What\'d5s Wang With Us, Part Deux: Sweatin\'d5 With Danielle Steel\'d5s Daughters

The New York Observer, September 9th, 2007

Fashion Week’s hottest after-party this far? The Alexander Wang after-party on Thursday. Indeed, hot doesn’t even begin to describe it.

By 11 PM, as a large warehouse in the West 30s began to fill with fedora’d, tank-topped, creatively-hairstyled early twenty-somethings, the crowd was getting moist. By 11:30, anyone wearing a shirt had completely sweated through it. The music was loud and Strokes-centric, vodka was flowing, revelers were spilling out of the bathroom stalls four at a time—but none of this made up for the fact that we were all starting to smell. The Transom took this up with the charmingly youthful Mr. Wang, who bounced around the room posing for pictures, belle of his musky-scented ball. He was drenched, but cheerful.

“I’m, like, working on AC right now,” he breathed. “It is so hot in here!”

It was a day of unfortunate venue-related incidents for Mr. Wang: His show at Bumble & Bumble earlier in the day had been visited by the Fire Marshal, who had kept out “like fifty of my friends!” he cried (and also the Transom). So how was the show? “It was just flawless, I think,” he said. “At least from backstage. Someone said I reinvented the cool girl, which is like the ultimate, ultimate compliment.”

The Transom spotted several “cool girls” at the party, including Danielle Steel’s twin daughters Vanessa and Victoria Traina, the latter sporting new, long blunt bangs. They posed for pictures in a side room which had been arranged to look like a prom photo-booth, with a glittery, chintzy purple banner reading “Alexander Wang’s Afterparty,” slung across the backdrop. “I’m going to the Proenza show tomorrow,” said Vanessa. “My sister and I are good friends with Jack and Lazaro.” (Meaning McCullough and Hernandez, the Proenza Schouler designers.) She added that she’s relocating to New York from Los Angeles in a few months. Watch out world!

The sisters Traina rushed over to join Mischa Barton, who was lounging on a large sofa near the back of the room with a friend, where she’d been staring vacantly for at least four straight minutes at her silver clutch purse.