Creative Director Francisco Costa alongside Diane Kruger, Emma Stone and Amy Adams.

We love the clean lines and abstract nature of Francisco Costa’s designs for Calvin Klein Collection. Of Brazilian descent, he has an unmatchable talent for creating wearable art that is minimal and wearable—perhaps the only one who provides a Parisian level of artistic thrills in New York.

We had some time to spare before the show began—a departure from our general habit of sprinting four blocks and arriving sweaty and out of breath at the last minute. We left our seat-mates Bianca Jagger, Julie Macklowe and Kelly Klein, to name a few, to explore the front rows.

Amy Adams, Diane Kruger, Emma Stone and photographer Patrick Demarchelier were all present, but our vigilant eyes sought out someone less obvious: W Magazine’s Fashion and Style Director, Edward Enninful.

“What are some of the highlights for you?” The Observer asked.

"September is the January of fashion," said Edward Enniful, who was flanked by Hollywood's hottest.

“Oh my goodness, there have been a couple of really great shows. I really enjoyed Proenza [Schouler]. I really enjoyed Rodarte, Marc Jacobs,” he replied, browsing the endless catalog of styles he had presumably witnessed in the past week; an unbearable fashion overload, it seems.

“How have you enjoyed W and growing there?” we carried on.

“With a great team, there is so much freedom ... It kinda of encourages you to do the best you can. We’re having a ball!” Mr. Enninful told The Observer.

Indeed, but is the ball worthwhile, we wanted to know. “Why is fashion week so important for stylists?”

“It’s like the Oscars of fashion. It’s like a get-together on one hand, and you decide how the whole year is going to be, how the whole season is going to be mapped out. September is the January of fashion.”

Well put. We bid adieu to Mr. Enniful, who was off to London in a few hours for more style and mayhem.

There was a sense of powerful austerity and dark romance for spring 2013, and it delivered a bold, physical (read: sexualized) reaction. There is a curiosity to the clothing, one that our fashion eyes could not decipher. Chiaroscuro, cinched waists and overemphasized busts, and innovative fabrics captured the fashion frenzy’s weary attention. The looks featured interesting moiré appearances, glossy leathers layered over tranquil matte crepes and cotton voiles in muted black, reed and cream colors. It highlighted a richness that was not opulently crass.

Looks from the spring 2013 collection.

A novice would have likened the proportions of several dresses to rolls of toilet paper under silk or waxed netting over a cage, but such individuals shouldn’t even be permitted to grace a Calvin Klein Collection boutique.

To end with a bang is no small feat after innumerable ready-to-wear collections of relatively unmoving, routinely practical and safe proportions. American’s sportswear isn’t in a rut; it just is what it is. How lucky we are to have Calvin Klein’s Mr. Costa. We don’t have any callous commentary, just rare bliss, which sadly ended the moment we exited onto ghastly, repulsive 39th Street.

Jean Paul Gaultier (Patrick McMullan)

The Cannes Film Festival has announced its jury, and aside from the President (past Palme winner Nanni Moretti), there are some surprising picks. Among them: Jean Paul Gaultier, the designer perhaps best known for creating the cone bra Madonna wore to Cannes some 21 years ago. Perhaps he can share some fashion tips with clothes-horse actress Diane Kruger, who'll be joined by Ewan McGregor and Alexander Payne, the director of The Descendants. Less well-known stateside are jurors Raoul Peck, a Haitian director; Andrea Arnold, the British Fish Tank helmer; and Hiam Abbas, a Palestinian filmmaker.

They'll be judging a slate of films including Lee Daniels's Precious followup, The Paperboy, and David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis.

The dynamic Mr. Mulroney and Diane Kruger play a New Mexico district attorney and his wife whose daughter is diagnosed with a progressive lung disease that only a double lung transplant can cure. Swallowing his principles like castor oil, this tough, by-the-books prosecutor finds himself bending the law himself when faced with the life-or-death decision of buying an organ on the black market. Aided by a kind pediatrician (Rosanna Arquette) and a powerful politician (Sam Shepard), he heads for the Texas border in El Paso and crosses over into Juarez with only one name in his wallet, one that turns out to be phony. With the demand for transplants 10 times the supply, and lists growing longer daily, desperate people losing hope are investigating new ways to buy organs illegally. Mexico is apparently a source for this kind of dangerous criminal harvesting, and this is a man with enough money to give it a try. Cursed with unalterable morality, he nevertheless ventures deeper into the Mexican underworld, risking his own life. Helped along by an unscrupulous street urchin, his search leads him through a warren of male prostitutes, child murders, gang beatings and even a ward full of children awaiting death sentences. One by one, the clues unravel with the tempo of a hair-frying thriller.

