizing future for art museums everywhere: blockbuster designer bringing glamour—and the clamoring masses—to their halls.

But perhaps not. “There are not that many real designers who would capture the public imagination the way McQueen did,” Ms. Blum told us. “The risk is that people’s expectations will be that every exhibition is a McQueen, and if it’s not, it’s a failure. These shows can become big extravaganzas, and I think we’re sort of running out of key players.”

Harold Koda, one of the Met Costume Institute curators who organized the retrospective, agreed. McQueen was, in some sense, an easy sell, he said. “The challenge,” he said, “is to bring in other designers who have equal influence who might seem more elusive in terms of what their contribution is because on one level they seem so familiar.”

Take the case of the Guggenheim’s 2000 Giorgio Armani show, which was savaged in part because the Italian designer was reported to have made an eight-figure donation to the Guggenheim foundation. “The art press had difficulty with seeing unstructured suits in one tone as art,” Mr. Koda, who also worked on that show, said. “It looked too much to them like what they saw not only in department stores, but on the street. It was my failure to communicate the distinction of his accomplishment.”

However, it may not be fair to blame curators for that problem. Mr. Koda noted that when Artforum, the art world’s journal of record, put a dress by Issey Miyake on its cover in 1982, it was, like McQueen’s work, intensely sculptural. “People from a fine art focus tend to overlook what they see as more quotidian or prosaic designs when in fact those are the ones that culturally wield the most influence,” he said.

Artforum has become more open to fashion in recent years: it now runs ads from top fashion brands (Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton) and jewelry designers (Bulgari), though only in certain positions in the magazine, a decision it reportedly made only after much soul-searching, as Sarah Thornton wrote in her 2008 book, Seven Days in the Art World. The magazine occasionally runs articles about fashion, albeit only a very particular subset of it.

The Met has on tap for next spring a two-person show, combining the midcentury Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who collaborated frequently with Surrealist Salvador Dalí, with the contemporary superstar Miuccia Prada. Though a 2003 Schiaparelli show that Ms. Blum organized in Philadelphia was a hit—people still talk lovingly of an opening party replete with madcap outfits—it remains to be seen whether this forthcoming show will draw the same crowds as the exhibition of McQueen, whose extroverted designs and tragic biography were tailor-made for the museum blockbuster.

But while fashion shows may not be the magic bullet for art museums looking to draw crowds, many sectors of the art industry increasingly resemble fashion houses. In a nod to Warhol, contemporary artists’ studios are often described as factories, but a more apt comparison might be the ateliers of fashion designers, expertly crafting products at a variety of price points, including perfume and accessories for those who find four-figure dresses beyond their means.

Visiting the Gagosian storefront on the Upper East Side a year ago, The Observer overheard a woman asking a salesperson the price of a long marble bookshelf by the designer Marc Newson. “Oh, wow,” she said quietly, upon hearing the price. The saleswoman informed her that the store also stocked books by Mr. Newson. “They are $80.” Gagosian, as The Observer noted last month, recently dropped its Gallery surname in ads, becoming a brand that transcends art; the store now carries a line of bracelets by jewelry designer Delfina Delettrez.

And contemporary artists have frequently crossed into fashion in recent years. Richard Prince and Takashi Murakami have designed handbags for Louis Vuitton, and the latter’s touring retrospective featured an entire boutique from the French luxury brand. Earlier this year, a group of artists, including Damien Hirst and Enoc Perez, created bags for a Christie’s charity auction engineered by the Warhol-enamored collector Alberto Mugrabi.

Even among the downtown set, fashion is playing a role of sorts. Artist Emily Sundblad—Mr. Kelsey’s partner in the Lower East Side gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art—hung a long Proenza Schouler dress on the wall in her recent show at the Algus Greenspon gallery in the West Village and donned the costume when performing at the gallery. And K8 Hardy has long been designing clothes. “Every article of clothing is so loaded with signifiers,” Ms. Hardy told The Times in 2009, sounding a lot like Ms. Opie.

