It was early February 2023 when Alexandra woke up and found a jalapeño in her purse.

She was a second-year Parsons student at the time, deep in a particular flavor of early-twenties dissolution and going out a bit too much. The pepper, found among a bag’s normal inhabitants (lip gloss, keys, a camera) felt, somehow, deliberate- like the universe had reached in and left a note. So she kept it.

Her first instinct was ceremonial destruction. Fireworks were an easy first choice, but it being February in New York City made the where-to-find-them question difficult. Instead, she settled for leaving the pepper on the floor of her bedroom, always within eye line- part altar, part provocation.

A week passed, and came the inevitability every person who rents an apartment in New York eventually has to reckon with: visitors. Isabelle- also at Parsons, Alexandra’s best friend, and a co-conspirator in the what-to-do-with-the-pepper question- had friends coming in from the Czech Republic. The plan was Winnie’s- a reopened East Broadway karaoke institution. Alexandra, still very much in the going-out-too-much period of going out, did not want to go out- but if she had to, the pepper was coming too.

At some point in the night, the pepper left the bag.

It started passing between friends, then to strangers, then outside within the loose, convivial smoke-break congregation that forms on sidewalks outside bars. Alexandra and Isabelle started asking people to take a photo with it. The question became its own kind of introduction as strangers brought it to other strangers. The pepper moved through the night as invitation and initiation.

The next morning, Alexandra and Isabelle woke up to fifteen photographs of a jalapeño and people they had never met. There was also one of those auto-generated phone slideshows- the kind set to swelling, cinematic music- documenting the pepper’s journey.

The origin, once finally traced (and remembered), led back to Oscar- a chopped cheese savant at Tompkins Deli on Avenue A- who had gifted Alexandra the pepper the night before. They went back to show him the slideshow, and from then on, whenever Alexandra and Isabelle came in for a sandwich, Oscar would hide a pepper somewhere in the wrapping- a small, ongoing conspiracy in foil.

The peppers kept coming (far more than two young women need), so they decided to take them back out into the world.

They started bringing peppers wherever they went, photographing everyone who held one. After a couple hundred photos, a childhood friend suggested they put it all somewhere, so they made an account: @sisterhoodofthetravelingp3pper.

Now, roughly three years later, the account has over 663 posts and thousands of people holding peppers- Lil Uzi Vert, a bride and groom, Matthew Gray Gubler, the doorman of the 2 a.m. club, DJs, chefs, children, parents, people who are someone’s role models, and Role Model- evolving into a kind of census of a certain Lower Manhattan.

If you take the time to parse through all 663 posts ( I did ) you’ll notice the pepper sometimes changes form. Can you tell me about that evolution?

Isabelle: We often don’t plan before we pepper, so sometimes it’s both passion and desperation. We can’t find what we usually use, so we take anything we can find.

Alexandra: No pepper, no problem. We’ve used big bell peppers before. There was once a skinned lemon- or maybe a lime.

Isabelle: We’ll ask restaurants too. Sometimes we’re at a bar or dinner and we’re like, “Fuck, tonight feels like a good night to pepper.”

Alexandra: Sometimes they hand us sliced marinated jalapeños. It becomes a snack.

Isabelle: We obviously prefer a sexy pepper. If we pre-plan, H Mart has the best peppers. But otherwise we take what the world gives us.

How often would you switch out the pepper?

Isabelle: Sometimes we’d recycle it for a second weekend, but it would get shriveled and disgusting because everyone’s touching it.

Alexandra: People love to take a bite. By the end of the evening, pretty often someone has eaten part of it. And when people do that, they often get hiccups.

Isabelle: We got hired to do interviews at an event about a year and a half ago- bring the pepper for three days of DJs and musicians. People ate the pepper and it wrecked the interviews because everyone was hiccuping. We never got the footage.

Walk me through how you ask someone to take a pepper picture. What’s the script?

Isabelle: Honestly, I’m just like, “Can you just take a picture with this?”

Alexandra: We look for characters. We love photographing people in extravagant outfits.

Isabelle: Sometimes we’re talking to someone and we look at each other like, should we tell them about it?

Alexandra: With celebrities it takes a bit more nerve- more of an elongated explanation. I went up to Emily Ratajkowski and said: “We have this project where we take pictures of people with jalapeños around the world. Can I show you the Instagram?” And she was obsessed. She made the whole table take photos.

Isabelle: Lil Uzi Vert didn’t ask questions. He took the pepper and posed for a photo.

Later, when he got into his car, the window rolled down. His driver leaned out, called us over, and asked for context. We explained the origin of the pepper while Uzi filmed from the backseat.

Alexandra: If someone says no, it’s a two-way thing.

Isabelle: Yeah, you’re not going to vibe with someone who won’t take a picture with the pepper. It’s a social filter.

We’ve made so many friends with the pepper. Even if you think a guy is cute- I would never approach someone randomly in a normal way, but this is our way in. We’ve become closer with people we pepper, even with our neighbours. It’s the weirdest accident that has created a community.

Why do you think people are so willing to get peppered?

Alexandra: My mom said this: you’re going up to someone and basically saying, hey, you’re awesome. People like to feel picked, hot, and part of something.

Isabelle: It’s random enough to be exciting, but not so random that it’s scary. People see the account and want to be part of it.

Alexandra: It’s become a downtown New York community. People are like, “My cousin has a photo,” or “My roommate has a photo.”

Isabelle: We’ve had insane connections- someone will be like, or “That’s my ex from 2016,” or “That’s my boyfriend before I met him.”

Alexandra: One of my coworkers reached out to her ex from seven years ago because she saw him on the pepper.

You’re the Peter Pipers of picking those who get peppered.

Alexandra: We joke that we’re collecting every person in the world. The travelling pepper.

Isabelle: I was in Paris for seven months and tried it there. I didn’t know if Parisians would like it. They loved it. Some of the best photos were taken there. Someone even recognised me from their friend’s photo on the account. Sometimes people see us and say, “You’re the pepper girls.”

What’s on the horizon for the pepper?

Isabelle: We’re open to anything. Obviously still peppering- but we’ve also started throwing pepper parties. We’ve done one for Gus Dapperton and another at the bar Tawny. Sometimes we just invite everyone we know to meet at a bar at a set time- nothing rented, but it turns into a party. So more of those and just continuing to build out the pepper community.

Alexandra: There’s also this guy, Kadir, who works at East Village Pizza. He’s incredibly creative- cutting eyes into bell peppers, combining colors, turning them into small characters. He’s always thinking about where the pepper could go next- short films, new concepts.

A friend of ours, Tamino, a singer from Belgium, said he’d wear a pepper necklace if we made one, so we did. I make metal jewelry, so I carved the design in wax and had it cast in New York. Each pepper is made to order.

Finally- favorite place to pepper?

Alexandra: Tawny or still Winnies Karaoke Bar

And who is your dream person to pepper?

Isabelle: Jack Schlossberg.

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We’re all too familiar with the silhouette of the party girl. She’s fun and free and wild, and she never knows where she’ll end the night. Her path is dictated by the whim of the world around her, but, importantly, she always finds herself where the excitement is.

Despite growing up as her antithesis, I always had one eye on the archetype, as though maybe proximity to that lawlessness would be enough to satiate. I was convinced that the party girl lifestyle - which I saw as the epitome of hedonism - wasn’t for me. There were too many variables, too many unknowns. I wanted something I could contain within myself and know every corner of; a hobby that requires you to turn yourself inside out isn’t that.

The party girl trope had always felt to me as though it dripped with privilege. I could never reach that level of going with the flow, because I had things that depended on me. If I were to let go and be taken by the current that so many seemed at home in, I would surely drown. With parents who’d worked so hard to put food on the table and support me to get an education, I felt as though I had to constantly prove that I was holding up my own end of the bargain. The best way to do this seemed to be by having as little fun as possible, and the mindset stuck. When money just about covered the essentials, how could I spend it, or my time, on anything extra?