In Mexico, the death rate from violence and drug wars is three times that in the U.S. So the removal of organs from dead bodies goes unchecked. You'll find yourself asking a lot of ethical questions, and you might be surprised at the answers you find. Shattered by his own conscience and growing lack of integrity, a noble character begins to lose his grip on reality. Should he break the law and win his family's everlasting love and gratitude? Or reject the corruption and lose his own child? I won't tell you how it turns out, but the dilemma builds a special brand of suspense that is wrenching. The subject matter was handled with more originality and Grand Guignol in Stephen Frears' memorable film Dirty Pretty Things. Baltasar Kormakur, an acclaimed festival-circuit favorite from Iceland, does not have enough grip to furnish Inhale with the same kind of arc, so the characters seem like papier-mâche symbols instead of fully fleshed-out human beings, but Mr. Mulroney is an exception, giving an honest, committed and deeply moving performance of tortured sincerity. He's better-looking and more virile and versatile than either, so why isn't he a superstar on the same plane as Brad Pitt and Matt Damon?

rreed@observer.com

INHALE
Running time 83 minutes
Written by Walter A. Doty and John Claflin
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur
Starring Dermot Mulroney, Diane Kruger, Rosanna Arquette, Sam Shepherd

3/4

Later that evening, after hopping around the packed Soho streets for Fashion's Night Out, we found ourselves in an even more aggressive mob scene: the line of people desperate to join us at the Pop magazine party at Don Hill's. Dubbed the party of the week before it even happened, the bash at the new venture from nightlife barons Nur Khan and Paul Sevigny attracted the evening's biggest names. As Iggy Pop rocked on the stage, Gwen Stefani sat perched on a ledge cradled by husband Gavin Rossdale; Mary-Kate Olsen stood on a bench to make up for her height; and Nicky Hilton chatted to the woman of the hour, Pop editor in chief Dasha Zhukova, girlfriend of one of the world's richest men, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

Of course, Chloë Sevigny wouldn't miss out. She had on a T-shirt and jean skirt befitting the gritty Don Hill's feel, and told The Observer that her brother's place would be the city's new hot spot. "It's what it was like at the Beatrice, and it's probably been missing since the Beatrice," she said. (What she didn't say, of course, was that the Beatrice Inn was closed in 2008 for overcrowding and "inadequate means of egress"--problems that hopefully will not plague Don Hills.)

On Saturday night, at the after-party for Charlotte Ronson's spring collection, Ms. Ronson, wearing a fitted, frilly blue dress, told us she was feeling good after her show, and said the rest of her week will be filled with "meetings--hopefully positive ones!" Her twin sister, Samantha, explained the personal significance of her final musical selection from the show, Lisa Loeb's "Stay": "That was an ode to one of my sister's and my best friends from when we were kids. She died a few years ago, and that was like our song together." Rashida Jones, on the other hand, wasn't feeling chatty, but she was clearly thirsty, as we witnessed her pour a hefty amount of vodka straight from the bottle into a empty coconut-water carton.

More action at Alexander Wang's party. The young designer topped his gas station soiree from last year's Fashion Week with a full carnival, built from scratch in a parking lot at 18th Street and 10th Avenue. Dree Hemingway, Terry Richardson and Agyness Deyn all turned up for the pulled pork sandwiches and skee ball.

The wildly enthusiastic Mr. Wang talked to us for a few moments, but didn't have time to stay put. "Will you walk with me to the bar?" he said as we dodged the cameras and flashbulbs. "We need alcohol! We need alcohol! Sorry!"

We asked Mr. Wang, who had on a black T-shirt, black shorts and black sneakers, about the theme for his over-the-top party. "The carnival is the new performance. Everyone can be a performer now."

We asked him to elaborate. "I just want people to have fun," he said. "Just get drunk, have fun, have a good time."