Meanwhile, luxury labels have been appropriating the codes and content of the art world with ferocious speed. In 2008, Chanel commissioned architect Zaha Hadid to create a temporary gallery that the label filled with contemporary artworks and planned to tour around the globe; it stopped in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Central Park, but was stalled by the recession, before it could move on to London, Moscow and Paris.

Last week, when the CEO of Louis Vuitton, Yves Carcelle, announced that he would retire at the end of next year, he said that his next job would be as president of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, an art collection that will be housed in a $142 million Frank Gehry-designed museum in Paris.

As luxury brands embrace art, the market for vintage couture has also begun to develop along the lines of the art market, though the focus is, with a few exceptions, on work from the 1970s and earlier. “There’s a movement toward buying couture as works of art, not for wearing, but as an object,” said Pat Frost, director of costumes and textiles at Christie’s, who organized the sale of the late fashion editor Isabella Blow’s clothing collection.

“Because of various blockbuster museum exhibitions, it’s more on the radar to museum curators and acquisitions boards,” said Ms. Frost. “I think it probably helps museum curators to persuade their boards that they should buy costume or couture if it has a link to the art world, which is a system of values which is well understood by museum boards, whereas couture perhaps isn’t.” McQueen, in other words, is in; subtler, lower-profile innovators are out. She listed Paco Rabanne, Issey Miyake and Martin Margiela as designers who could arouse similar interest.

Collectors looking to stockpile contemporary couture in the manner that Mr. Mugrabi hoards Warhols are likely to be disappointed, however. “McQueen was notoriously expensive, because they were one-off sculptures,” Ms. Frost said. “If you’re talking $6,000 or $7,000 for an evening dress two years ago, it’s going to take a long time for it to get to that level in the art market, shall we say.”

Today’s confluence of art and fashion is perhaps defined best in the person of British heiress Daphne Guinness, prodigious collector of clothing and friend to McQueen and a handful of other avant-garde designers. Ms. Guinness is currently the subject of an exhibition at the museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, which is filled with clothing from her wardrobe, including a number of pieces by McQueen.

The show features the same moody, dramatic lighting as the Met’s McQueen show. As Ms. Blum predicted, though, it feels like a letdown after the Met’s magisterial production, which was personally overseen by the designer’s production managers. How could F.I.T. possibly compete?

The opening reception for the event was pure mayhem: vertiginous heels, a man in a wedding dress, a woman in a bathrobe and leather boots. Not exactly the Chelsea gallery crowd. The Observer buttonholed Helene Verin, a shoe designer who is an internship counselor for accessories students at F.I.T. and asked her what we should make of Ms. Guinness, a woman famous for wearing clothes. “She serves a role,” she said. “She’s the muse.”

Ms. Verin was wearing an orange circular Hermès box on her head—a headpiece called a “fascinator,” as a tribute to Ms. Guinness, who has made the accessory one of her trademarks. Her dress and bag were also trimmed with the label’s trademark orange, and dotted with its logo. “Do you think it’s overdone?” Ms. Verin asked.

We mentioned that we typically cover art events. “Andy Warhol was my friend,” she told us. “He did my portrait.”

The invocation of Warhol seemed apt. Ms. Guinness and her compatriots embody the artist’s dictum about 15 minutes of fame to a degree that, again depending on your perspective, is horrifying or sublime, or both. Everyone is an artist, as Beuys said, and everyone is staring. Part of us wished we had dressed as ornately.

We asked the woman in bathrobe and boots, Elisa Goodkind, about her background. “I used to work in fashion, but now I work in style,” she told us. “One is an industry that is about selling, and the other is about soulfulness and self expression.”

Ms. Guinness, as it happens, has recently taken to referring to herself, on some occasions, as an artist. She makes videos—some are included in the F.I.T. show—and back in May she did a performance before the Met’s Costume Institute gala, in which she got dressed in a window of Barneys.

At the press conference on the morning after the opening, we asked Ms. Guinness which contemporary artists inspire her. She demurred. “I’m more of an Old Masters fan,” she said. “I love Old Master drawings, like Zurbarán and the Spanish masters.”