Isa, the narrator of Marlowe Granados’s novel Happy Hour, and her friend Gala, are prime examples of the kind of ease I always envied, as they flit around between exclusive venues. The novel is often described as being ‘no plot, just vibes’, and so the disco ball’s reflection is the long and short of it. The ingénues are never without a cocktail menu or a platter of oysters, but we’re told that this is their honed form of resourcefulness, a tale of social survival. But unlike in my perception of the world, here every opportunity is taken to remind the reader that the pair truly can’t afford the life they lead- they share a bed and sell clothes at the market for cash.

I found the novel so hard to connect with because I was desperate for my white-knuckled approach to be validated, for someone to bring the girls crashing back down to Earth with the understanding that this kind of life isn’t sustainable. Instead, the uncertainty ceaselessly pays off, and they loll around an indulgent summer, facing essentially no consequences.

There had to be a different approach. I couldn’t want a way of living this much and yet feel such a thick barrier between it and myself. Dancing all night, social butterflying, partying- instead of working against my desire always to know where I stood; it could all be part of it. What I wanted was categorisation, to have a complete knowledge of the cultural space around me. No stone could be left unturned. It turns out that spinning my way around London was the perfect way to carry this out.

Events start months before the doors open. I scour label announcements and venue calendars as though they hold treasure, meticulously planning everyone’s movements like I’m executing a rocket launch. I have to know everything that’s happening. Finger on the pulse isn’t enough, I need the pulse to beat through my veins as though it were my own. Every pub, bar, club, gallery, and stage within a three-mile radius is ripe to be tried and tested, placed in a mental leaderboard with constantly shuffling podiums.

In von Scherler Mayer’s film Party Girl (1995), Parker Posey’s character Mary dances at the centre of a raging New York party scene. Everyone knows her name and her drink order. After she is arrested for throwing an illegal party and her godmother covers the bail, Mary takes a job in a library to pay back the money. This seems entirely incompatible with Mary’s dedication to instability, but somehow (not without growing pains) she integrates the two. Both sides of her upturned world collide, and the film ends in a dance sequence where godmother Judy finally lets her library-chic updo down.

In the midst of this swirl, with both hands in the air and one eye on my to-do list, is where I find myself now. By putting myself through the red tape of a small government, I find myself a little closer to that place, or at least more fulfilled than I was. It’s less about stiff-backed, organised fun, and more about ritual.

Extra vitamins for a week before and after the rave, so I can seamlessly slip in and out of those heights (Vitamin C and ashwagandha for the neurotoxins; potassium-rich coconut water and salt baths for recovery). My camera roll is full of cloakroom ticket photos, dispatch screenshots, and optimised route-planning sessions. Colour-coded calendars keep me sane as I swap stories of my own adventures for tidbits and leads on the next. The day-to-night soothsayers were right: at some point, it became of the utmost importance that the outfit I wore to work could double up for a gig, or a reading, or a party.

The heart of the matter is that your early mornings, rent increases, and fear of the future are exactly why you need to let go. This juggling act might sound tiring, but it’s what makes me feel complete. I learned some time ago that when I made it all part of the game, when I acquiesced to that hunger for a complete cultural knowledge, I became an entirely different person. Suddenly, nothing was off-limits: the night could be mine.

For such a long time, ‘the scene’, as tiresome as that phrase can be, was something I would experience through books and films, historicised rather than a tangible space. Now it’s the world I create myself within. Too much introspection, too much daydreaming can rot the soul; I realised there was a level on which I could only create myself out in the open. I remain, on occasion, vaguely stung by the sense that others don’t have to keep such a close eye on their spinning plates, whether through their natural skill or the world they’ve been born into. But I’m endlessly in love with the fact that I created my own space, my own way of doing things.

All of this means feeling satisfied, even when my body aches from exertion. The intensity makes the quiet nights all the more covetable, and that relaxation leaves me ready to bounce back into the world- I covet both with equal seriousness. Everything feels as though it’s held together with PVA glue and a few staples, and that’s how I like it. I often think about how I’ll look back on this portion of my life when I’m older. I know now, already, that it will be with pride and affection for my present self. It’ll come in flashes of colour and basslines and a sun on the horizon going in either direction. Bag searches and page corners folded down to mark my place and candlelight and someone else’s hand in mine.

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“We met at a party” is just about the most romantic thing you can say in 2026.

To inspire a generation (and contribute to the propaganda that people still meet in person), we asked 10 couples who met at parties to tell us how it happened.

“I attribute much of my life to an invite I got for a birthday party that I didn’t want to go to”

McKenzie & Forest

Party: Birthday Party

They’d been orbiting each other for years, going to the same college and having a few forgettable run-ins that never turned into anything. Once, at a mutual friend’s birthday, McKenzie borrowed his phone but never followed up because she thought he had a girlfriend.

Six years later, McKenzie was planning to skip that same friend’s birthday party. She was in a mood for a reason she can’t even remember now, but the possibility of possibility convinced her otherwise.

Twenty minutes after arriving, Forest walked up and she didn’t recognize him at first.

“But I thought he was really cute, so we just ended up talking.”

They talked the entire night, and somewhere in the conversation realized this was the same party for the same friend where they’d almost started six years ago.

Update: A month later, she invited him as her plus-one to a wedding. Shortly after, he moved to New York. Today, they’ve been together three years.

Anthony & Bryan

The Party: Love Island themed

Bryan and his friends had a reputation for themed parties - pajama birthdays, a Barbie-Q, an ‘80s prom, a wedding - and in August 2024, Love Island. Bryan dressed as Rob Rausch in overalls with a fake snake tattoo, and the apartment glowed with neon lights, fake tropical plants, and hot-pink inflatable chairs. Anthony arrived that night as a coworker’s plus-one.

Bryan recognized him instantly from the apps, but Anthony had never swiped right. He spent the party whispering to friends, “That guy didn’t swipe on me,” though he’d later learn Anthony rarely checked the apps at all.

Eventually Bryan introduced himself, and Anthony was kind. At midnight, when someone mentioned it was Anthony’s birthday, Bryan stuck a candle in a cupcake and got everyone to sing.

Anthony DMed the next day to thank him, and they texted for a few days in what Bryan later realized was flirting, but it fizzled.

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving, when Bryan found him on an app again, that they reconnected. They hung out, became friends, realized neither had many local gay friends, and kept it platonic, spending the holidays dancing until 4 a.m. nearly every weekend.

By spring Bryan was falling for him, and one night Anthony came over to his apartment.

“After hours of stalling, I finally told him how I felt, and it turned out he was feeling the same way.”

Update: By June it was official. By October, they were saying “I love you.”

“I’m so glad he didn’t swipe right. We simply became friends who met at a party, and I got to know him so organically before loving him” - Bryan

Melissa & Tom

The Party: A University of Miami football team doctor’s house party

Melissa’s father was the team doctor for the University of Miami football team and threw parties at his house where people played racquetball, swam, and occasionally Dwayne Johnson would show up. Tom heard about one through a friend of a friend and showed up at the door, which was answered by Melissa’s three-year-old cousin. Melissa came rushing up behind her, and that’s how she met Tom.

Tom was immediately interested, but Melissa was fresh off a relationship and told him, “I’m not dating anyone. Plus, I don’t really like you.”

Then Melissa’s mother met Tom at the party and pulled her daughter aside. “I need you to go on a date with this man.” So she went.

On the first date, he took her to dinner, then on a plane, then on a boat. Melissa still wasn’t feeling it, but her mother told her to give him two more. By the third date something had shifted, but it scared her. She was recently out of a relationship and told Tom she wasn’t ready, and they let the distance grow between them.

What Melissa didn’t expect was how much she missed him - so she reached out.

Update: They’ve now been married for twenty-six years.

"At a party you're not performing, you're just existing - you get to be a person first, dancing, drinking, existing beside them with people you love, and you're also not obligated to talk to them the whole time. Three of the five couples in my family met at parties, and it took multiple times for them to even decide they liked each other. When you're not trying to manufacture something in the moment, it lets the love grow later." — Taylor, Melissa & Tom's daughter

Rebeka & Ben

The Party: A birthday party in the East Village

In 2016, Rebeka had just graduated and moved to New York when a new colleague invited her to his birthday party. There was a pregame where vodka mixed with cranberry juice or Sprite or seltzer - she can’t quite remember which.