Our fashion crawl came to a close on Sunday night at the Tommy Hilfiger 25th Anniversary after-party, where we got a little literary with Mad Men's Christina Hendricks. "I just finished The Way the Crow Flies, which I absolutely loved," she said. Next on her night stand is One Hundred Years of Solitude, which she's started three times but never made it past the first chapter. "I know it's going to be worth it if I just go for it. ... I know the payoff will be there," Ms. Hendricks said. We also ran into Kelly Osbourne, who told us she was looking forward to hearing the evening's musical performers, the Strokes, play for the first time in New York since 2006. "Before there was the Strokes, I really liked *NSYNC and, like, really big pop music. And then the Strokes came out and they are what made me change my taste, I guess you could say. In my generation, I think that happened with a lot of people."

Asked what his favorite moment of the party was, Mr. Hilfiger said, "Having all of my friends there, including Jennifer Lopez, Bradley Cooper, Rebecca Romijn, Jason Lewis, Lenny Kravitz, to celebrate with me, and the Strokes' performance. It was one of the best nights of my life."

editorial@observer.com

After all, the themes of years past--“Superheroes” in 2008 and “The Model as Muse” in 2009--resulted in numerous disasters, including lamé turbons (Kate Moss), strange lighting strike patterns (Lake Bell), thigh high boots (Madonna) and inappropriate cleavage and leggage (Blake Lively). Judging from this year’s looks, the famous ladies have wised up and classed it up. Truthfully, the disasters were far fewer than we’ve seen in the past.

Stay tuned for a full red carpet report from Chloe Malle, but for now enjoy a slideshow of our favorite looks from last night. 

Like all Quentin Tarantino movies, Inglourious Basterds is exasperating, absurd, cruel, cynical, sneeringly arrogant, racist, elitist, naïvely derivative and viciously funny. It is also one whale of a rigorous entertainment.

The wild plot: In World War II–occupied France, a band of bloodthirsty American Jews form a battalion of renegade guerrilla soldiers without approval or military supervision, dedicated to the merciless torture and death of all Nazis. They don’t take prisoners. They butcher their captives, performing shocking acts of execution, mutilating their corpses and bashing like eggshells the skulls of their victims with baseball bats. Their leader is Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), an Indian from the Smoky Mountains with a rope burn around his neck from a narrow encounter with a hangman’s noose; his specialty is scalping Nazis while they’re still alive—a talent that earns him the nickname “Apache.” Under Apache’s command, the unit’s war crimes escalate, littering the 1941 landscape with more corpses than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and Saving Private Ryan combined. With little attention to narrative detail, the movie suddenly jumps to 1944, and Apache leads the “basterds” to Berlin to blow up a movie house where Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and the entire leadership of the Third Reich are attending the movie premiere of a Nazi war propaganda film during a Leni Riefenstahl film festival. Preposterous, of course, but according to Mr. Tarantino, what more logical way to end the Holocaust than to go up in flames from flammable nitrate film stock in three-strip Technicolor with the cameras rolling? Would you believe the basterds’ chief allies in this big, noisy finale are a revered Marlene Dietrich–style film star and a covert double agent who is really a British film critic with an expertise in German cinema? You gotta love it.

Facetious, and sprawling over two and a half hours, the film is often unintentionally hilarious but, I hastily add, never tedious. Both the German barbarism and the testosterone-infused American brutality are exploitative in styles that borrow freely from every war movie Mr. Tarantino has ever discovered in the video rental shops he calls home. In all of his films, he specializes in exposing, with imagery and well-crafted vignettes, humanity’s capacity for violence and stupidity. But when he’s accused of film school smugness and fractured plagiarism, I can’t entirely disagree. Inspired by everything from the German cinema of Murnau, Pabst and Josef von Sternberg (Emil Jannings even shows up for the premiere!) to Hogan’s Heroes and (most glaringly) Paul Verhoeven’s fabulous Nazi saga The Black Book, Mr. Tarantino borrows and steals so many clichés from other people’s movies that I’m surprised he didn’t throw in the little girl in the red coat from Schindler’s List. A monstre sacré for Gen Xers who like their movies loud, outrageous and obnoxious, Mr. Tarantino is so immune to opinion that he can’t even spell the title right, and nobody challenges him. By the time he gets around to rewriting the end of World War II, his arrogance is positively de rigueur. He’s like an idiot savant.