Ms. Guinness speaks softly and thoughtfully, with a perfectly pitched élan easily associated with aristocracy. “I like some contemporary art,” she continued, “but by no means all. It’s difficult to say contemporary artists off the top of my head, because I’m always going back to the past.”

What about her performance? “I sometimes get myself into situations in which the only way through it is to do a performance,” she replied. “To make things relevant in their context, to contextualize why they were done.” There is fashion, but sometimes one has no choice other than to make art.

arusseth@observer.com

Ms. Guinness.

Did you wake up today with Fashion Week withdrawal? Craving a runway in New York, and unable to hop a flight to London? Remnick & Co. have you covered: The New Yorker's style issue hits stands today, and there's plenty of hemming to fill the pages. Susan Orlean has a nice snapshot of happy-go-lucky French couturier Jean-Paul Gautier, but more arresting is Rebecca Mead's take on the enigma of Daphne Guinness.

There is no shortage of reasons to look into the life of Ms. Guinness -- described in the profile as "an heiress, a muse, a socialite, a designer, and an artist" -- but it helps that The Observer is coming off a week where she seemed to be everywhere. We caught up with her at Steven Klein's harrowing video installation, downed shots of tequila with her at the AnOther magazine dinner, and then hung out with her and Mick Jagger at Electric Room late into Thursday night (for more on that, look for a certain nightlife column in Wednesday's Observer).

The article is behind the paywall, so we'll give the subscription-less a look at the more intriguing reveals imbedded in the piece.

On what clothes by her late friend Alexander McQueen hang in her closets:

She had at least six McQueen bodysuits, made from skin-tight beige silk net embroidered with glass beads in patterns that evoked both corsetry and herpetology.

On a bad fall that resulted from her wobbly, sky-high heel-less Noritaka Tatehanas:

She was delighted to see that her blood matched her shoes.

On her role as mistress to married philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy:

Guinness has often alluded on her Twitter account to the heartbreak of the situation. ("I am a hopeless romantic. I would not think twice to die for love.")

On her relationship with Harold Bloom, the Western Canon's biggest fanboy:

"She has got a kind of precarious beauty," Bloom to me, fondly. "One wonderful day, there she was, looking very young and boyish in a black costume with a white ruff, and I said, 'Daphne, dear, who are you?' And she said, 'Harold, I'm Hamlet.'"

And on the Nazism that once ran through the older generations of her family:

School became even harder to tolerate after the death, in 1980, of her grandmother Diana's second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana and Mosley were married, in 1936, at the house of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolph Hitler as a guest.

Perhaps the most striking quote from Ms. Guinness relates to this arm of her family, and its politics. The icon and writer are discussing Diana and her sister, Unity, who committed suicide after years dwelling in Hilter's inner circle.

"Why didn't Unity shoot Hitler instead of herself?" Guinness said. "Then we'd be descended from heroes instead of villains."

"We have been in discussion with a number of major venues in London for some time now however nothing has been finalised," a spokesperson for the label wrote in an e-mail.

The show at the Met brought 661,509 attendees between when it opened in May and when it closed earlier this month. The museum extended its hours as the closure loomed, and packed the museum with midnight showings in the last two days of the exhibit. In the end, 17,000 visitors purchased $50 tickets for after-hour viewings.

Miuccia Prada

"Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" stunned the city, broke records and went out with unending lines that spun around the block until late in the night. Now, a few weeks after its close, the Costume Institute has announced the focus of next year's exhibit: Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli.

And that's all we know right now! WWD reached out to the Met and representatives declined to comment. But it's a good bet that these two iconic female designers, of two entirely different eras, will bring out crowds come Spring 2012.

'Savage Beauty' late at night.

"BUT HOW DID HE DIE?" said a young man to the girl standing next to him in an outsize dress.

The couple was looking at a blossoming, red-feathered, evening-wear creation, the first taste of the Met’s hit exhibition “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” The deceased in question, of course, was the designer.

“You don’t know?” she said.

He shook his head.

The two had come to the exhibit at a time that would seem appropriate but, given the mammoth crowd now populating the hall of Rodin, saving their visit for the last night turned out to be folly. “Savage Beauty” was closing at midnight, the latest the museum had ever stayed open. At 11 o’ clock, many line-standers had been waiting to bid McQueen adieu since early that afternoon.