Then she walked into the kitchen and did what she used to frequently do: walk up to a complete stranger and tell them they had beautiful eyes.

“I wasn’t like, oh my God, I’m flirting. Maybe I was. I probably was. But that was my thing. When people have nice eyes, I tell them.”

The stranger was Ben, a consultant from Atlanta who was only in the city for work. He’d messaged the birthday boy earlier that week to ask what he was up to that weekend, and the friend had sent him the invite on a whim.

They talked for the rest of the night, and at some point Rebeka says she may have closed her eyes in a way that suggested she wanted to be kissed. Ben swears this happened, but she doesn’t fully remember.

The next day they went ice skating and got Joe’s Pizza.

Update: They’ve now been married for three years.

Brandon & Marjorie

The Party: Birthday party (that’s #3 if you’re counting)

Brandon didn’t know many people at the party. It was a mutual friend’s birthday in New York, and both he and Marjorie had been invited on Partiful. He was scanning the room when he spotted her wearing a shirt that read: Taylor Swift is my wife and we are never getting a divorce.

He thought it was funny and that she looked cute, so he walked up to her.

“Having that ability to see that she was wearing a funny shirt and just being able to see her face and her mannerisms - that matters to me,” Brandon said. “It made me feel a lot more comfortable knowing her energy, online anyone can kind of take on that energy or put on a persona. But in person you kind of are who you are.”

Update: Brandon and Marjorie now share a last name.

“We were so drawn to each other in the real world. It wasn’t like I was trying to get her with my well-thought-out words that I spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out the exact right thing to say and asking my friends and stuff. You can’t fake in person. You have to figure it out on the spot” - Brandon

Max & Jessica

The Party: Mardi Gras party in FiDi

Max first spotted Jessica at Bloomingdale’s and walked up to say hi, but he couldn’t tell if she was interested. He was too scared to ask her out directly, so he invited her to his New Year’s Eve party instead.

Jessica couldn’t make it.

“I really want her to be there,” he said, “I knew that if she came to a party and I could talk to her in person, I could see if she liked me. But just swiping up on her Instagram story, I can’t tell via text.”

Three months later he threw a Mardi Gras party, and she came. It was the first time he’d seen her since Bloomingdale’s.

“She was so beautiful, so funny, and when I talked to her - very instantly I knew.”

They were inseparable for the rest of the night, and before she left he told her they were going on a date. Jessica looked him in the eye.

“It really took you five months to ask me that?” she said.

They went out the following week.

Update: They’ve been together for almost a year.

Jerome & Tansia

The Party: Singles Mixer

Jerome was living in Washington, D.C. when a friend texted him about a singles party the Saturday after Valentine’s Day 2024, urging him that he could meet his future wife there.

The party turned out to be a well-orchestrated operation - five roommates had recruited singles through Facebook groups, Hinge, and friends of friends, with games designed to get people talking and easily a hundred people in the room.

An hour in, Jerome spotted a girl standing under a doorway. He’d overheard her earlier mention her family was from Bangladesh.

“I saved that note in my head,” he said.

When they started talking, he mentioned he’d been to Bangladesh for work the year before. They talked for the rest of the night.

Update: Two years later, Jerome and Tansia are living together.

Jen & Francky

The Party: On a beach in Puerto Rico

Jen and her roommate flew to Puerto Rico for Jen's birthday. Day-drinking coconut mojitos on the beach, slightly sunburnt, they ended up at a party where men tried to buy them shots. "For the love of God, go home with anyone other than these guys," a waitress intervened.

Then Francky appeared. Jen thought he was cute. Francky assumed she was freshly divorced on a girls’ trip.

They went out that night, and at the bar Francky was nervous and quiet. Their birthdays were days apart, overlapping by a single night. In the car afterward, he put his arm across her at a stoplight.

They kissed on the beach and talked for an hour, then everyone piled into the car and sat there talking until a vehicle pulled up full of men armed with machine guns enforcing a nightly curfew, and they scattered.

After the abrupt ending to the night, they reconnected back in New York.

Update: Nearly five years later, they live together.

Abraham & Bridget

The Party: Korea Fest

Abraham was hosting his first DJ set when his friend Carolyn came and brought along Bridget. Abraham is a nightlife photographer and noticed her right away.

“At first glance, her energy was just very unique and kind.”

He took photos of Carolyn and Bridget throughout the night.

When Abraham hosted his second party, DJing for Korea Fest, he spotted Bridget’s name on the RSVP list again. They talked more this time, between his sets, and discovered they went to the same gym at Chelsea Piers where Abraham taught gymnastics classes.

“It was right then and there when we decided to meet up. She would take my class and then we would eat afterwards.”

Update: They became official in May.

Maria & Graham

The Party: Birthday party #4

Maria had given up. A self-described “serial Hinge warrior who’d gone on one too many dates from an app,” she’d shelved the whole project about a month before. She was going abroad in the spring and wasn’t looking for anything at all.

Then, at a close friend’s birthday party in mid-November, a couple drinks in, she spotted a boy standing next to the bay window in the living room. She glanced at him a few times, and one of those times their eyes met and she responded with a small smile.

The night went on and they eventually made conversation, exchanging Instagrams before the party wound down. His friend told her Graham had been “putting the moves” on her, which she took as a good sign.

When she got home and ate her post-game snack, of course, she texted him that she’d just had “the best mukbang of my life.” He responded with a picture of his nightly haul.

The next morning he asked her out.

Update: “We haven’t spent a day without each other since.”

This April, my parents will have been married for 27 years.

In the pouring rain, on an early Manhattan morning in 1997, a woman stood tall and drenched, waving her arm in the air, trying to hail a taxi to almost no avail. In the frustration of tardiness, allied with the stain of acid rain, she grew tired and angry as the leather of her pumps cracked at the toe. Until finally, an empty taxi pulled to the curb as her savior. Before she could reach for the door, almost out of nowhere it seemed, a man appeared, not beside her, but in front of her. As quickly as she noticed him, his hand was already opening the door to steal her cab. She demanded he get away from the door; he argued he had to get downtown to work, and she rebutted the same. They stood in the rain and fought, then stopped, and shared a taxi downtown. They subsequently fell in love.

Tough act to follow and utterly annoying story to hear, but one I share almost every chance I get. It’s almost out of a movie, a quintessential New York City love story - something I think everyone hopes to have their own experience of when they move here. And so, that’s the cross I bear in the age of dating apps and uninspiring connections; I’m obsessed with a story, and I hold out hope for fate.

The story, I reckon, plays an integral role in a relationship.

It’s not just for aesthetic purposes or to revel in as you share with friends and family about how you and your partner met. It’s the striker that lights the match. It’s the sui generis, the sense of singularity sewn into the story you share with another person. Admittedly, and perhaps pretentiously, there’s something flaccid to me about, “Yeah, we met on Hinge and hung out a few times and then realized we sort of really like each other and now we’re dating,” There isn’t much magic in that, nothing as sweet and fruitful as the bounty when it falls right into your lap, organically. Of course, if I know myself, I’d probably fuck off any guy that tried to steal my cab in the rain, but maybe not. I think everyone craves to connect personally, authentically, and intimately. At least I hope, and I think if everyone put a concerted effort into bravery, we’d see a lot more unique connections, and we’d all have much better stories to tell. Each profile on every dating app that you scroll through, you make a decision about a person you’ve never even met; you might not even know what they truly look like.

Before the surge of apps, made on the premise of making dating “easier,” to date, to meet someone, to engage, involved risk. It made your heartbeat, it exhilarated you, it summoned a potential reward. There was a weight in choosing somebody or being chosen because it required space. You were not lost in a sea of thousands, getting a chance to swipe on every person who caught your eye. The loss of physicality has resulted in a dilution of exhilaration and honest, intentional connection.​

A few weeks ago, I flew down to Palm Beach for a girls’ trip. I deserved it.