If you crave Holocaust accuracy, see Heimat or all nine hours of Shoah. If you want the most disgusting, patronizing and manipulatively sentimental crap movie ever made about the subject, revisit Life Is Beautiful. Mr. Tarantino aims for neither end of the scale; as war movies go, this one never rises to the level of Elem Klimov’s 1985 epic tragedy Come and See or sinks to the depths of The Dirty Dozen Hollywood heroics. The important thing to remember is that Inglourious Basterds is in no way intended to be taken seriously—and as pure hokum, it delivers. Mr. Tarantino is pretty generally considered, in serious circles, as a wickedly overrated amateur, but in his defense I admire the way he makes no claim to “art,” so you can’t say he’s pretentious. He’s as self-conscious and referential a movie “fan” as mainstream entertainment can be, which makes him a welcome adversary of the kind of creeping art-house paralysis I generally hate—phony, self-conscious, and booooring! (Lars von Trier, anyone?) His limitations are obvious. He sees everything from the viewpoint of a teenage faux-cool dude, which means his films rarely delve any deeper than juvenile posturing. So, as with Pulp Fiction, he makes Inglourious Basterds stylish and riveting without producing any remotely profound insight. It totally reflects not the age of its setting, but the age that has informed its director—a time of pop videos, Playstations, the Internet, CGI and 24-hour digital TV with ads inserted every eight minutes for bathroom breaks. So expect World War II as seen through an issue of DC Comics. The gung-ho “basterds” are louts who storm the barriers like Hogan’s heroes; the comic-book Nazis are Katzenjammer Kids; and nobody displays much icy wit except for one Nazi colonel who steals the picture. (More about him in the next paragraph.) Among the casting errors, comedian Mike Myers plays a British officer with makeup and prosthetics that render him unrecognizable; the terrific Irish actor Michael Fassbender (devastating in Hunger as Bobby Sands, the IRA prisoner who starved himself to death in prison) plays the undercover movie critic who parachutes behind enemy lines to kill off Der Führer; and a bulbous Rod Taylor makes a guest appearance as Winston Churchill. The dismally miscast Brad Pitt, upstaged by an exaggerated Southern accent that imitates choking on grits and grillades, acts with a grim intensity, like he’s the only one who’s not in on the joke. The film turns ludicrous when he crashes the premiere, festooned with swastikas, pretending to be an Italian extra and sounding like Gomer Pyle.

On the plus side, I was bowled over by Christoph Waltz, a juicy, flamboyant Austrian actor who speaks perfect English, in the unforgettable role of the finger-licking Gestapo Colonel Hans Landa, a combination of every handsome, blue-eyed movie Nazi from Otto Preminger and Helmut Dantine to Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. Passionate about gourmet food and fresh milk, oozing a lethal charm that thinly veils a capacity for murderous outrage, Mr. Waltz emanates such energy and discipline that he’s one 35-millimeter Nazi who deserves an Academy Award. The funniest thing in the movie is his final offer, with the war coming to a disastrous end, to help kill the leaders of the German high command in exchange for the Congressional Medal of Honor, U.S. citizenship and a house in Nantucket.

Mr. Tarantino knows how to frame a scene. The color, movement and sound are as good as in Pulp Fiction, the dialogue is a slight improvement over Reservoir Dogs’ and the scene where the Gestapo invade a French farmhouse to massacre a Jewish family hiding under the floor is better than anything in Kill Bill. World War II was more serious, complex and horrifying than all this comic embellishment, but if I sound critical, I apologize in advance. I had a helluva time watching Inglourious Basterds. It’s as frenzied as a dog in heat. Mr. Tarantino lacks nuance, but he’s an erratic, awkward and often brilliant filmmaker. In time, he might even become a mature one.

rreed@observer.com

Molly Sims called her elaborate gold Dolce & Gabbana minidress “fashion-forward, taking a chance, shorter than short, short, short.” She was also wearing a necklace by jeweler-of-the-moment Tom Binns. “I kinda push fashion tonight!”

“We’ve gotten our due for a long time,” she demurred when asked whether it was nice to be the center of attention for once. “But it’s nice.”

Short was the order of the evening: One of the last standing supermodels, Kate Moss, had arrived 35 minutes in advance of the start time on the arm of honorary gala chair Marc Jacobs, clad in a miniscule gold toga and matching turban.

Mr. Jacobs was uncharacteristically buttoned-up in tuxedo and slicked-back hair; he placed his hand stiffly on Ms. Moss’ back and the duo posed for a few photos before exchanging whispers and rushing past crushed television crews to the entrance atop the stairs. (Mr. Jacobs’ fiancé, advertising executive Lorenzo Martone, would later arrive on the arm of Posh Spice.)