“Really,” came a whisper. “How did Alexander McQueen die?”

She leaned in and told him.

“That’s pretty serious,” the young man said.

The Observer ducked into the compound’s side entrance, on 81st Street, at 10:00 p.m. Sunday night, and upstairs we witnessed the feared line that snaked through the halls, engulfing statues on display into the theme park-caliber queue.

We had bypassed it all, though, and so we witnessed the collection before many, and we found it an aggressively brilliant fever dream played out in silk, all the frocks cut with daring.

It was one of the most successful exhibits in the museum’s history. Hence, the line on that final night was very, very long. We had heard horror stories: six-hour waits, irate groups turned away feet away from the entrance, not to mention the claustrophobic hell once you do get inside. At one point during the week, a young child was rumored to have wet himself while on line. The parents did not want to risk losing their place.

“What did we do all that time?” said Simon Barros, a 21-year-old student, of the afternoon-to-night stretch. “I tried to download the app, but, I dunno, talking to people in line, talking to my friends, I’m thinking it’s definitely going to be worth it.”

Her voice trailed off.

“I’ll see when I come out.”

“Well, I thought this would actually be an event,” said Cole. He’s 26 and works for the United Nations. It’s not so often that a exhibition of this scale and importance has its last hurrah at the going-out hour, and it seemed many had joined The Observer in having a few cocktails beforehand.

“And it is an event!” he went on. “Some people were getting angry a lot, cutting in line … ”

Speaking of cutting the line, it was time for us to take in McQueen’s final show.

“I haven’t seen it yet either!” Anthony Haden-Guest, the writer whom we walked in with, exclaimed as we approached.

Those were the last words we exchanged with him, or anyone, for the rest of the time inside. The clothes were draped on mannequins with iron skulls for heads, the bare eye sockets and deep-sunken cheeks often deprived of breath by a suffocating cloth. And blindly they peered down at the masses.

“One of the mailroom guys told me yesterday how much he enjoyed the show,” Anna Wintour told The New York Times a few days earlier.

Some share her surprise, but they shouldn’t. Yes, even those poor souls who work outside the Vogue editorial department can enjoy the video of the fragile, 17-year-old Shalom Harlow—in a pure white dress girded outward and affixed above her chest with a belt—cowering swanlike on a giant revolving lazy Susan. Then she wriggled in horror as the danger crept closer. As she spun, two robotic metal appendages darted at her, sniffing her neck, before bursting at the tip and sullying the muslin fabric with yellow and black splatter. The paint-stained dress hung below the video display.

McQueen’s vision evolved with each room. In the next, Tartan garb evoked the Scottish heroes whom McQueen worshipped. And in a glass box a fuzzy ball of pixie dust melted into a hologram of Kate Moss, a tiny ethereal vision twirling in a dress made of fog and light, fabric of milky cloud-sinew, to the theme from Schindler’s List.

“I knew he killed himself, but I didn’t know too much about him,” said Mary Adams, a nurse practitioner who was leaving the show. The elderly woman had driven from Boston that morning. She had been in line since 2:30 and the clock was edging toward midnight.

“Did he have a troubled life?” she asked The Observer.

We leaned in and told her.

As we left, a new batch of people huddled by the front of the line got nodded in. The line still flowed from one gallery space to another, but they would be among the last of the groups. With entry gained, the people raised their arms, let out a vigorous whoop of anticipation and walked under the ghostly photograph of Alexander McQueen—the fashion show, for them, about to begin.

nfreeman@observer.com @NFreeman1234

Ms. Wintour, at the Costume Institute Gala.

Just over twelve hours ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art shut the door on "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty," ending two days of staying open until midnight, waits up to six hours, and a spectacle that generated deafening word of mouth for the institution. The blockbuster show attracted 661,509 guests, putting it at number eight in the top ten exhibitions in the museum's history.