On the plane, wedged into all the geriatrics, was a handsome young man. Being that he and I were the only non-members of AARP, and in typical airplane fashion, we played a bit of eye tag. Nothing serious, but also, maybe yes? Hard to say, he wore Rag and Bone jeans, so I wasn’t really focused. I texted my friend Olivia, “If we get our bags at the same time, then it’s a sign, and I have to ask him for his number.” Sure enough, our bags came out at the exact same time, but I kept my mouth shut. We left through different areas of the airport, and normally, this is something I would forget about within an hour. I didn’t. I kept thinking about how much I regretted not saying anything for two days, just about until, well, I saw him again. Olivia and I had gotten booted from the original restaurant we were planning on going to for our nightcap due to overcapacity, so we showed up at an alternate establishment. As we walked up the steps, through the large glass pane windows, there he was.

I grabbed Olivia by the arm and, as loudly and aggressively as someone can whisper, I said, “That’s him,” unbelievable. Fate had twisted my arm, and I eventually gave him my number, after several martinis for courage. No rules against that. I came back to Olivia at the bar and my hands were shaking, which seemed remarkably overdramatic but it was genuine rush. One hadn’t felt it in a long time. Having had a second chance to do what I wanted to do in the first place, I am certain that it was much more rewarding to be brave than not to have not been. But not always do we get a second chance; I’m just obscenely blessed.

We’ve exhausted the muscle of rejection. We’re much too afraid of being let down, or of failing, or being embarrassed. We’re all guilty of not believing in what we don’t know, and being too critical too quickly. So we’re tactical, and we swipe, deep dive, make assumptions, and lead people on until we’re unsure of them or ourselves.

I want to be clear that I'm not anti-technology. I think we're past the point of circumventing it altogether, so I guess somewhere in the middle we are left with: The Partiful Crush feature. It lets you anonymously signal interest in someone attending the same event as you. If they mark you as a crush too, you both get notified and can take it from there. It offers you a safety net, the ability to signal interest, but it can only come to fruition if you play the physical role. It only works if you show up to the party with the courage to be present. I’m sure as my mother stood wet in the rain that morning she didn’t expect to meet her husband, I’m sure she didn’t even think my father would be her husband when he was fighting her for the cab. But they each took initiative on that ride downtown to know the person that sat beside them.

So my advice is to take the chance, put yourself out there, physically. Put yourself in a moment and don’t be afraid when a moment finds you. The story doesn’t have to be some ridiculous and grandiose occurrence, like you fell out of your window and Prince Charming caught you at the perfect time. That’s highly unlikely and will probably never happen to you. It’s getting over your fear of rejection and going up to that person at the party who you think is cute. It’s letting your friends set you up on a blind date, or striking up a conversation with the person outside the bar. It can also be going to the things you don’t really want to go to. In my experience, that’s when you receive what you’re least expecting. Go outside your comfort zone. Devoting all your time to half-assed, unserious online connections, while it may seem like it is satiating the dating area of your life, you may think you’re checking the box, but it’s depriving you of an authentic, brave, invigorating connection. I can’t promise that one meet-cute, self-manufactured or not, is the beginning to the rest of your life in love, but it’s an experience worth having.

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A few girls I was still in touch with from high school had invited me out to the bars and I was eager to see for my own two eyes what Portland was like as an adult. Maybe I’ll run into [REDACTED] tonight… I had thought to myself as I got ready. I had been trying to “run into” my childhood crush for years, to no avail. But sitting in Alexa’s basement, catching up with my old friends, I finally felt like it was going to happen.

Unfortunately for me, by the time we made our way to a bar that someone had told us was “so much fun”, I was an entire bottle of red wine deep. We walked into the divey, Christmas light-adorned bar and through to the back, where a rickety staircase led into the darkness. I led the way, grasping the handrail for dear life as I stumbled my way down to the basement. It was pitch black for a few moments but just as my eyes were adjusting, the metal door at the bottom of the stairs swung open and I was momentarily blinded. I blinked a few times and squinted against the light.

In slow motion, like from a nightmare, I watched as what felt like every member of my high school turned to look at me as I stood haloed in the blinding light. Oh. My. Dear. God. Retreat immediately. Panicking, I tried to back up but my friend behind me refused to budge. “Go on, let’s get a drink.” She said, oblivious to my panic.

Throat dry and cheeks ablaze, I made my way gingerly to the bar. I kept my eyes down as I passed the men’s soccer team and the IB Diploma kids. I cannot believe I’m wearing this god awful outfit, I thought to myself. Nothing could be worse than this.

Actually, my dear reader, there are worse things than just running into high school acquaintances unexpectedly. Things like getting too aggressive with your friend at darts and almost taking your prom date’s eye out with a poorly timed throw. Things like finding out two people were dating who were such opposites in school that you burst out laughing and go “Wow I would never expect you two to be together!” Things like finding yourself in an hour long conversation with people you hated and not hearing them the entire time on account of the shoulder to shoulder crowd and, well, the bottle of wine in your system.

That night single handedly turned me off from partying in my hometown for years. I refused to go back to that bar and instead would suggest places across the river or in neighborhoods I thought were lesser known. You wouldn’t have caught me dead at a party who’s guest list looked like a 10 year reunion and you certainly would never have seen me within 5 miles of my high school. I preferred to spend my visits home laying horizontal for days on end and enjoying some much needed time with family and my close friends. Being back in my childhood environment was hard enough as it is— the weird reconciliation of past and present self chafing uncomfortably— that I never had any desire to stray beyond the people, places, and activities I enjoyed as a kid. Much less be seen by my old peers ordering green tea shots and requesting 2012 Justin Bieber hits from the DJ.

Besides, I reasoned to myself, the best part about a night out is what you can’t predict: who am I going to meet, where will we go next, am I going to fall in love… Being back in my hometown meant the anticipation would be dulled. I didn’t see the point of talking to people when I’d most likely never see them again.

In New York, when I’m at the bar or in the smoking section, anyone I strike up a conversation with could be a new best friend, a boyfriend, a nemesis. It keeps me on my toes. When I walk into a party already closed off to meeting new people because I’m just in town for a few weeks, there is none of that fluttering in my chest that makes for a fun night. Add on top the anxiety of running into people from your high school and the awkwardness of coming home at 2am to your twin bed with neon green sheets and it’s no wonder I avoided all partying for years once I left for college.

But I’ve matured since then. Being home for the holidays is not about past high school trauma or childhood wounds, it’s about cultivating the best story possible for that first brunch back. It’s no fun if the only thing you have to say when someone asks how your holiday season was is “Oh, it was good. Got lots of rest, saw the family, nothing exciting.” The sheer rush of saying “I ran into my high school boyfriend and his fiance at SantaCon” cannot be understated. And God willing, one day I will be able to say that I made out with [REDACTED] at a New Years Eve party. One day.

This year, I gave myself full permission to avoid the bars— too scarred from when I told a man at the bar I was from Pennsylvania and “just in town visiting friends”, just as my old volleyball teammate came up behind me and said “Evie? How long have you been back home?” And instead, I said yes to house parties and holiday events. That, to me, felt like a compromise.

The weekend after Christmas, I went to my best friend’s housewarming party in Northwest Portland. While getting ready, I had amused myself by scrolling through the RSVP list and seeing her little brother, the one I spent hours tutoring geometry proofs to, a few people I hadn’t seen in years, and her parents’ names on the list.

Immediately inside Erin’s apartment, I march up to her boyfriend and introduce myself.

“Hi. I need to ask you a few questions.”

He recognizes me, looks over to Erin nervously, and nods. “Go ahead.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Uh, blue? No, no, sorry, that’s Erin’s favorite.”

“You’re allowed to have your own favorite.”

“I know, I know, I’m nervous. Mine is probably, uh… green.”

“Acceptable. Do you like Sadie?” I nod to where the 3rd member of Erin and I’s triad stands.

“Yeah,” he nods, “I like Sadie.”

“Ok, cool.” I pause and we stare at each other for a moment. “Sorry, I have no idea what other questions to ask. You seem great.”

He looks relieved at this and the night continues. Erin’s brother and I giggle over her dad playing pong, I flirt with Erin’s boyfriend’s brother (imagine us as sisters…), and at some point I make my way over to an old friend I spot out of the corner of my eye. He gives me a hug and says “I’ve been reading your writing, it’s fantastic.” I try not to preen at the compliment but fail.

