Fashionistas Get Together in Finance
The crowd at Manhattan’s Bar Basque on Thursday night — shiny-haired men in expensive suits and women in sheath dresses and authentic nfl jerseys china strappy heels — could only mean one thing.
Yes, Fashion Meets Finance, the social mixer that introduces New York’s fashionistas to well-heeled Wall Street bachelors, is back.
“It’s actually a pretty upscale crowd,” said a tanned brunette, as she and a friend made their way past a group of martini-clutching bankers to the open bar, sponsored by Svedka.
It’s been a rough few years for Fashion Meets Finance. The event began in 2007 when Beth Newill, a merchandiser for Esprit, decided to hold informal bi-monthly gatherings to introduce her single fashion friends to their high-earning counterparts in finance.
With the help of word-of-mouth marketing and cheeky slogans (one invitation read, “Ladies, you don’t need to worry that the cute guy at the bar works in advertising!”), Ms. Newill’s gatherings quickly became infamous. One event last year at the Empire Hotel drew more than 1,400 attendees.
But Ms. Newill had to give her parties a face-lift after a wave of bad publicity that accused the event’s attendees jersey china of blatant money grubbing. Gawker called one 2009 gathering “an event where Manhattan banker-types and fashion slaves meet, consummate, and procreate certain genetics to create lineages of people you’d rather not know.”
“In the past, the events had a certain connotation that we are trying to get rid of,” event organizers wrote in a press release announcing this year’s revival.
Fashion Meets Finance has returned as a kinder, gentler form of upper-crust mating ritual. Gone are the slogans, and the requirements that men furnish proof of Wall Street employment and list their salaries upon registration. And it’s been replaced with a post-crisis sense of charity. Proceeds from this year’s event were given to Indego Africa, a non-profit that sells goods manufactured by female artisans in Rwanda.
“We’re still proud of these two industries,” Ms. Newill said. “They work well together, and they look great together, and they’re very gender-heavy. It’s an organic idea.”
This year, the open-air balcony space at Bar Basque, a swank venue in Chelsea owned by restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow, was filled to capacity, with partygoers dancing to Beyoncé and nuzzling on white couches as the evening wore on. Of the 800 or so attendees, men outnumbered women only slightly, and among the newly diverse guests were doctors, accountants, and even several female investment bankers.
