Mike Dean, Liam McMullan on Plooms.

“I went to Wonderland and met Alice, and we went to a tea party with the Mad Hatter!”

Okay?

“This stuff is great, and you know, you can smoke other things besides tobacco inside of it,” the 28-year-old told us, winking at us and grinning like the Cheshire Cat. We were dubious of the validity (and health factor) of these claims, especially since Ploom, created by two Stanford grad students, worked like most vaporizers in the sense that it didn’t involve smoking anything: rather the device heated up and released a water vapor that, when blown out, resembled the trail of cigarette smoke.

Before venturing inside the non-smoke-filled room, we eyed The Village Voice’s Michael Musto loitering out on the sidewalk. Was watching all these kids light up making him nostalgic for the smoky bars of the pre-Giuliani era?

“No, but I miss the smell,” the columnist told us. “I miss waking up and not having that cigarette scent on all my clothes that let me know I was in a bar last night. Eau de Cancer.”

Inside, Kanye West producer Mike Dean stood with his model girlfriend, Louise Donegan, both of them thoughtfully puffing away on their respective Ploom’s. We asked if the two if they’d consider switching their favorite brands of cigarettes over for the e-version.

“You’re kind of catching me on a hiatus,” Ms. Donegan, an on-and-off Parliament smoker who had quit once before relapsing and was trying to quit again, told Transom. “These are interesting.”

“I feel like these are okay,” said Mr. Dean dubiously, a Marlboro man himself. As if by magic, a track from Watch the Throne came on.

“This album is really special to us, because I met Mike at the release party for it,” Ms. Donegan told us. Would she ever walk down the aisle to it?

“That’s not a bad idea,” she laughed.

To get a real review of how Ploom stacked up against the competition, we had to find someone who was already familiar with the Vaping scene.

“I’m a huge fan of e cigarettes,” said DJ Cory Kennedy, who claimed that she had gotten her friends and yes, even her mother hooked on vaporizers. (Her preferred brand is Blu.) “So when Ploom contacted me about tonight, I was like ‘How did they know?’”

But Ploom wasn’t exactly like an e-cigarette...at least not like the kind we were used to. Ploom’s mini-vape model contained little disposable “pods” (which several attendees described as like those “Nescafe espresso cups”) that had to be rotated out consistently, and the device itself seemed to run out of battery power over the course of an evening. (It needed to be refilled with butane, we found out later.) And it didn’t really taste like a cigarette either.

“It’s kind of got a tea aftertaste,” the DJ told us, before spitting something out in her hand. “I just got a chunk of some tea leaves or something sucked out,” she gasped. “Is that normal?”

Andrew W.K., Russell Simmons, and James Franco (via Getty)

Last March, we did a socialite-laden post about the dangers of accidentally CC'ing everyone on an invite list instead of using BCC. In most circumstances, you chalk the mistake up to a faux-pas and feel a momentary twinge of embarrassment. Of course, if you are a photographer to the stars, this might lead to more sticky situations.

Liam McMullan, son of famed photog Patrick and quite a shutterbug himself, invited us to his father's PMC Magazine/Maybeline party last night at the Dream Hotel in Chelsea. Unfortunately the rain combined with our stupid decision to wear leather flats to work, we were unable to make it. The moment we were about to reply to the Jr. McMullan's email (sent from his smartphone), we realized that he had sent the invite out to over 30 people en masse (message).

Glad we dodged a bullet and didn't press 'Reply All'! As we were congratulating ourselves on our Internet social skills, we noticed that some of the names of the list were definitely not for media eyes. Like say, James Franco's Gmail account. Or Andrew W.K.'s. Or Russell Simmons's personal email.

While we'd never be so gauche as to actually put these people's private information out there, as a public service to celebs and socialites, here's a list of people who might be wanting to change over to Hotmail pretty soon:

• Socialite Cleo Coco Lettry Vauban
• Socialite Anna Rothschild
• Occupy Wall Street sympathizer Russell Simmons
• Academy Awards host James Franco
• Manager and producer Steve Paul
• Musician/comedian Andrew W.K.
• Magician and mind-freak Criss Angel
• Model Sabrina Huls
• Justin Timberlake surrogate and Napster creator Sean Parker
• Socialite-rising and former Observer semi-star Stephanie Wei
• Girls Loves Shoes stylist Zia Ziprin
• Photographer Antoine Verglas
• Izzy Gold aka Francesco Civetta
• Artist/photographer Ohad Maiman
• Catfish star Yaniv Schulman
• Rapper/actor Chris Massey
• Alterna-socialite Arden Wohl

Actually, strike what we said before: It's actually amazing how many of these cool kids have kept a hotmail/yahoo address. Or maybe that's just their "PR" address they give out in case a snafu like this ever occurs.

