There was no image of Lady Gaga at 3 o’clock, hanging by the wall with different members of Arcade Fire and Eddie Vedder. No images of Kevin Costner, single and ready to mix at the bar. No images of Chern and Lauryn Hill about the banquets of the softly lit dining room. The owners of San Vicente West Village had ensured that no paparazzi could be found in last Friday, despite the fact that some of the biggest names in music and Hollywood had come to Radio City after the Saturday evening live 50-year anniversary concert.
If one of those images was blasted on the internet, it might have built up a feeling that the first event at SVB, which is officially opened in March, was a brother for the centuries.
Maybe that’s the point: you had to be there.
Among New Yorkers who come to power and have exclusivity, the coming opening of the best private club in Los Angeles will be greeted with a sense of urgency that is the second for the future of democracy.
“Everyone in fashion talked about this club, whether he has to participate, how you can be on the list,” said Kendall Werts, a founder of the Jeffries, a desk at the intersection of branding and celebrity.
San Vicente West Village is the brainchild of Jeff Klein, a businessman with a long state of service in hospitality, who opened San Vicente Bungalows Los Angeles in 2018.
In the nineties, Mr. Klein wage that hotels in that decade would have been what night clubs had been in the 1980s.
In 2004, Mr. Klein spent $ 18 million to buy the expired Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles. It became the most important canteen of the city for Moguls and movie stars (think: Jennifer Aniston, Jeff Bezos, George Clooney) and, for a few years, it was the site of the famous Oscars party of Vanity Fair.
Mr Klein also collaborated with the former editor of the magazine, Graydon Carter, on the Monkey Bar, a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan.
But the real sequel to the Sunset Tower was the San Vicente Bungalows, a club for only members who changed how celebrities can socialize.
A cynic could say that the idea was to create a safe space for the best known and best connected people in the city, a where they could go to each other and touch each other without having commemorated those moments in a bad iPhone -Photo made by a tourist. (The club requires all guests to cover their telephone cameras with stickers for the duration of their stay.) The challenges related to the proliferation of Los Angeles also worked in favor of the club. In fewer ways to meet people, they settled to choose one.
The contribution ran around $ 4,000, not including initiation costs that varied from $ 3,000 to $ 15,000, depending on the age. Among those who became members were Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Tom Ford.
“When I’m in LA, if I don’t eat at home, I am in San Vicente. Before that I was in Tower Bar, “Mr. Ford said by telephone last week. “It’s like I’m home. They know my favorite table and what I like. My Coca-Cola arrives before I ask for it. You feel Jeff’s presence in all possible ways. “
After the Coronavirus Pandemie, an idea started to gnaw at Mr Klein: Can he bottle the magic in Los Angeles and return it to the city he had left?
In short order he decided to test his luck at the Jane Hotel, a monument by Red Brick West Village along the West Side Highway.
The return and intrigues of New Yorkers started as soon as the first invitations to add were expanded. A select group of current members was instructed to invite their friends or people that they thought they should be a member. In e -mails, those new insiders had the rare opportunity to participate without the formal assessment process to which most members were subjected. Membership is screened by Gabe Doppelt, a British magazine editor who cut her teeth as an assistant to Anna Wintour and Tina Brown. After being the editor of Mademoiselle, she supervised Hollywood reporting in W Magazine and The Daily Beast.
People who did not receive invitations were angry that they were not invited. People who did receive invitations were angry about the reimbursements, especially the older and some of the most creative people who were not high -quality individuals. Potential guests were asked to upload their driving licenses, so that they could be determined by age -corrected reimbursements. Nobody liked that.
It happens that the annual costs of San Vicente are in the same margin as those of other private -social clubs in New York City, such as Casa Cipriani and Chez Margaux. They are considerably cheaper than those of the Core Club.
A considerable amount of debate started about whether the city had enough juice to create a permanent clubhouse full of people who were both creative enough and were enough financially solvent to pay for membership. Power in New York City is often as cultural as capital.
“Does real fantasticity even take place more in public? Is it not behind closed doors in the houses of others? “Said Jon Reinish, a well -connected political consultant who received an invitation for the club last month and had not yet joined.” I just don’t know that it exists in Manhattan more like it did in the days of Michael’s the Grill Room and Mortimer, And it is very difficult to reverse it in a sustainable way. “
But for every person who snaps, there was another member of it. Also help with guaranteeing success: the unique popularity of Mr Klein, according to Kevin Huvanane, who, as co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency, helps the career of many tribal guests in San Vicente, including Mrs. Aniston, Demi Moore and Jennifer Lopez . “People underestimate goodwill,” he said, before he was Mr. Klein compares with Joe Allen, the impresario whose restaurants in the Theaterdistrict established him as a king of Broadway.
The night after the SNL party strewn with stars, Mr. Werts van de Jeffries was one of the approximately a thousand people who attended a hard-hat party in honor of the upcoming opening of the club.
Others in the crowd were the power-literary agent David Kuhn, the television-Mogul Darren Starr, the actress Zooey Deschanel and the political expert Molly Jong-Fast.
A magazine editor who had complained to me earlier in the week about wasting several thousand dollars to become a member (largely because of FOMO) was now grainy over the long line for the jacket control.
Even Mr. Klein seemed a bit ashamed of the size of the crowd. A few meters away he spoke with Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of Woody Allen.
“It’s a good thing that Woody didn’t come,” said Mr. Klein. “It’s too busy.”
The Lord Klein officially did not participate in this piece. Last December he gave an interview to the New York Times in connection with the opening of an outpost of San Vicente in Santa Monica, California. After the publication, Jay-Z asked him why the hell had worked with it. After all, a central promise of the club is privacy for its members. (Some are suspended for uploading photos to Instagram.)
And Mr. Klein had to admit that Jay-Z had a point.
Yet he also knew that in a city of journalists nothing about the weekend would be completely outside the record. And with the opening costs in the range of $ 130 million, he could not make that without some press. (“Oof, that’s a lot of money,” said Mr. Huvan, when the song was told.)
So Mr Klein did not chase me exactly while he greeted Risa Heller, a crisis manager whose customers Jeff Zucker and Anthony Weiner have recorded.
Oakers marched around the space for crispy shrimp satays and cappuccino-aromatized macarons.
Mrs. Jong Fast and Mrs. Deschanel went upstairs to see the cinema and then looked at a few guest suites, where the hardwood floors had a amber tint and the bedding was light and white.
“This would be a great place to cheat your partner,” said Mrs. Jong-Fast, stop for a minute to admire a pumpkin-colored sofa with a Hudson County atmosphere. “Although that might be more Casa Cipriani.”