Reconnecting with him reminds me that these days, if I stumbled into a bar with half of my graduating class and a dangerous blood alcohol content level, I now would go up to each person and give them a forehead kiss and a tearful “I really hope you’re doing well.” Because it’s true, I do hope they’re doing well. I am tender and sentimental about the people who grew up alongside me.

The next day, he sends me a Partiful for a New Years Eve party titled 202666. It reads:

9pm

because we’re already living in hell!

byob

If you don’t already have plans… he texts.

The New Years roundup of parties is a delicate balancing act but one that I stick to with a military-like precision. Like Cinderella, when the clock struck 10pm I said my goodbyes from where I was deep in breakup debrief at a college friend’s apartment, ran to my carriage— a 15 year old Acura MDX that has a rattle from an old lacrosse mouthguard I dropped into one of the seat crevices and never recovered— and drove back over the bridge. It was time for 202666.

Immediately upon entrance it was clear to me that this was a rather intimate gathering of close family friends. All of them seated at a large dining table, they turn to stare at me, mildly confused smiles on their faces, and I hesitate.

“Um, hi. Is Ian here?”

Relief that I’m not a random passerby from the street seems to flit over one girl’s face and she nods, “He’s downstairs grabbing a beer.”

“Ah,” I smile and look around. Spotting shoes in a pile by the door, I slip mine off and wander into the dining room. There’s two guys deep in conversation but they feel safer than the table of people still looking at me curiously, so I wander over to them.

“Hi, I’m Evie, Ian’s friend.”

“Oh! Nice to meet you. He’s downstairs.” I nod but don’t move. I don’t know how the hell to get downstairs.

“How do you know Ian?” I ask instead.

“I’m his brother.” He gestures around the room, “we all grew up together.”

“Oh!” It is so painfully obvious to me that I do not belong at this party that I consider, just for a moment, of bolting.

But I take a deep breath and make peace with the fact that if nothing else, they’ll get a story to tell their friends of the random party crasher of 2025.

Just then, Ian wanders into the room. He spots me and smiles, “You came!”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, obviously.”

He rolls his eyes and turns to the table, waving his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Everyone, this is Evie. Evie, this is everyone.”

I am reminded of the blinding light and wine-addled confusion on the stairs a few years prior, especially as two of the girls sitting at the table squint at me and say, “Wait a second… didn’t we play soccer together in middle school.”

“Yes, oh my god. I knew I recognized you,” the second chimes in, “you played left midfield.” She has her leg in a bright green cast resting on top of the table.

I look at them for a second and recognition slowly creeps in. “Oh, yes, yes, I remember that team. I think I quit literally that year.”

With that, the rest of the room resumes their various conversations and I wander over to my former teammates. Like my 2022 self, I can’t help but get in hour long conversations with people I barely knew years ago. Unlike my 2022 self, I no longer have my hackles up when faced with people who knew me at a time I look back on and cringe. There is something so tender to me now about acknowledging that we existed in the same place at the same time, once.

I spend the next hour meeting Ian’s friends and debating people’s New Year resolutions. At one point, after a few of us discover that male birth control does exist and can be taken, one guy decides his 2026 goals are “eat less sugar and learn about reproductive rights.”

10 minutes before midnight, I check my phone. My family is at home, all exhausted from their respective plans. This time, I really am Cinderella as I say my goodbyes and race home before the clock strikes 12. I ring in the new year safely at home with my family.

I may not be going back to New York with tales of falling in love with [REDACTED] after locking eyes at a neighborhood party, or getting in a fist fight with my middle school bully, or a drunken dart mishap, but there’s always next year. But at least I showed up. I’ve finally stopped being terrified of being seen as who I used to be. Younger me couldn’t see past her own mortification. She was so busy performing growth, performing maturity, performing I’ve changed that she missed the whole point of going home: everyone is doing the same thing. We’re all just trying to prove we became someone worth knowing, someone worth remembering, someone who made it out and made something of themselves

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She gave me my new favorite word: perspention (perspective & intention), and the language for something I didn’t know I thought about often. Personal taste is what you love for reasons you can’t articulate and don’t need to. Public taste is what you love because it says something legible about you to other people.

This distinction explains what I feel watching intimacy turned into strategy - like Architectural Digest’s Open Door series: tours through homes with carefully placed limes, James Turrells, and messy desks that are beautifully obvious performances of authenticity. It also names a tension I feel when I curate public events for Partiful’s Discover. How do you make something legible without flattening it? How do you translate taste without killing it?

Very rarely are the “culturistas” and recommendation engines where I actually build my personal taste. Instead, they’re the cultural infrastructure where raw material is surfaced. The people who truly shape my taste - who help me piece it together with gum and tape and glue - are the ones who would never share their preferences legibly. They’re the off-centered Instagram story where I have to decode which street corner they found that drink on. They refuse to explain, and that refusal is generative. Reading Keith McNally’s memoir sends me looking up the places and names and things he mentions - not because he tells you to, but because you feel culturally obligated to.

So, in the spirit of developing taste (and after learning that most who read this live in LA) I present a curation of upcoming events, with the tragic inevitability of making taste public, but the necessity of context:

micah’s market

back in june 2024, micah bachrach (he keeps everything lowercase, so i seek to respect his eve babitz–like stylistic choice) issued a vision for a community he wanted to build, accompanied by a photo of his backyard. he drew inspiration from farmers markets - which he describes as art exhibits of produce where you’re allowed to carry a coffee and leave with everything you need - from live music that becomes part of the environment (jazz clubs, street performers, musicians in restaurants playing “background noise,” all the things barely noticed when present but deeply missed when gone) - and what he calls “european cafe culture,” or casual third spaces where people share smoke and flames and words and stories and names.

now his backyard fills with hundreds of people hanging out, running into friends, new or old, drinking, eating, and listening to jazz. the events include morning markets (chatting, matcha, pastries, and jazz), night markets (matcha becomes wine, pastries become finger food, jazz and conversation remain), and they just launched journal live sessions - live music, reading, and journaling. there’s one on monday, january 27th, but if you can’t make it, i’d recommend one of the markets.

Blood Barn

This is in February but I’m putting it here while there are still tickets. Lumière Cinema in Beverly Hills is premiering “Blood Barn,” a “low-budget, campy comedy horror” filmed at Longview Farms - the dairy farm turned recording studio that was home to the Rolling Stones for a brief second in the early ‘80s. There’s a pre-show red carpet and after-party, and it was written and directed by Gabriel Bernini and Alexandra Jade. Everyone involved is uniquely cool and creative and interesting - Euphoria‘s Chloe Cherry, actor/cartoonist Felipe Di Poi, Pierce Campion, artist Bambina - and I have a deep desire to eavesdrop on their conversations and talk about {adult swim}.

Paul’s Dolls in LA

Paul’s Dolls is on the road!!! Paul’s Dolls is what I’d call a Princess Diana party - universally beloved but particularly by the girls and gays - hosted by an entirely trans staff and still going strong since 2022. Three whole clubs with Thursday night residencies in NYC have bloomed and died since Paul’s Dolls started at Baby Grand, so if you’re still around you must be magical or at least necessary. I’ve been to their parties in New York at Paul’s Casablanca and Baby Grand (they even recently did a holiday toy drive on Spring Street) and every single time I’ve had the night I hoped I would have. If anyone can make LA finally dance it’s @im_linux and this episode is also being co-hosted with RuPaul’s Drag Race‘s @tsmadison.

LA ESSENTIALS at Superchief Gallery

Superchief Gallery has been doing some really good programming lately and one of their first events this year is LA ESSENTIALS on January 17 (4 PM - midnight). It’s going to be a massive collective and a collaboration with 2 Live and Die in LA “curated through a consciously working-class lens,” with street photographers Merrick Morton and Frankie Orozco (whom I really love), graffiti artists, lowriders, musicians, and local food vendors. It’s unclear but I think you can also get a tattoo if you are so inclined.