Vogue editor at large André Leon Talley, resplendent in an Isabel Toledo cape, was more voluble: “I gave a lot of advice to a lot of people, but they shall remain nameless because they don’t want me to say who I’m giving advice to,” he was telling a reporter nearby. (Last year, he’d dressed Venus Williams).

Russell Simmons looked on admiringly. “I once sat with André Leon Talley,” he said. “He’s the host of the event”—actually, it’s his boss, Anna Wintour—“he’s the inspiration for the whole thing, he’s got such good taste and everyone looks to him; he’s like fashion royalty, isn’t he?”

Mr. Talley was now telling a photographer who asked him to back up for a photo to “just take Obama!”, slapping an Obama button he’d pinned to his massive gold heart chain Roger Vivier necklace. “I had a good time,” he told The Observer of last year’s gala. “We went to the after-party, Venus and I, and Kimora [Lee Simmons] and Karl [Lagerfeld]; we had a fabulous time, it was at some restaurant, Phillipe …”

He declined to comment on how he planned to potentially get Mr. Obama to the ball in the future: “Ask Anna Wintour! I don’t answer those kind of questions, I have a mortgage to pay!”

Co-host Justin Timberlake appeared on the carpet in nerdy glasses with a Versace-clad Jessica Biel on his arm, and the photographers’ chorus of shouts reached a high pitch (rivaled only by the one greeting Posh Spice soon after, and, much later, Madonna).

Then came the moguls: Harvey, Donald, Rupert.

“How are you, my little beauty, are you still married?” Mr. Trump was asking a petite blond Fox News reporter as wife Melania posed for pictures down the carpet.

“I’ve been here many times, yes,” he told The Observer. “You just meet a lot of great people.” Who did he want to meet tonight? “I hadn’t thought about it, ask me after dinner!” Would that we were invited to dinner, sir!

The carpet was filling up with ethereal, slow-moving Russian and Eastern European mannequins, most wearing smoky eyeliner and messy hair and clutching the nerdy-looking young fashion designers who’d designed their outfits.

“She was lovely enough and gracious enough to ask me to be her date,” said designer Richard Chai of the Amazonian Karolina Kurkova, standing to his right in a, yes, short blue dress he’d designed. “I’ve known Karolina since she first came to New York, when she was 16, and I was the director at Marc Jacobs, so it’s an ironic sort of full-circle moment for us, that Marc’s hosting it. She came in for a casting and we took her for the show, and she was the same exact person then as she is now.”

In the car, bracing themselves for flashbulb impact before braving the carpet, they’d discussed “absolutely nothing about fashion,” he said. “Just what have we been up to, what are we doing, where are we going afterwards” (to Mr. Jacobs’ party at Monkey Bar and then to knitwear heiress Margherita Missoni’s bash at 1Oak).

Soft-spoken Michelle Obama clothier Jason Wu, meanwhile, making his Met debut after exploding from obscurity into household-name-dom in the past year, described how he went about getting a date with Jessica Alba. “We met each other last year, we were at a photo shoot. It was really great,” he said. “So when it came to the Met, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to ask Jessica.’ We’d seen each other a couple more times, and when it came to this event, I thought, ‘Well, Jessica would be the perfect muse.’ She’s really down to earth. These things can be daunting at times.”

Hey! There was Cheryl Tiegs, wearing a blue sequined, actually floor-grazing vintage Norman Norrell. “When I was starting out, nobody really knew who models were or what they were doing or whatever; they certainly didn’t know my name,” she said. “Today, I think girls are much more recognizable, and that puts more pressure on them. They get more money, it’s a bigger production. But there is no right or wrong, good or bad. When I started out, it was simpler.”

Nonetheless: “It was a thrill,” Ms. Tiegs sighed. “I love my Vogue covers. They’re some of my favorites.” 

Dominant fashion trends in evidence to this point included braids on the head—like those stacked on the noggin of Tyra Banks, resembling nothing so much as a shiny bird’s nest—and jumpsuits, like the ones encasing Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon (Halston), model and Andy Roddick better-half Brooklyn Decker (Derek Lam) and Stella McCartney (her own).

British Rag & Bone designer Marcus Wainwright was squiring actress Lake Bell, wearing a tight black Rag & Bone pantsuit and side-leaning top hat, up the carpet. “It was her idea to wear a suit,” he said. “This is traditionally a very dress-oriented thing, and she was like, ‘Yeah, I want to wear a suit!’