Naturally Anna Wintour was one of those many thousands. In fact, she was on hand last night. The New York Times' Eric Wilson oh-so-casually inserts a quote from the Vogue editrix -- "I happened to see her last week..." -- into an otherwise unremarkable "Savage Beauty numbers round-up.

“We knew it was going to do well, but we didn’t know how well,” Ms. Wintour said to Mr. Wilson. “One of the mailroom guys told me yesterday how much he enjoyed the show. It just shows you how fashion now reaches so many different people.”

Yes, Anna, it is just shocking that someone can both place mail into mailboxes and enjoy high fashion.

In any case, Ms. Wintour's newly discovered kindness toward the bottom rungs of Vogue staffers should comfort interns who encounter her in a Condé Nast elevator. Maybe they'll actually say something next time.

The line, last week.

How swamped is the Metropolitan Museum on this, the last Friday of its wildly popular Alexander McQueen exhibition? Swamped enough that visitors just hoping to enter the building itself — for McQueen, for anything — now face an hour-long wait.

“I wouldn’t say we’re closed,” said Met senior spokesman Harold Holzer. “I would say we have huge lines both inside and outside the building.”

“It’s a Mona Lisa-type situation,” he added, referring to the popular painting at the Louvre.

Mr. Holzer denied that the museum was “at capacity” and that visitors could not be admitted until others leave. Once inside, McQueenites face an additional three-hour wait before they hit the exhibit.

Rangel.

 

Wednesday, August 3

The Ultimate Art Machine

Is the Guggenheim the Shake Shack of museums? Locations, locations, locations! Not content with outposts in the Basque Country and the United Arab Emirates (as well as the now-shuttered Las Vegas outpost, which seems in retrospect a bit of an overreach…to expect real culture to take hold in the land of bilk and money), the Guggenheim is now creating a mobile lab, opening today, that will set up shop in nine cities over six years in a quest to spur discussion on urban life. The slow migration of the auto-company-sponsored BMW Guggenheim Lab (a mobile laboratory isn’t cheap, dears!) begins in New York with the erection of a mobile structure themed around “Confronting Comfort.” (While the Guggenheim Lab is referring to balancing individual desire with the common good, surely you’ll be reminded that a new BMW forces you to “confront comfort” in a whole new way!) Catch it while you can—the mobile lab jaunts to Berlin next, then on to a yet-to-be-announced city in Asia.

BMW Guggenheim Lab, 33 East First Street, opens today from 1-9pm, visit guggenheim.org for more information.

Thursday, August 4

Single-Source Stories

When we hear “Talking Head,” we think rock star/bicycle enthusiast David Byrne, of course—we see that guy everywhere! But some talking heads come on reels, not wheels: the Anthology Film Archives continue their Talking Head screening series of documentary films featuring testimonials from a single individual. The mini-genre’s rife with unreliable narrators and charismatic characters: today brings screenings of The Confessions of Winifred Wagner (about Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law and her friendship with Adolf Hitler) and Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican and American Boy (regarding, respectively, his parents and the Taxi Driver actor Steven Prince).

Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, The Confessions of Winifred Wagner at 6:45pm, Italianamerican and American Boy at 9pm, visit anthologyfilmarchives.org for tickets and information.

Friday, August 5

Soundgarden

This weekend, the Shinnecock Indian reservation, in Southampton, is invaded by hordes even wilder than cigarette buyers looking for a tax-free carton. The Escape to New York music festival brings electro-loving ravers in for a weekend spent sleeping in campers (it’s glamorous camping, or “glamping,” for the Sunday Styles set), listening to music and enjoying all the good, clean fun the Hamptons have to offer. Tonight, noted memoirist Patti Smith and girl-group-but-not-in-the-Phil-Spector-way Best Coast perform on the main stage. It’s not just music and glamping (something about that word—we just can’t take ourselves seriously when we say it!): the organizers were responsible for the U.K.’s Secret Garden Party, an annual festival that transforms a manor house’s grounds into what a Telegraph reporter described as “a fairy woodland filled with strange sculptures” and “a Tower of Babel disco.” If this all sounds a bit foreign to you, gentle partygoing reader, know that in bringing a manic all-weekend festival to the States, the organizers adopted one indigenous custom: there will be a massive brunch for all attendees. Glamorous!