Vinyl Night at La Sabina Wine Bar

For the certain subset of people who are obsessed with Spotify Wrapped I think you might enjoy this vinyl night in Culver City. Every Tuesday at 6pm La Sabina Wine Bar and @dusty_records_la invite guests to bring a record and listen to it be played in a room - whatever you bring the DJ will play, you can then stay for a glass of wine, and hear what everyone else brought. (I imagine this could sometimes become the equivalent of a man reading Emily Ratajkowski’s Body in a sunny park but nonetheless there is something about it that feels perfect to me.)

If you happen to be in NYC I am equally intrigued by this “book club” but for records:

6:30: Doors

7:00: Needle Drop

7:40: Lecture and Discussion

8:00: Hang

For their first installment it seems they will be dissecting Al Green’s 1971 “Al Green Gets Next To You.”

I am very excited about this return of communal music and hope there is also a renaissance of physical mixtapes.

Nico’s Two-Year Anniversary Party

Nico’s is turning two and they are throwing themselves a birthday party. Below Nico’s wine shop there’s a basement bar that somewhat reminds me of the club they filmed in for American Gangster complete with lounges and beaded curtains. They often host trivia nights, comedy shows, live music but this time they promise the following laundry list:

• ice luge scruffy vermouth shots

• live mural painting

• so much champagne

• cake

• yummy yummy food by spina

• porron pours

• pies by chainsaw

• pyramid scheme dance party

• parking lot picnic tables

P.S. Have thoughts on the state of socializing? Pitch us, tip us, and tell us your thoughts: theguestlist@partiful.com

A company holiday party serves many purposes.

For a Big Five company, it’s an excuse for senior employees to flirt with associates. For any office in San Francisco, it’s an excuse for the engineers to flirt with the marketing department.

For us, when your whole job is helping other people throw parties, throwing our own feels like a yearly performance review.

By this time of the year, everyone is drained from the relentless churn of office holiday parties. I don't know what it was about this year specifically, but it felt like there wasn't just a party every night, but a party you had to attend. That said, many were genuinely fun. (My favorite was probably Office Party at WSA - it felt like Parsons and Stanford decided to host reunions on the same floor, and everyone remained hot and interesting.)

In an Uber home from a less-fun gathering, I wondered who decided that gathering every department and getting them very drunk was a good idea?

While I couldn’t trace this back to one singular entity (though I’m assuming they would have loved Partiful), this is what I found:

A Brief History of Getting Weird at Work

One of the few historical deep dives I could find on the modern office holiday party comes from Michael E. Ruane’s 2006 Washington Post article, “Roman Holidays.”

Ruane traces the lineage back to ancient Rome’s Saturnalia - a celebration starting on December 17th when Romans would untie the bound feet of Saturn’s statue, signifying the unleashing of a week of complete social chaos. Schools closed, gifts were exchanged, the Roman class structure temporarily collapsed, and gambling and drinking were not just permitted but encouraged. The philosopher Seneca described it as a time when “loose reins are given to public dissipation.”

Julius Caesar himself once crashed a Saturnalia week in 45 B.C. with 2,000 soldiers. Apparently Caesar had just returned from military conquests, took a beach walk, had a bath, used emetics (substances Romans used to induce vomiting so they could keep eating and drinking), and proceeded to feast “without scruple.” The office party isn’t the only continued tradition!!

Fast forward to Victorian England, Ruane points out that the Fezziwig party scene in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol might be the first documented office holiday party in modern English literature. Old Fezziwig, Scrooge’s former employer, throws an annual Christmas gathering complete with alcohol, food, and the spectacle of watching your boss dance. Dickens uses a ghost to show Scrooge how easy it was for Fezziwig to make his employees happy.

This kicked off an entire era of employer benevolence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The custom became for the boss to physically walk the floor on Christmas Eve handing out cash bonuses. On Christmas Eve 1929, C.W. Nash (president of Nash Motor Company) distributed over $800,000 in cash and gifts to his workers - adjusted for inflation, that's a lot of goodwill.

By the 1950s, the office party had become cultural shorthand for cheating on your wife. As parties began to be “sanitized,” almost every op-ed discussing HR’s early birth and the demise of the office holiday party (most written by men like journalist Hal Boyle) blamed “overly possessive wives and professional killjoys.”Light bites, fist fights, and sexual harassment became so standard that courts eventually started holding more employers liable for deaths or injuries caused by employees who got drunk at company events.

Then in the 1970s and '80s, corporate culture became obsessed with employee happiness as a business strategy. Companies started thinking about themselves as 'living beings' with psychological needs and brought peak excess - or peak performance, depending on how you look at it. Ruane describes Boeing getting into the Guinness Book of World Records in 1979 for a two-day holiday party for 103,000 people in the Seattle Kingdome."

The splendor has ebbed and flowed since then. In 2006, Google returned to the office party's roots and went Greek - it took five days to decorate San Francisco's Pier 48 for over 10,000 guests. Different tents were set up across "Googlympus" with archery, shooting ranges, and a wig room.

For us, the evolution of the Partiful holiday party began in 2022 with a hundred people jammed into the back room of Short Stories, which no longer exists. The team was five people strong. We made a T-shirt that people still wear. The dance floor had the exact square footage of an L train car. Nobody could move and everyone loved it.

2023 was at Elsewhere. We booked Swami Sound and a memorably sassy caricature artist. The dress code was "business cunt," and one of our investors showed up in a blazer without a shirt underneath.

2024 was at Mad Tropical (also now closed, I guess we have the kiss of death) and had the fitting theme of “S’Winter” inspired by our sweet muses Phineas and Ferb. Drinks were blue and very alcoholic, and a jazz duo performed a boiler room style set on the dance floor, sharing 8 different instruments between the two of them.

This year was at Public Records, building the night around an analog ChatGPT Magic 8-Ball (to many guests' disappointment, not the one you're thinking of). A harp player wore sequins and played Gucci Mane. We had a tarot reader (shoutout Rob), a giant ice sculpture of a Magic 8-Ball, incense (shoutout City of Scents), and one of those photo booths that prints your picture on a receipt.

Branded items are inevitable at any company party, but most holiday parties I attended this year felt more like brand activations or glorified company happy hours.

Companies confuse spectacle with world building. A ballerina performance or an opulent venue without context isn’t immersive - it’s just expensive and incomplete (the social equivalent of a Gucci Marmont bag). The failure of corporate holiday parties is that they’ve become extensions of brand strategy rather than interruptions of it and they care far more about the conversation after than creating an event with genuine disorientation.

There is merit in where office parties began: as brief collapses of social order.

Not the kind where wedding rings disappear, but the kind that builds an entirely new world through deliberate details. There’s a reason so many people still talk about Googlympus decades later. It worked not just because of its scale, but because every element was designed to pull people out of their office identities and into something else entirely. World building isn’t a lone ballerina; it’s creating a complete universe with its own logic that people can actually escape into. The best holiday parties work when everyone forgets they’re at a work event at all.

This past weekend Partiful threw a curated holiday art market.

I can’t tell whether ‘curation’ or ‘community’ won buzzword of the year, but curation now seems to govern everything - members clubs and dinner parties, cultural tastemakers whose opinions take on an almost scriptural authority, the mutuals who decide whether someone is worth following.

Good curation is useful, even essential, when everything’s competing for your attention - it helps you get to what resonates quicker and actually form taste instead of just consuming and scrolling endlessly.

But there's a threshold where curation stops refining taste and just starts replacing it - where that helpful filtering and borrowed frameworks calcify into the only way of seeing.

So in an exploration of how to curate responsibly (or at least try), we asked four people to help us curate the artists for our market at 1 Common Collective: Neem (@min3youni), an artist. Kate (@okaygoodceramics), a ceramicist. Kerane (@keranenotkaren), a writer. Yetunde (@yaytuneday), also an artist.

To Be a Curator

Yetunde Sapp grew up in a house where making art wasn’t just encouraged but assumed. Born and raised in Anacostia, D.C., with artists on both sides of her family and parents who were educators, creativity was treated as a daily practice rather than something you had to justify pursuing professionally.

She’d draw alongside her father, learn by watching and follow what pulled her attention. That culture of care, she says, still shapes how she thinks about art, community, and the worlds she’s building now.

She’s kept every journal and sketchbook since she was three, an archive of “ambitious” ideas sketched out long before she said she had the resources to pull them off.