Liam McMullan, Aesha Waks

"LET ME TAKE YOUR PICTURE," Liam McMullan said. It was late May at the Southampton Social Club, and the lanky 23-year-old stood in front of me with a camera covering his face. He was there on assignment for his father, Patrick McMullan, the house photographer to the city’s social set.

The camera shutter clicked.

“Oh, why don’t you smile?” he implored. “You don’t want to look like that on the site.”

We smiled. Another click.

“That’s good—oh, this is my fiancée, Aesha,” Liam offered, introducing the small-framed woman in a flower-print dress who stood beside him.

When we ran into her again later that day, she was chatty, pretty and porcelain—and she wanted us all to be friends. “You’re the same age as Liam,” she pointed out.

That was Sunday. The first message came on Friday.

“It was nice seeing you. Will probablly be out in Hamptons every weekend n in Rockaway beach where we live,you are welcome2the beach.”

We responded that we would love to drop by.

AESHA WAKS MET LIAM MCMULLAN in May 2009, when she was 31 and he was 21.

“Patrick Matamoros, he’s a vintage clothes guy, really known around downtown,” she recounted. “He had a party I was spinning at one night, and Liam showed up. After that night we kept running into each other every time we went out and every day too.”

For the uninitiated, her crowd was, and still is, a group that tends to have birthday parties covered by the party-photo site Guest of a Guest—all of which is just fine with Ms. Waks.

According to her, she wasn’t looking for a relationship with Liam—“because of the crowds of women and the groupies and the stalkers”—but they fell into together anyway. A month later, they were engaged. Aesha got a “Liam” tattoo and Liam got an “Aesha” tattoo.

The crash pad of choice was Patrick McMullan’s Fifth Avenue apartment, near N.Y.U., where Ms. Waks was taking classes.

“We took over his life,” she said, of her new father figure. “I was literally wearing his boxers to bed every night.”

Ms. Waks had something of a career as an actress—cameras of all sorts seem to exert a pull on her. In the mid-90’s she stared in a few pictures, including Arresting Gena, with then-unknowns Sam Rockwell and Adrien Grenier, in which she played a girl with a mother in a coma. By the aughts she was appearing in ever-smaller roles in ever-smaller films.

Her ambitions have shifted since then, and these days she is in an artistic way. This week, instead of stepping before the camera, her art will be on display at the Town House Art Gallery in Park Slope. The big works are messy and neon, consisting mostly of wooden planks splayed with text and assorted detritus—Page Six cut-outs, cigarette wrappers, party flyers, trash, American flags, JC Penny bags, Patrick McMullan photos, Warholesque axioms, cereal boxes, pictures of Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber with a mustache, Liam McMullan and Aesha Waks.

“We had to look through Patrick’s trash every day while he was recycling, and I found a lot of cool things,” she said. “I started making collages out of his garbage.”

Now, she works out of the home she was raised in, a tumbledown-but-stately 1940’s mansion overlooking the water at Rockaway Beach. The house was built by her grandfather, the walls painted by her mother and the payments settled by her father, who owned a cut-rate women’s clothing store on the main Rockaway strip of 116th Street. He quit town five months ago and went down to Florida with a new girlfriend.

With its cracked marble and creeping rust, the house demands a name, and indeed it has one: “The Mindy.” Its namesake, Ms. Waks’s mother, died in that house, collapsing in the living room after a stroke and falling into a coma from which she would not awaken. “She had serious tumors at this point, and she’d literally fall down the stairs in the middle of the night because she couldn’t even walk,” she remembered dolefully. “And I would have to pick her up at 4 in the morning from the floor.

‘What are you doing?’ I’d ask. And she’d say, ‘I’m going down to the guest room to print out pictures of pink flamingos to paint tomorrow.’”

After a sticky hour on the train to Rockaway Beach, The Observer tucked himself into the back of Mr. McMullan’s gray jalopy. Ms. Waks, wearing a dandelion dress she bought from her father’s store and colossal black sunglasses, rode shotgun. A plan was made for a cookout.

