Madonna and Flavor Flav Hit New York Fashion Week
The New York Times
Inside Off-White’s bash in SoHo; Graydon Carter’s love letter to Italy; and an early 2000s throwback with TV on the Radio.
New York Fashion Week is here with a ripple of parties across the city, where urban cowboys, indie-sleaze-aspiring revelers and stylish, timeworn New Yorkers are strutting their stuff. It’s not just vamping models and eager spectators pumping out looks. Off the runways, a less curated undercurrent (or at least one carefully chosen to appear so) takes over after sundown. See who was out and what they wore — updated throughout this week and next.
The top of Madonna’s wavy blonde hair was barely visible as a crowd hovered around her on Sunday night in SoHo inside a party to celebrate Off-White’s New York Fashion Week debut at Brooklyn Bridge Park earlier that day. Ibrahim Kamara, who took over the label following the designer Virgil Abloh’s death in 2021, wove through the fans to hug the pop icon. (Her son, David Banda, modeled in the show.)
Hundreds of guests, including the musician Leon Bridges, the filmmaker Lena Waithe, and the singer Victoria Monét packed into the party at the Manner Hotel, which is scheduled to open later this month. Around the hotel, partygoers sipped drinks on a dim dance floor lit by phone flashlights, dodged broken champagne flutes on their way to the rooftop and ate mini crab cakes in a candlelit lounge overlooking the street.
Just before midnight, Flavor Flav, who sat in the front row of the show, wearing a baby blue Off-White tracksuit and white Alexander McQueen shoes, burst through the doors to applause. As he greeted guests, he showed off a medallion-like water polo clock around his neck, a memento of his role as hype man for the U.S. women’s water polo team at the Paris Olympics. The Olympic gymnast Sunisa Lee also posed for photos in the congested entryway.
