If You Don’t Know How to Love, at Least Learn How to Fuck
Who do we think we are? What makes me think I should be privy to advising others as to how to do anything, let alone undergo a venture as extravagant and odious as throwing a penthouse party in a city I don’t live in in mid-July? Our previous accolades consist of:
FW SS 2025: The one that started it all. Spontaneous, impulsive thought experiment of the party. First edition of the Chelsea. Competition against Fashion Week. Beat them. Run up 4,000 k tab. Porn on the TV. Porn in the rokom. Chicken nuggets with caviar. Ted Skata mentions he ordered 7 ice creams and proceeded to let them melt all over the sticky velvet living room. The image is disgusting, and I ask no further. Three music videos filmed. One with Andi Vaus, one with Dimond, and the third, as the boys recall, was but a man with a camera who recorded whatever it is that his footage entails.
Halloween. A retired MMA fighter wrestling an 18-year-old nepo baby on the floor of someone's apartment, for reasons nobody present can later reconstruct or agree on. The one that got announced 45 minutes beforehand.
Valentine’s Day: Francis Delacroix’s book launch. It lasted as long as it took to conjure it. People were trying to book the Ritz from the street outside. Unsuccessful. Moved to the Mercer. Security footage exists of at least one person being blocked from entering their own party.
New York has no single etiquette for entertaining. The city's best parties happen in railroad apartments, gallery back rooms, Chinatown restaurants, borrowed rooftops, and living rooms where half the guests barely fit. They are held together less by perfection than by momentum, good casting, and the feeling that everyone is exactly where they're supposed to be.
On July 3, five of us hosted a bottle party in a Manhattan penthouse. Friends arrived carrying whatever they wanted to drink, strangers became regulars by midnight, playlists changed hands as often as bottles did, and the apartment settled into the kind of rhythm that only New York seems capable of producing.
The Method (As It Is)
Step 1: Three martini lunch.
Step 2: Drunk-talk your way into booking the room. At the Chelsea, ideally. This time at NoMo Hotel Soho. You went in for one drink with a friend you haven’t seen in a while. You immeditely Trojan Horsed the idea of a party after hearing about their vivacious life in the city.
Step 3: Make a flier. It’s the next morning. You remember what you’ve done. You need to make a flier: you have learned your lesson of disorganisation last time when you just posted about the event on your close friends’ stories. You’re too hungover to put any actual effort in. Besides, it’s meant to look nonchalant. A handwritten, barely legible note on a hotel’s cocktail napkin, stating a room number and a time by your hands which are still shaking.
Step 4: Post it. Turn your phone off and ignore anyone who actually RSVPs. Make your own mental checklist. It begins and ends with the one person you’re trying to hook up with.
Step 5: Pre-party dinner with co-hosts. You can’t afford it because you just dropped a bag on the hotel room. You’re chain-smoking outside and ducking the waiters trained by American hospitality who desperately want your business. You have nothing to offer them. You have nothing to offer to anyone. You are worthless. You are also wearing a skirt that will pop open if you even think of an appetiser.
Step 6: Arrive in the room. It’s too small. You have been betrayed once more. The balcony is bolted shut so you ask your dodgy friend from Brooklyn to run to his car and unsrew the door.
Step 7: Too many people come. You regret playing God with the guest list. You also never told the hotel reception you planned a party with 1000 people. Not to worry.
Step 8: Cobrasnake pulls up. To worry
Step 9: Booze delivery arrives 2 hours late. Crowd is elated. You drink your weight in booze. Cobra takes an awful photo of you. Baddies are clawing over a White Claw.
Step 10: Have a two-hour conversation with a stranger in the bathroom. This memory only comes back to you when you check the Cobra website the next morning.
Step 11: Get banned for life. Walk out ashamed, escorted by security and sweating vodka and ecstasy as the flash of the camera scorns your eyeballs, unable to hide behind the darkened frame of the too-big-for-your-face sunglasses you have on. Notice the exiting carpet you’re walking on is red. Shrug, order a car, and go home. Do it again in a week. Learn nothing from your mistakes.