We arrived at a narrow driveway, a tongue of pavement rolling out from the split-level house. A defunct fountain, tiled with swirling prisms of color, stood out front, and iron war figurines dotted the stone staircase to the door. A red awning hung above the front door.  Inside came a wash of orange sherbet walls and paintings done in the old style, by Ms. Waks’s mother—a painting of Victorians with golden mirrors and men in riding pants nursing cocktails. The house’s spaces spilled out onto a deck, and beyond that was a pool filled with a foot or two with bulbous green gunk.

Inside, Liam jiggered a nugget of weed into a one-hitter.

The Observer walked to the window to take in the view.

“The city skyline, you can hold it in your hand,” Ms. Waks noted.

We squinted at Manhattan, focusing through the fog.

“Let’s fire up the grill,” came the suggestion.

It had been announced several times that despite Liam’s strict veganism Ms. Waks gleefully consumes meat.

“I got myself over borderline anorexia,” she said, after the tiny burner produced a sufficient flame. “Since then, I’ve been doing health consulting.”

She has a book in the works, The Model Body, that will promote proper eating and fitness with pictures of beautiful women—all shot, of course, by Patrick McMullan.

“These are the girls that people get anorexic over,” she said, dragging on a cigarette. “I want to fix that.”

Soon, a crowd filled the living room: Ms. Waks’s brother, her brother’s girlfriend, her brother’s girlfriend’s kid, the kid’s friends, the guys fixing the pool, the pool guy’s buddies.  She suggested a tour of the house. Her bedroom was a disaster, clothes and canvases and guitars spilling out over the mottled carpet. Some of her collages hung on hooks beside her bed; others, packed away for the trip to Brooklyn, for the next week’s exhibition. There were printouts of McMullan shots on the walls, including one of Ms. Waks with Liv Tyler.

She explained that her mother too was an artist. “Something like this is what she did when she was sick,” she said, holding up a work rendered in cobalt-ash smearings. “She wasn’t trying to be a cool abstract artist, it’s so strange.

“And then she did this of my grandmother,” she said, pulling out one of her mother’s portraits, a more conservative style, from before the tumors started. Ms. Waks began to tear up. Immediately behind the minicanvas, we noticed, was a copy of Patrick McMullan’s Kiss Kiss, his collection of celebrities locking lips, with Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson on the cover.

“When are you and Liam going to get married?” we enquired.

“We’re waiting—right now we have a couple of sponsors and TV shows talking to us,” she replied. “Who knows? Maybe Tori Spelling will throw it for me. She has her wedding show.”

She paused.

“Who’s helping me put it together? I don’t have a mom, my grandmother’s in Florida, she just got over getting ill. It’s just, like, how am I supposed to do this on my own?”

"IS THIS THE AESHA WAKS SHOW?" asked a frumpy man in his late 20’s. It was a Monday evening, on the corner of Second Street and Seventh Avenue in Park Slope.

Inside, the Town House Art Gallery was empty, but for two people.

Ms. Waks’s collages occupied much of the wall space. They consisted of New York Post clippings, barcodes, hair ties, sparkly plastic jewelry, the word “MONEY” big and sideways. Mr. McMullan had designed postcards to accompany the show. “Aesha’s hope is to continue the legacy of Andy Warhol and create a new factory,” the text read. The reverse side featured a patchwork chaos, in the middle of which was a cover of Artnews, that asked “Who Are the Great Women Pop Artists?” The name “Aesha Waks” appeared directly underneath.

“You made it!” Aesha enthused as she walked in, Mr. McMullan in tow, camera around his neck.

“Go stand over there,” he ordered, “I want to take a picture of you two.”

He pointed out a collage featuring images of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Mario and Luigi, a symmetrical banner printed from a page from Guest of a Guest—and, naturally, Liam McMullan and Aesha Waks.

Mr. McMullan raised his camera once again, obscuring his face.

“Smile,” he said.

We did, and the camera shutter clicked.

The movie is based on Nick McDonnell’s 2002 novel of the same title about a Manhattan teen who deals drugs at his private school. (Mr. McDonnell, son of Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonnell, attended Riverdale prep and wrote the book when he was just 17.)

The film, set for release in 2010, has enlisted some of Manhattan’s less experienced young actors, including 23-year-old Chace Crawford, who is set to play the lead role of "White Mike"; the 20-year-old Zoe Kravitz, daughter of Lenny; Ralph Lauren model Cody Horn and—and!—Liam McMullan, son of party photographer Patrick, for whom this is a first movie role.