Escape to New York runs through August 7, Shinnecock Reservation (Southampton), visit escape2ny.com for tickets and information.

Saturday, August 6

Newport Lights

If you find yourself among the Gilded Age relics in Newport tonight (we mean the mansions, not the social set), contribute to the preservation of one grand home. Once owned by Pennsylvania coal baron Edward Julius Berwind and modeled after a French chauteau, the house at the Elms is fine ($1.4 million in 1901 money could buy you a pretty sturdy house), but its carriage house and stables are in need of a pick-me-up. Tonight’s black-tie dinner dance—whose theme is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”--will raise money for Newport’s Preservation Society, which plans to turn the stables of The Elms from equine domicile into a historical society devoted to researching the town’s architectural history. Let’s make sure that horsey smell is powerwashed out before the important work of this research center begins!

The Elms, 367 Bellevue Avenue (Newport, R.I.), 7pm, call (401) 847-1000 x120 for reservations.

Sunday, August 7

McQueen for a Day

The Met is open until midnight tonight so that late, late latecomers can check out Alexander McQueen’s wares before the exhibit closes permanently. A night spent experiencing the glories of the museum? We remember that children’s book! Most everyone we know has raved about the Costume Institute show, but we’ve been pretty busy all summer (the Newport mansions can’t save themselves, you know, and there’s pretty intriguing costumery to check out there as well!), and the museum’s been bending over backwards to accommodate busy (lazy!) people like us all summer, with admission on Mondays and now late-night shows. Is any innovation quite so welcome in this go-go city as a museum for the nocturnal? We hope the trend catches on—nothing would lull us to sleep quite like the soft glow of MoMA’s Rothkos. (We do love McQueen, too, but we’re sure those severe, radical clothes will give us a few nightmares!)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, exhibition open until 12am August 6 and 7, visit metmuseum.org for more information.

Monday, August 8

Day for Night

We’re still vicariously embarrassed for dear old drama geek Anne Hathaway in her noble, pathetic attempt to host the Oscars by sheer force of will. She tried so very hard! She laughed at her own jokes to fill cavernous silences! Well, her new film might have put the brakes on her earnest, overbearing schtick and given us the chance to remember why we loved her in the first place. Ms. Hathaway, as a British lady separated from her one true love but for an annual brief encounter, puts her high-school-production-of-Oliver! on for the new film One Day, which she’s fêteing at the red carpet premiere tonight. Do you think Ms. Hathaway’s erstwhile Oscar co-host James Franco would consider it a suitable art project to come as our plus-one?

One Day premiere, an Upper West Side movie palace, screening at 7pm.

Wednesday, August 10

Rangel Me an Invite

It’s Christmas for politicos with the annual Charles Rangel birthday gala (the Congressman was born in June, but that’s not a slow news month that will guarantee headlines!). Planned attendees at the Plaza Hotel bash include Governor Andrew Cuomo, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer—all familiar faces from last year’s bash, which went on during Mr. Rangel’s ethics investigation. Also planning to attend is Aretha Franklin, who’ll sing for the assembled guests: she was supposed to sing last year, but fell and broke her ribs, so Psychic Friend Dionne Warwick turned up instead. Broken ribs are perhaps the only excuse that can keep prominent machers away from the ever-popular Mr. Rangel: “I felt bad—because Aretha felt so bad!,” said Mr. Rangel’s fundraising consultant Darren Rigger, who noted that Ms. Franklin was pleased to make up for her truancy. As for the party--why the Plaza and not, you know, something in Mr. Rangel’s district? “Charlie is iconic,” said Mr. Rigger. “We needed a place that had that same feel—you remember the Black and White Balls, the galas, it sends a powerful message. There’s a lot of places, and I’m not going to say bad things about other places, but this place is iconic for throwing a gala.” Indeed! If Truman Capote were alive today, he’d love nothing more than hanging out with New York politicians.

Plaza Hotel Grand Ballroom, Fifth Avenue at Central Park South, 6pm-8pm, visit charlierangel.org for tickets and information.