There are galas where the dancing is an excuse for the dinner, and galas where the dinner is an excuse for the dancing. New York City Ballet‘s Fall Fashion Gala, now 14 years old, has made a franchise out of refusing to choose. On Oct. 1, the company once again filled the David H. Koch Theater with couture, choreography and a good portion of the city’s donor class, and, according to Vogue’s Jenna Adrian-Diaz, walked away with $3.45 million for its trouble.
That figure, Vogue reports, brings the gala’s total to more than $40 million since Sarah Jessica Parker, the company’s board vice chair, conceived it in 2012. In an era when benefit committees fret about donor fatigue, a party that has averaged nearly $3 million a year for over a decade is less a gala than an endowment strategy with a dress code.
Stevie Nicks, honorary chair
This year’s draw was unusual even by Lincoln Center standards: Stevie Nicks served as honorary chair, and she was not merely a name on the invitation. As the company’s own recap describes it, Resident Choreographer Justin Peck made a pas de deux, Mirror/Sky, to a reimagining of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” by composer Gabriel Kahane, with vocals by Haley Heynderickx. It was danced by Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia in streamlined costumes by the London designer Simone Rocha. Vogue’s headline put it plainly: Nicks and Parker “Brought Down the House.”
The genius of the Fall Fashion Gala’s format is that it treats a designer’s involvement as a commission rather than a sponsorship. Each year, choreographers are paired with fashion houses, and the costumes are made for the dances rather than bolted onto them. That is how you end up with a Fleetwood Mac ballad, a Simone Rocha silhouette and two of the company’s finest dancers in the same eight minutes, and nobody in the audience thinking it is a gimmick.
Three premieres, three houses
The evening, per NYCB, opened with Alysa Pires’s Auspicy, her second commission for the company, with costumes by the Dutch house Viktor&Rolf; it portrays an abstract narrative of motherhood, with dancers taking on avian characters in feather-trimmed costumes, set to music by Jocelyn Morlock. It closed with Shared Rain, the first work for the NYCB stage by choreographer Jennifer Archibald, which put eight dancers in glimmering costumes by Robert Wun.
Archibald, speaking to Vogue, offered what might serve as the gala’s unofficial motto: “I want people to see the humanity within the glitz and glamour of it.” It is a nice line, and a pointed one. Fashion galas have a way of turning dancers into mannequins; the best of this format insists the reverse, that the clothes are there to serve bodies in motion.
The music was as deliberately eclectic as the clothes. Per NYCB’s program notes, Auspicy is set to Jocelyn Morlock’s Oiseaux bleus et sauvages and part of her Aeromancy, while Shared Rain moves through an “auralscape” assembled from Lisa Gerrard and Patrick Cassidy, Hauschka and Hildur Guðnadóttir, Tokio Myers and others. Mirror/Sky, the company says, is “grounded in tender, sensitive partnering” and evokes “the memory of life past,” which is about as good a description of “Landslide” as anyone has written. All three sets of costumes were supervised by the company’s longtime costume director, Marc Happel, the unsung figure who makes sure a couture gown survives a grand jeté.
The room
Vogue reports that the program was preceded by remarks from Diana Taylor and Katherine Brown and then from the company’s artistic leaders, Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan. The guest list ran, per Vogue and the company’s photo recap, to Matthew Broderick, Nicole Ari Parker, Julia Fox, Olivia Rodrigo, Amy Sedaris and Fran Drescher, a range that tells you something about the gala’s reach: a Broadway husband, an And Just Like That regular, a downtown provocateur, a Gen Z pop star and a sitcom legend, all in black tie, all in the same theater, all applauding a pas de deux.
Parker, for her part, gave Vogue the evening’s best articulation of why she started it. The gala, she said, lets audiences “watch supremely talented people come together to offer New York City one of the great, great nights at the theater.” The repetition of “great” is the kind of thing a copy editor might trim, but it is also exactly how people talk when they mean it.
Corporate support came, per Vogue, from Wells Fargo, in its sixth year as sponsor, and from the pearl house Mikimoto. The gala chairs are listed on the company’s Fall Gala page for anyone who wishes to study the season’s philanthropic org chart.
Why it works
New York’s benefit calendar is crowded with evenings that raise money for excellent causes and are forgotten by the time the car arrives. The Fall Fashion Gala is not one of them, and the reason is structural. It produces art. Three new ballets now exist that did not exist on Sept. 30, and at least one of them, a duet built on one of the most covered songs in American pop, may well find its way back into a regular season. The donors, in other words, are not just buying a table. They are buying a premiere.
It also offers the fashion world something it cannot get on a runway: an audience that has paid to watch clothes move for 20 minutes without a phone in its hand. Designers who might never show in New York get a Lincoln Center debut. Dancers get couture. The company gets $3.45 million.
There will, of course, be other galas this month, at least one of them on the very same stage. But for a single evening on Oct. 1, the city’s ballet company managed something rare in society life: it made the party about the performance.
The City Politic has reached out to New York City Ballet, Justin Peck, Jennifer Archibald, Alysa Pires and the representatives of Sarah Jessica Parker and Stevie Nicks for comment, and will update this story with any response.
Photo: The David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, by AramilFeraxa via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
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