“Joel specifically wanted kids that would be believable high school kids,” said Jessica Kelly, the casting director for the film. “It was important from day one of casting to treat this like a documentary—over-privileged, under-loved teens in New York exist and, in order to care about these characters, they had to be 100 percent human and believable.”

Was Ms. Kelly nervous about casting Mr. Crawford, best known for his work on TV's Gossip Girl but otherwise lacking much big screen exposure, for the lead role?

“No,” she replied. “Chace definitely has star quality and is also a really good actor. I am excited for him to show what he can do with this character.”

Mr. McMullan had originally tried out for Mr. Crawford’s role.

“He wasn't right but he was too unique and colorful and ‘of this world’ to not bring him back for Joel,” said the casting director. “Joel thought of the character Royal for him right away.”

Reached by phone last week (Mr. Schumacher objected to having the Daily Transom visit the set), Mr. McMullan was sitting in his trailer—yes, he’s got his own—in a Thom Browne suit with a tutu sewn inside. He was waiting to shoot the next scene with Ms. Kravitz at a house party inside a brownstone.

“My character is friends with all the girls in the movie,” said Mr. McMullan. “He’s like the gay fashionista guy.”

The model Ms. Horn, also the daughter of Warner Brothers chief operating officer Alan Horn, was taking a break from the shoot, having just arrived in the Hamptons, when the Daily Transom caught up with her this week.

“I got the part through this photographer I work with,” she said, "Bruce Webber?" (Yeah, we might know that guy.)

One day, according to Mr. McMullan, the cast was shooting on the Upper East Side when a troop of tween girls gathered on the sidewalk to look on. Mr. McMullan asked if they might be waiting for a sighting of Mr. Crawford.

“They were like nooo!’” Mr. McMullan recalled,  “And I was like, 'Well, do you want him to come meet you?' And they were like 'Yeaaah!' So I called him up and all these girls jumped me and stole Chace Crawford’s number out of my phone!”

He added, "Joel is always joking that we’re going to win for the most attractive cast."

Party photographer Patrick McMullan plays himself in an episode of Gossip Girl airing Monday night, March 30.

“I’m probably getting more attention from the coming attraction than on the show itself,” Mr. McMullan told the Daily Transom, referring to the brief half-second during which his mug appeared in a preview that aired last Monday. Since then, his many friends and colleagues—many of them Gossip Girl devotees—have been ringing him to say "Congrats!"

Since the show premiered in 2007, all sorts of prominent New Yorkers have made cameos: author Jay McInerney, designer Michael Kors, socialite Tinsley Mortimer and New York Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood, just to name a few. And so Mr. McMullan, who has been documenting New York society since the 1980s, seemed like a natural choice.

In the episode, Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) throws a birthday party for Little J (Taylor Momsen). “To make her feel liked and all that,” explained Mr. McMullan. But an intimate 16th birthday party soon turns into a huge society event after a few of the city's social find out that Ms. van der Woodsen is hosting. According to Mr. McMullan, other guest stars include the model Chanel Iman, his son, Liam, and The Misshapes’ Leigh Lezark.

“So Jenny says, ‘Most of these people don’t even know who I am or know why they’re here,’” revealed Mr. McMullan. “And then Serena says, 'That’s not true! Hey Patrick, take a picture of me and the birthday girl!’”

Mr. McMullan takes the photo and then recites his one line: “Oh, it’s a birthday party?”

“So it kind of just shows that it’s true that no one really knows why they’re there,” explained Mr. McMullan. “They’re just there for a party for Serena van der Woodsen.”

This wasn’t the first connection Mr. McMullan has had to the show. The gallerist Yvonne Force Villareal was responsible for placing six of his works from the '80s into the fictional home of Lily van der Woodsen (Kelly Rutherford), Serena’s mother.

“So in theory, the mother knows me,” said Mr. McMullan. “I visited the set before to see my pictures and someone said, 'We’ll have to have you on sometime!' And I said, 'Sure, anytime.' And then they just called me."

While on set at Astoria Studios in Brooklyn, Mr. McMullan chatted in the makeup room with Ms. Lively. He asked her to sign her Vogue cover; she agreed. He made small talk with the other cast members and enjoyed the food spread that included sandwiches, salads, and pasta. “I took a little bit of everything,” he confessed. He decided that his favorite cast members were Ms. Lively and, “What’s his name? Bass, the boy.” Alas, he did not get to meet Leighton Meester even though he was looking forward to it.