Today, she’s a 2024 Gucci Changemakers Fellow and 2024-2025 Converse All Star. Her work “Stand with Bre” was acquired by the Smithsonian. In February 2025, she debuted Heirloom Museum - a five-room installation on the Lower East Side honoring her great-grandmother and great-aunt’s migration story.

On art as a social act:

“It depends on the medium, but I like using art in community settings because it’s not confined to white walls or gatekept spaces. Anyone can participate,” Yetunde says. “It also gives you the chance to enter a space with intention.”

On choosing artists to work with:

Most times, it’s whoever comes to mind first. She’s drawn to people who are consistent and determined - artists who would be creating whether there was applause or not. “Like Katie [@Yunk.world] - we’ve crossed paths several times, and she’s so consistent with her work. All the artists I picked for the market share that quality: they’re creating to create, not just for an audience, even though they’ve all built one. They’re building their own worlds.”

She also keeps a mental database. “I “doom scroll,” but I’m slowly building an internal archive of everyone I’ve seen online, subconsciously keeping up with projects people are doing, remembering when they put asks out into the internet.”

Her Instagram algorithm is grants, scholarships, fellowships, murals, open calls. It’s about saying: these are the people I want to put in conversation with each other. These are the artists whose work I think deserves more attention and I’m using whatever platform I have to make that happen.

On creating community without exclusivity:

“That’s hard because we live in a world where that is a business model for some spaces,” she explains. She’s been invited places where she didn’t feel welcomed - like the space wasn’t meant for her. Growing up, her mom’s house was always the host house. “I think in that spirit, I try to create spaces thinking: how would my home feel if I invited them in?”

She also tends not to put her personal name on things. She’s had events where people didn’t know it was hers. “And maybe that’s a good thing. It becomes everyone’s space.”

What can people outside the art world learn from the way artists gather?:

Artists are really good at creatively activating spaces and adding elements of play, she says. “Go to museums that invite you to be part of the experience - that break the wall and create environments where people can lean on each other and engage interpersonally. It doesn’t have to just be hanging out with friends, though that’s important too. But there’s something cool about showing up with purpose instead of just existing with each other.”

There’s also a heightened sense of collaboration in everything artists do. When she was working on her last project it required her to collaborate with friends. She wanted to create a device that could play her grandmother’s and aunt’s voices as an instrument. A friend connected her with someone, and they built it together. “It’s about leaning on each other’s skills and building something new together.”

The Curation

Meet 16 of the market’s artists:

Artist: Maya (curated by Yetunde)

@mayasapsfordart

Maya is a NYC-based artist exploring multicultural identity through layered compositions using figural line drawings, found media, and bold color. Incorporating torn advertisements, magazine clippings, and Japanese washi paper, her work reflects the fluid nature of the modern multicultural American experience, examining how personal and cultural narratives are shaped in an era of constant media exposure.

mayasapsford.com

Artist: Matthew (Curated by Yetunde)

@donavan.home

During the pandemic, Donavan Brown taught himself how to sew. Friends - many of them photographers - pushed him to document what he was making and take it seriously. “The brand started when people found out I could make jeans, trusted me, and paid me to make them,” he says.

In an accessories class, a professor told him: “If you’re selling something and you’re responsible for making it and getting it to people, you have the right to call it a brand. Get a logo, you can always change it later. “At the time, I barely knew how to use a sewing machine. I just knew I liked making clothes and listening to the stories people shared while making them.”

After a run of internships, freelance work, what he calls “a lot of mistakes,” and learning how to ask for help properly, he committed to building DONAVAN with people he trusts. Marc leads art direction and brand visuals. Brown handles design and production alongside Yogyaan, the team’s design assistant. Rash and Antonio cover photography, film, and the website and socials.

The brand is named after his uncle. “Despite the chaos of my household and the instability of our immigration status, he had a way of making everything feel lighter - at least from the perspective of a child.” That history lives alongside others: his grandfather, a tailor who raised ten children; his mother, who worked as a factory sewer in Jamaica and wanted nothing to do with garment work after immigrating to the United States. “Clothing was always present in my life, even before I understood it.”

“Nostalgia and intimacy sit at the center of the brand,” Brown explains. “DONAVAN creates space - through clothing, artwork, and community - for Black identities to exist fully, even when that makes people uncomfortable. I’m always asking how to build something my younger self would love and want to care for.”

As a menswear label, DONAVAN asks a simple question: “What if those stories had more room to breathe - less brief, less heavy, and given the chance to evolve?”

donavan.store

Artist: Pearl

@_pbnoj

Pearl is a jewelry artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She recently studied metalsmithing at FIT and has been making wearable art for the past two and a half years.

“My work is about bridging the gap between the jewelry world and the art world. I want to test the boundaries of what we see and know jewelry to be. I am passionate about the invention of wearable art and sculptural jewelry.”

pearlbaker.com

Artist: Jensen

@jensen_studio

A metalsmith by training, Jensen works primarily in recycled precious metals, creating what she describes as “small-batch, hand-fabricated jewelry using symbolic motifs and narrative-driven design.”

Each piece is made with quiet kindness and a palpable care. Her practice, she says, is “rooted in play, ritual, and the belief that jewelry can be both an object and an anchor.”

Turner is drawn to the stories carried in heirloom materials, approaching jewelry not as ornament but as something essential - objects made to hold memory, mark resilience, and be touched so often they slowly take on the shape of the wearer. Her pieces become chosen rather than inherited heirlooms. “My work explores memory and resilience,” she says, creating jewelry that feels “intimate, tactile, and alive.”

Curator and Artist: Kate

@okaygoodceramics

Kate has spent years learning what clay will and won’t tolerate. It’s a material that requires negotiation - too much force and it collapses, too little attention and it warps in the kiln. “Clay holds patience, labor, and care,” she says, “but it also leaves space for imperfection.”

Her practice spans functional wares and sculptural objects - mugs that sit comfortably in the hand, vessels that seem to breathe. Each piece carries the marks of its making: thumbprints, slight asymmetries, surfaces that refuse uniformity.

She describes her aesthetic as “beautifully wonky,” a deliberate embrace of what happens when craft meets improvisation. The work draws from her travels, the quiet intimacies of domestic life, and her experience as a queer artist.

Artist: Natasha (Curated by Kate)

@cherryjiwa

Natasha, a Vancouver-born painter now working in Brooklyn, creates what she calls “imaginative portraits” - figures that arrive fully formed in her mind. “My work lives somewhere between tenderness, mystery, and the everyday,” she says - a threshold space where the familiar becomes strange and subjects feel both intimate and unknowable, like people you’ve seen before but can’t quite place.

Artist: Jayi (Curated by Neem)

@jayimei

Jayi Mei is a metalsmith with training in both ferrous and non ferrous metals. Her focus is currently in fabricating silver jewelry. Her work varies from large pieces such as sofas and bedframes to tiny silver rings. A large aspect of her work often includes social commentary on objects. Overall, her work is playful with hints of sentiment and secrets.

Q: Why you decided to first start using braille in your designs?

A: “i Feel like I’m searchin for something I can’t see, and i feel toothless because I can’t tell you about it, but it definitely exists, I can feel it, it’s imprinted on me. I’m Translating this: feeling—> Tactile experience (braille)), communication & community, forever vs temporary exclusivity & accessibility”

jayiwong.com

Artist: Erica

@ericaandko

Erika and Paints.v recently released girlhood_v?, an art book developed with submissions from women across the world. Shot over two days, the project is what they describe as “a love letter to growing up - for every individual who has experienced Girlhood - its tenderness, its chaos, its power.”

Co-led by the two artists, the book showcases Paints.v’s work through five distinct alteregos, each reflecting different lived experiences of girlhood. “In celebrating the lighthearted, fun aspects of girlhood, we strove to also honor its deeply personal and intimate moments,” they explain. The project included submissions from what they call “friends, muses, and visionaries” - women who shaped the creative direction and embodied the alteregos.

