You’ve felt it at some point, surely, when the £250 bar tab runs out at some miserable adult playground picked out for your team by the ‘socials coordinator’. Your hairs have stood on end as the startling thwack of axe against target board is the only sound that punctuates the din of Hotline Bling. ‘All work parties can’t be this lame,’ you wonder. ‘There’s got to be some cool ones out there.’
Don’t quit your day job just yet. To keep you from a drastic, perhaps life-ruining change of career at your big age, we’ve panelled party drones from ten of the most banging sectors across the capital to let you know exactly what you’ve been missing out on this whole time.
fashion
The guests list are mostly made up of influencers (paid to be there, dressed by brands) or magazine journalists (not paid to be there, not dressed by brands, funded almost entirely by advertising revenue). They are either in unnervingly well-lit locations, like Dover Street Market and The Photographers’ Gallery, or dimly lit, overpopulated west London hotels owned by Richard Caring. You have to get to the Evening Standard’s LFW party before 8pm if you harbour any hopes of getting a drink, and equally there’s no point in going to anything held on The Standard rooftop after 10pm (they invite every person with an email address and a pair of Tabis in Zones 1 to 6).
Nobody eats or drinks much anyway because everyone is either on Ozempic or cocaine or both. Or they used to be on Ozempic or cocaine or both and are now conspicuously sober, and will tell you so. There is no point in going to absolutely anything hosted by Dazed or held in Kensington Olympia. People say things you think are clichéd and actually mean them: once Adwoa Aboah’s mother made an intern with a clipboard burst into tears when she asked for her name and cheerfully checked the clipboard, only to hear, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’. Jodie Harsh is always there, for some reason. As is Lisa Rinna.
arts
In this very glamorous world, there are, of course, very glamorous parties – private dinners and the like. But only the VVIPs get to go to these, there’s no space for the rubberneckers here. Lower down the scale, you have launch parties at galleries, which are ‘usually full of desperate art students feigning interest in ultra-dry abstract art’. Gagosian and David Zwirner are full of beautiful people, lustrous gallerinas and perfectly coiffed ‘walkers’.
The Serpentine Summer Party – always covered extensively in the papers – is ‘full of idiots and very corporate’. The auction houses, keen to shed their fusty images, are open to partnerships. The Christie’s contemporary party, sponsored by Elle, was filled with photographers and, we are told, ‘absolutely ghastly’.
publishing
A very mixed bag. Most people attend for precisely the four minutes it takes to do a loop of Hatchards. One thing unites: ‘At publishing parties, everyone is just waiting for someone from the media world to show up. I doubt they are waiting for authors at media parties.’
There are high points: HarperCollins’s lavish sushi and profiteroles bash at the V&A, the Canongate party at the London Book Fair at which Jamie Byng always DJs. The Daunt Books launches paid for by authors are dreadful. At least Hatchards has a labyrinthine layout where you can hide from agents with bad breath. ‘Warm white wine is ubiquitous.’