The scene took three takes. “One time they kinda screwed up, one time I got there too early because I was really running around taking pictures," said Mr. McMullan.

Naturally, even though the party was staged, Mr. McMullan got caught up in the scene and treated it as any other party he covers. “I just did what I always do," he said. "I was taking pictures.”

A makeup-free Maggie Rizer, one of the evening's co-hosts, said the event was "all about incorporating young, up and coming artists with fashion—and I love fashion. If you don't support the young ones … Also, it benefits diabetes, which a few people in my family have." Rizer, whose father died of AIDS, is also working on a documentary on the subject, but said the project had been put on hold. "We're in the process of finding another production company."

The Daily Transom wondered if the current move away from conspicuous consumption-socialites finding it fashionable to stretch their salon appointments from every four weeks to every six!—might lead towards a dressing-down trend, but Rizer shot that theory down: "People tend to start dressing more expensively, I think ... People in fashion tend to do the opposite, anyway."

The recession was the unescapable theme of the night—even the ladies in the powder room were atwitter about much of the same: "I'm going to have to sell my shoes!" one said, prompting an anguished "Noooooo!" in reply.

Photographer and flâneur John Norwood was there, like a friendly uncle, eager to talk.

"People will actually start partying harder, but less often," he predicted. "A bartender friend of mine said during the week, it's slower now. But on weekends, it's crazy!" (The working-class ethic of partying reemerges!)

"I have to wonder if the lifestyle we're used to is going to continue. This is my fourth event tonight and it's only, what time is it, 9 o'clock?"

Another reporter remarked that the crowd was rather "pushy" for a benefit—"like a bunch of linebackers." Indeed, the sound of wineglasses breaking would punctuate the rest of the evening. A cater-waiter confirmed that the second-floor ballroom was more crowded than it had ever been.

But wait—there was Ally Hilfiger, daughter of fashion designer Tommy.

"Yes?" the tiny brunette replied brusquely, peering over the rims of her huge black-framed glasses, and stepping back into her heels, which she had kicked off. Her hair was twisted into a messy, intellectual bun.

Of her art, she said, "It's broadened and developed." Her previous paintings featured various iterations on the number eight. "It's very different now—I spent four months by myself painting [in the Caribbean]."

And now? "I'm starting my own collection of women's clothing." Inspired by? "Everything!" she said with a grin. She conceded that the recession was "a very big trend … I watch CNN and listen to NPR all day, every day, while I work. … We need to learn how to adjust, no matter which background we come from. We have to be very loving and supportive to each other during this economic crisis."

Heavily bearded artist Michael M. Koehler had two pieces in the show, both photographs from New Orleans. Speaking of hard times!

"The first wave of photography I saw from New Orleans—it was all these images with no people in them," he said. "I wanted to show that people's day-to-day struggles can be as beautiful as that image of a car up in a tree." One of his works, a 6-foot-high photograph, showed a stoic black man standing inside his post-Katrina house, with the high-water marks somewhere near the ceiling.

The show also included a cheeky work by Thomas McDonnell titled "Caucasians on Clinton Street Chewing Khat," clearly a comment on the street's gentrification.

Young Liam McMullan, in a lime green T-shirt, surveyed the scene from the back of the room. He had just written his first column for Page Six Magazine, a surprisingly funny, dry-humored scenester report. How's the editing process going? "Well, they dilute my snark and replace it with a little bit of douchebag ... but that's O.K."

Towards the end of the evening, it was announced that the benefit had raised over $150,000. As if on cue, another wineglass fell to the floor and shattered.

Last night, Mr. Goldstein hosted a one-year anniversary party at his Bowery store that--in keeping up with the theme of displaying art alongside fashion--doubled as an exhibit of "iconic images" from party photographer Patrick McMullan's archive that were for sale. But since Mr. McMullan is pretty busy these days, his son, party-boy and new Page Six Magazine columnist Liam, was put in charge of choosing the images for display and modifying them in different ways. 

"It's really all Liam, he is going to get the money from these," said Mr. McMullan, the elder, as he was showing off the blown-up photos on the walls to the Daily Transom.

