Sarah Jessica Parker, Stevie Nicks
In the 14 years since Sarah Jessica Parker established the New York City Ballet’s Fall Fashion Gala, the benefit has raised more than $40 million, drawing the biggest names across the arts, fashion, and entertainment together in support of the world-renowned dance company. After nearly a decade and a half presiding over the ballet’s most glamorous night, Parker told Vogue, she finds it all the more thrilling.
“It’s about revisiting something that, in your mind’s eye, is extraordinary,” the multi-hyphenate and NYCB Board Vice Chair said of the occasion: a glittering night of collaboration between some of the most prominent designers and choreographers of our time. “You watch supremely talented people come together to offer New York City one of the great, great nights at the theater.”
Thursday night’s “extraordinary” affair raised $3.45 million for the company and began even before the curtain rose on a trio of world premieres: honorary gala chair Stevie Nicks made a rare red carpet appearance (her first since the Met Gala) alongside Parker. After effectively shutting down the step-and-repeat—Parker in a balletic, hand-painted custom tulle and ribbon gown by Simone Rocha, and Nicks in a mauve Morgane Le Fay frock and flower crown—the duo joined Matthew Broderick, Nicole Ari Parker, Julia Fox, and Olivia Rodrigo for the night’s performances in David H. Koch Theater.
Opening remarks from New York City Ballet Board Chair Diana Taylor gave way to the world premiere of Alysa Pires’ Auspicy: a regal ensemble performance whose climax—an arresting solo performed by principal dancer Unity Phelan—evoked a phoenix rising. It was a “romantic” image, to hear Dutch fashion designer Rolf Snoeren tell it, one reinforced by Phelan’s elaborately gilded coat and the ensemble’s metallic catsuits from Snoeren and Viktor Horsting’s label Viktor&Rolf.
For all its sheen, the Fall Fashion Gala commission is a deceptively challenging one. Designers accustomed to outfitting the body for the motions of the everyday (even one as spectacular as this) must, with the help of the New York City Ballet costume shop and its director Marc Happel, adapt their thinking and execution to the needs of the company’s elite artist-athletes.
Rocha, who created Parker’s look for the occasion and the costumes for Justin Peck’s Mirror/Sky, met the twin challenge with aplomb. “The physicality of the dancers was so important to me,” the Irish designer told Vogue of her approach to costuming Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia for their pas de deux. “They were so intertwined, they almost moved as one.”
After walking the red carpet together, the principal dancers and married couple swapped black tie for backstage. Avid followers of Justin Peck may have come to expect ebullient, high-octane works from the ballet company’s Tony Award-winning Resident Choreographer, but Mirror/Sky represented a change of pace. Their performance, set to an adaptation of Nicks’ Landslide by Gabriel Kahane and Haley Heynderickx, settled the night’s energy with the gentle soulfulness of Tiler Peck and Mejia’s every break and embrace, their characters’ courtship embodied by the ruffles, rosebuds, and blooms of Rocha’s costuming. “It was the first time I was able to really trust the craft, not only of what I’ve built over the past fifteen-plus years, but also of Tiler and Roman and their performance as dancers,” the choreographer told Vogue. “It has qualities of what’s fleeting in life, so I think it speaks to ballet in this beautiful way.”
New York City Ballet was founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein to set a national standard for the art of neoclassical ballet. The company is no stranger to choreography that leaves audiences spellbound, and on Thursday night, it was Jennifer Archibald’s Shared Rain that gave attendees cause to wonder if they’d caught a glimpse of the future of the art form from their seats in the David H. Koch Theater.
The urgency and intensity of Archibald’s choreography harnessed the brutal precision and unforgiving athleticism of the company’s training through techniques inflected by hip hop and modern dance. The score and ensemble performance seemed to force a negotiation with the construct of time itself, as if to interrogate the true upper limit of beats per minute, and of the human body’s capacity for extensions and breaths in any given measure.
“I want people to see the humanity within the glitz and glamour of it,” Archibald told Vogue of her choreographic process. “That’s what makes the movement more emotional—for me and also for the audience.” Couturier Robert Wun brought glitz and glamour aplenty to Shared Rain, his third dance world collaboration, with glittering, midnight blue costumes that refracted the stage lighting across the audience. “There were a lot of conversations about what ballet usually needs to be,” Wun said, “but then Jennifer and I went in to say, ‘Shall we do something a little bit different?’”
After a standing ovation from the First Ring by none other than Nicks herself, the final act played out at the center of the theater’s bronze-cast promenade. There’s nothing like a red carpet and three world premieres to work up an appetite, and guests ascended to the gala dinner, many with a martini in hand, to debrief on the night’s performances over green olive-dressed artichokes and squash blossoms. The soaring aerie had been transformed by event design studio Cait & Jules into a visual ode to the thread of romanticism running through the night. It also offered something of an ‘I Spy’ of iconic duos in rapt conversation. Among them: Monse’s Fernando Garcia and Julia Fox, And Just Like That cast-mates Nicole Ari Parker and SJP, Matthew Broderick and Amy Sedaris.
The public eye at last fell on one more pair: NYCB Artistic Director Jonathan Stafford and Associate Artistic Director Wendy Whelan, who, in their final remarks, acknowledged the evening’s numerous supporters from within the company and beyond.
While it’s an unspoken “ism” on the gala circuit to dash before dessert (on this night an apple cinnamon upside down cake with a coffee and toasted oat crumble), guests instead booked it to the dance floor to shimmy along as the DJ spun Vogue, Dancing on My Own, and the eleventh-hour ABBA banger Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).
As Cinderella hour approached, the sight of the still-packed promenade (including a Paris-bound Rocha, who hit the City of Light for market week the very next day) brought to mind Parker’s earlier characterization of the celebration: “My experience is probably very much like what you heard in the house,” she had told Vogue, “one of astonishment, awe, and tremendous respect.”
Sarah Jessica Parker, Stevie Nicks
