Everyone You Know Was There, Apparently

By 2016, VICE had spawned so many sub-brands that tracking what each one was actually supposed to be had become its own mild cognitive exercise. Motherboard was tech. i-D was fashion. Broadly was women. Amuse was something harder to pin down—culture, loosely defined, the kind of remit that lets you throw a party at the Tiki Tabu in the SIXTY Hotel on the Lower East Side and call it editorial.

Mia Moretti played DJ, which already makes it worth going. She has an instinct for the room that most DJs spend a career trying to develop. Theophilus London was there and performed—the kind of set that happens when you’re the right person in the right city at the right moment and everyone already knows every lyric. Virgil Abloh was around too, about a year before Off-White would make him genuinely inescapable, when he was still primarily someone you’d hear about rather than someone whose sneakers were everywhere.

There was also a screening of Take Three, a short romantic drama directed by Ismail Shallis, with Allison Lanier and Wesley Davis—VIP, exclusive, the usual framing for something meant for that specific room and no other.

I have a genuine soft spot for this corner of New York: the creative-class party that’s half industry and half actual enthusiasm, where the DJ is good and someone performs a set that wasn’t on the schedule and a short film screens somewhere in the back. It doesn’t need to mean anything. It just has to be exactly that specific about what it is.