V’s Big Night
V Magazine threw its annual party in New York again, which means a certain density of beautiful people in one room at the kind of event where everyone’s dressed to prove something. Troye Sivan performed. The guest list read like a modeling agency roster mixed with people who exist primarily on Instagram—Taylor Hill, Gigi Hadid, Kacy Hill, and a bunch of others whose names blur together when you’re scrolling through photos the next day.
I used to care more about these things. There’s something about the fashion industry party that appeals to a designer—the concentrated attention to how people present themselves, the calculated casualness, the sense that every outfit is a small statement about where you sit in some invisible hierarchy. You go to these things and you notice the cuts, the fabric choices, who’s taking risks and who’s just wearing what they know works.
But after a while you realize that’s all it is. Everyone’s beautiful, everyone’s wearing something expensive or clever or both, and it means almost nothing. The photos come out the next day and you scroll through them and think about how much effort went into an evening that will be completely forgotten by next month. Taylor Hill wore something. Gigi wore something else. Brad Kroenig was there. Maxwell Osborne was there. A designer, a model, another model, another person whose job is partly to exist at parties.
What stays with me isn’t the fashion or the guest list. It’s the weird ecosystem these parties reveal—how much of celebrity culture is just people showing up to prove they’re worth showing up for. The performance of being in the room becomes more important than anything that happens in the room. Troye Sivan played songs. Everyone smiled at the cameras. That was the whole thing.
I still look at the photos sometimes, but not because I care who was there. I’m curious about the texture of it all, the feeling of being at the exact moment when fashion and fame and design converge into something that photographs well and means very little.