“It’s quite an overwhelming evening; there’s a lot of people you read about a lot,” he continued. “I met Karl Lagerfeld last year, which was pretty fun. I said, ‘That’s a nice jacket,’ and he just goes”—Mr. Wainwright lowered his voice to a throaty whisper—“‘Chanel Homme.’ And that’s it. That was the end of our conversation.”

Tonight he would sit with countryman and Topshop chief Sir Philip Green, whom he’d never met, but who had presumably purchased a table at this very New York party to honor his new New York store. “It should be fun!” Mr. Wainwright said, almost giddy.

Suddenly, newlywed Gisele Bundchen appeared, toting Tom Brady and wearing Versace again. And even less of it than last year! A few blue sequins covered her torso, stopping short of her legs.

Donatella Versace appeared soon after to take responsibility for this. “Once you dress Gisele, what is left?” she said in her thick Italian accent.

An Olsen twin had taken the alternative route, appearing in what looked to be a white sheet, the kind children wear on Halloween (it was from the twins' label, the Row).

Actress Emmy Rossum tried to put in perspective what the famous people might be feeling at this chaotic moment: “A, why does it always rain, and B, don’t trip! If you trip, you just roll down, and down, and down …” She gestured at the long distance from whence she’d come from her Town Car.

Then it was actress Diane Kruger (arriving with boyfriend Pacey, er, Joshua Jackson), in a white, wedding-cake-looking Chanel—“It was a one-time wonder, it fit perfectly without having to do anything to it! But I did my own makeup, so it took me a little longer to get ready than usual, maybe an hour and a half,” she said.

Socialite Fabiola Beracasa was also in Chanel Couture, but longer and more ornate; she’d flown to Paris to pick it out. “It’s ridiculous,” she’d told The Observer before the event. “I’m so happy with my dress, and I think it’s beautiful, and it’s so fun just to go. I could be sitting in the bathroom and it’s cool. Actually, the bathroom is where it all happens, to be honest! The bathroom is where everybody goes to smoke, and you run into, like—I have run into everybody from J. Lo to Jessica Simpson in that bathroom. I remember really distinctly Jessica Simpson in that Roberto Cavalli dress that was beaded and down to there, and up close it was a lot to take in. …”

Late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon, meanwhile, was gamely working the carpet nearby with wife Nancy Juvonen. “This is like a normal night out for us, this is not a big deal!” he shrieked. “This is like, I mean, to us this is not a big deal. We always have a red carpet, we always wear tuxedos and designer dresses …”

“It’s actually really fun,” piped in Nancy, more seriously.

“It’s a really good party inside,” agreed Mr. Fallon. “There’s always a surprise musical thing, a Broadway show or something fun. … Anytime I can legally drink in a museum, I always agree to the invitation!”

Almost two hours after Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Moss had arrived, a shout rose from the paparazzi. It grew to hysteria. Vamping on the almost-deserted steps below were Madonna and Jesus (Luz, her boyfriend). The Material Girl wore Louis Vuitton, short and puffy, with leather boots encasing her thighs and two antennalike blue feathers sprouting from her head. Jesus appeared to be the shy type: She yanked him toward the photographers and wrapped her arms around him seductively, while he offered a tentative wave.

The duo encountered the Seinfelds, still making their way up the carpet. Madge dragged Jessica over to the photographers; Jerry stood in the middle of the carpet in glasses, hands folded awkwardly, looking bewildered, not appearing to exchange words with Jesus.

And then the famous carpet went quiet.

Inside, guests were treated to a surprise performance by Kanye West and Rihanna, who wore a Dolce & Gabbana pantsuit.

(The bathrooms, as predicted, were stuffed throughout dinner by nicotine-addled partygoers: One guest reported seeing Josh Hartnett and John Galliano in the ladies’ room puffing away with a clutch of models—“because nobody eats!”)

Most attendees then retired to Mr. Jacobs’ aforementioned party at the Monkey Bar, and then to late-night fetes hosted by Ms. Missoni (1Oak) or the Rodarte designers (SubMercer), or to Bungalow 8.

One spy reported that earlier, leaving the Met, she’d witnessed an “icy” encounter between two of the evening’s more recognizable models: Ms. Bundchen and Bar Refaeli, the Sports Illustrated cover girl and current flame of Ms. Bundchen’s ex, Leonardo DiCaprio. “They both looked away when they walked right next to each other. Then, “literally, I swear, Bar checked her out a thousand times up and down.”

mbryan@observer.com