"Here's a photo of Barry Diller. I think Liam picked this one because he knew Barry growing up," said Mr. McMullan, pointing out a photo of the IAC chairman in 1987 at a party at Limelight, dressed down with his jacket thrown over one shoulder and looking surprisingly James Dean-ish. 

Underneath the blown up images on the walls, racks of clothing were handpicked to somehow represent the look of each person in the photos. Underneath an image of Madonna, taken at Limelight in 1984 and on sale for $10,000, Mr. Goldstein hung a selection of '80s style dresses with bustier bodices by Coven and and fitted leather jackets. Underneath a $2,000 photo of Halston also taken in the 1980s, there was a display of men's gauze scarves and fedoras by Stussy. And under an image of Andy Warhol as the "invisible sculpture" at Area nightclub going for $12,000, there was a rack of neat, uptown-style Temperley dresses.

"This is dead-on with my perspective of the merging of fashion and art," Mr. Goldstein told Daily Transom. "I stressed days and weeks about it. And even at four o'clock I was worried about how well the Coven dress and the leather jackets went with the Madonna image."

Mr. Goldstein said that the exhibit started with a conversation about putting some of Mr. McMullan's older photos on T-shirts.

"Patrick and I were saying that all the young kids are stealing these iconic images--they don't have the copyright to it--but he owns all these amazing images. So for the T-shirts, we talked about Liam and Patrick collaborating and painting on the images, changing it up a bit and making it very artsy," said Mr. Goldstein. "Then of course once we got a look at all the images, we were like, 'Wow!' So we decided to show them."

The T-shirts featuring some of the photos--including the one of Madonna--will be available at the store closer to the holiday season. 

When we asked Mr. McMullan just how his son "altered" some of his images, he pointed out paint drops simulated on of the Halston print, increased contrast on the Andy Warhol print, and the Madonna print cut a different way from the original. 

"I've been wanting to blow up some of my dad's images. I think frames are on the way out. I don't like frames anymore," Liam said. "My dad still has a bunch of his images from this collection framed, but this is a completely different thing. I did some treatments in photo shop to make them a little different. It was all on the computer."

The Daily Transom inquired if Liam was excited to make collect the money from the sales of the blown-up photos. 

"Did my dad really say that?" said Liam with a genuine look of childlike-surprise in his eyes. "I wish! But if he said it..." 

"It's going to be more about what I see than what I do," he said. "Anyone who thinks I'm even the least bit entertaining, the least bit interesting, I'll give them a little more insight into how I feel about things."

We wondered if he'd sought advice from his godfather, Mr. Musto, who has built a career on this sort of thing: "Not really. He has faith that I can do it." And his father? "Somewhat" he told us, before explaining that "Everybody tells me they wanted to read it before, but I had to turn it in for [today]."

Was it safe to say that his contributions would be a bit more authentic than those of his predecessor, Ms. Hearst? "It's definitely all me," he assured us.

He added that he also saw the column as an opportunity to combat peoples' tendency to "misconstrue" his words: "I feel like when I'm the only one writing, it's not like 'Telephone'... It's just my words, even if it's not the most eloquent thing I've ever said."

Mr. McMullan, like many of his fellow scene-makers, says that the party circuit was largely unaffected by the recent financial crisis: "People who don't work and don't do nine-to-five jobs and don't take any consideration about the world are, generally speaking, still going out. People who went out during the weekdays and weeknights are still going out."

After months of speculation, we got to the bottom of Marquee's temporary summer shutdown.

We tallied gifts, drank absinthe, and chatted with godfather Michael Musto at nightlife heir Liam McMullan's 21st birthday party.

Russell Crowe got a little testy at the Body of Lies premiere--par for the course, we suppose.

We partied with Diane von Furstenberg, Tory Burch, Fern Mallis, Martha Stewart and Rory and Elie Tahari as the CFDA welcomed its newest members.

Irina Aleksander sweet-talked her way into Liam McMullan's 21st birthday party and discovered that the sons of society photographers like a good pair of Brooks Brothers pants just as much as the next guy.

Ms. Aleksander also got on the horn with socialite-slash-actress (aren't we all!) Annie Churchill to gab about her new online venture: a fashion retail website and online fashion-lifestyle TV show (ooh!) hosted by (you guessed it!) Ms. Churchill herself.

And wide-eyed Caroline Bankoff fell under the spell of Benicio Del Toro at a screening of his new movie, Che. Mmmm, more, por favor!