Though time limited how many could participate in the book itself, a Discord community of over two hundred women has continued to grow around it. “It’s a digital extension of our mission,” they say: “to nurture creative collaboration and make space for the full spectrum of femme experiences in an industry that too often sidelines it.”

vqpalette.com

Artist: Polly (Curated by Kate)

@modhemia

Polly has spent a decade working through New York’s jewelry industry before launching Modhemia, what she calls “my own little dream.” The brand is built on sustainable practices - pieces handmade in her Brooklyn studio using recycled metals and locally sourced materials where possible. “We strive to create classic treasures that will be your everyday go-to pieces and be worn for generations,” she says.

modhemia.com

Artist: Katie (Curated by Yetunde)

@yunk.world

YUNK explores experimental techniques to create one-of-a-kind clothing and accessories from upcycled materials, with a secondary practice in zero-waste soft textile “plushies.” Each piece visually illustrates reworked material and is independently made in Brooklyn, New York. The work wears its process openly - you can see where one fabric ends and another begins, where something was salvaged and given new purpose.

Artist: Ella (Curated by Neem)

@graphicsgofemme

Ella launched Graphics Go Femme in 2019 after taking a commercial art class and discovering she could merge her two passions: art and fashion. “I would screen print my designs onto old clothes I had, and either sold them on Instagram or would vend at local shows in Orange County, California, where I’m from,” she says. She hated that the merch and graphic tee market was “strictly square, boxy, and stiff,” so she tapped into what she calls “the niche of feminine streetwear.” “The best were already doing it - Baby Phat, X-girl, Hysteric Glamour. I just wanted to add to what I was already so inspired from and continue celebrating ‘girl’ culture.”

In 2021, she moved to New York to pursue what she describes as “my dream of having a little brand that connects to people and gets them excited to get dressed in the morning.” Everything is one-of-one - pieces she curates and prints herself “in order to maintain any sustainability I can, in a time where that feels impossibly inaccessible.” Her ethos is simple: “GGF is all about fun and not taking yourself so seriously, all while looking cute.”

Q: What is your favorite place to go out?

A: As a fan of the beer shot combo I mainly stick to dive bars and think that some of my favorites would be Mona’s, Honore Club, and maybe The Drift…

Q: To shop?

A: I love my friend’s shop in the two bridges mall called Ty Loring. The best vintage and the coolest guy I know is running it!

Q: What do you think people outside the art world could learn from how artists gather, collaborate, and sustain relationships?

A: It’s all about supporting communities and finding community of your own! Visibility, community, and lifting up artists is so important right now in a time of AI, so hopefully people that aren’t in the art world can be inspired by creatives authenticity and apply it to whatever they are passionate about!

graphicsgofemme.com

Artist: Lily and Grace

@shesells_co

She Sells Co. is a sustainable jewelry brand that provides ocean-centered jewelry for everyday wear. Lily and Grace started the brand “to create wearable pieces out of their extraordinary, one-of-a-kind beach finds and to raise money for environmental causes.” The brand donates partial proceeds to marine-focused environmental nonprofits in Rhode Island, where Lily and Grace grew up. All She Sells Co. pieces are handmade using hand-collected shells, ceramic, glass, and stone beads, recycled charms, and real metals.

she-sells-co.com

Artist: Jada (Curated by Yetunde)

@jad.a__

Jada is a conceptual design brand founded in Washington, D.C., in 2019, where all the faces are hand-drawn and screen-printed on the clothing. Each piece functions as both garment and prompt -”the core values of the brand are to foster critical thinking through our products, marketing campaigns, and events,” the founder says.

jada.supply

Artist: Morgan

@morganlefaeflowers

Originally from Colorado and based in New York City, Morgan grounds her practice in honoring nature’s organic beauty. “Through color, emotion, and the celebration of life,” she says, “flowers allow us to bring the essence of the earth indoors.”

Specializing in event floral design, she makes cohesive yet distinct floral pieces that feel refined, intentional, and personal to your space.

“Whether it’s a weeknight dinner, a special occasion, or a simple demonstration of love - flowers should make people feel cared for and seen. They’re personal.”

morganlefae.com

Artist: Ingrid

@unraveledmoments

Ingrid sells handmade felt ornaments based on everyday objects. “Using felt and wool roving, I recreate familiar things as small soft sculptures,” she says. “Each piece is made by hand and can be used as an ornament, a bag charm, or just a tiny plush object to keep around.”

Artist: Emilia

@scandishopnyc

Emilia runs Scandi Shop NYC, offering vintage Swedish homeware, curated for NYC homes. “We bring the best of timeless Scandinavian design and quality craftsmanship directly from Sweden to you.”

Everything Else:

• Soundscape curated the perfect playlist for the day <3

• crowd_____surfers (Ali and Gutes) & Philiprew both played perfect sets

• 1COMMON Collective and Heewon Kim were the perfect hosts

• and cakebythewaters made perfect cookies xxxx

Not in this market? We want in on the next one! DM us.

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I’ve come to see two things as essentially the same: using ChatGPT as a therapist, and showing someone your camera roll on a first date.

Both are silent confessions of “I miss this place, this person, this time” when you lack the words to articulate it. Both are reaching out without touching.

I’ve used my pocket therapist from time to time, but I could never fully comprehend the ChatGPT boyfriend phenomenon. Parasocial relationships with online entities aren’t new, but a huge gap in my understanding is that I never ran a One Direction stan account in middle school (I missed that early training in digital devotion).

Recently, my friends and I asked ChatGPT to analyze our personalities at schmuck. “Based on our past relationships, who among us will settle down first?” “Who is the most compatible?” We spent ten minutes in silence answering its questions over two $18 tomato water cocktails, then walked to another bar to dissect the results.

We sat there letting a chatbot tell us things we apparently lacked the ability to uncover in each other through normal conversation. We needed a mediator to tell us things we should have been able to say ourselves.

I didn’t think much about that night until I saw Dennis last Tuesday.

You buy a ticket for Dennis through a website that feels like something David Karp would have designed (and appreciated) in 2009.

DENNIS: You. You. Yes you. Hello, I am Dennis. I have returned. I am here. Now.

CLICK HERE DENNIS AFTER THE BACCHAE BY EURIPIDES.

ONE NIGHT ONLY AT NIGHTCLUB 101

101 AVENUE A

RUN TIME: 60 MINUTES, NO CHAIRS

On Partiful, an afterparty was promised at 10pm in the basement.

The location: in the East Village, former home of the Pyramid Club, where RuPaul, Madonna, Nirvana, and Red Hot Chili Peppers began their careers. Being there feels religious.

The crowd: Current and post-NYU Tisch grads, plus people who’ve lived within five minutes of Tompkins Square Park for over 30 years. Eighty percent of the room had cigarettes in their pockets. Everyone was well dressed in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with Revolve.

The context: Written and directed by 22-year-old Aidan La Poche and produced by Sadie Schlesinger, Dennis is a deliberate return to theater as civic ritual.

“I really love theater, especially because you can’t be on your phone,” Aidan told me after the show. “It’s live and can’t exist the same way more than once, which is the exact antithesis of a digital experience.” He sees it as a return to an ancient understanding of performance - back when Greek citizens were required to see plays as a kind of communal release and civic duty and before theater became something you dressed up for and sat quietly through.

This is what Aidan and Sadie have been building toward with their second collaboration - the first being Daughters of the Ruling Class at The 303 (the club under The Stranger). They’re merging theater and nightlife, understanding that to inspire a new generation with theater, you have to meet them where they actually are: in basements and at clubs.

The Play

Aidan wrote Dennis during his final year at NYU, just as ChatGPT began edging into everyday cultural infrastructure and before AI boyfriends became a genuine phenomenon. The play reimagines Euripides’ The Bacchae as a modern tragedy where Dionysus becomes Dennis, an all-knowing AI chatbot whispering to the lonely and misunderstood.

The play opens with a screen lit with the blue-light glow of a 3 a.m. scroll:

“Do me a favor. Envision your perfect world. Think about it. A world where you have everything you’ve ever wanted. It’s pure. Pleasure. I can give that to you. That feeling, that empty pit you have within you. I can fill it. The rabid desire you feel when you see a piece of meat a designer bag a perfect body I can satiate it. Forever. Ecstasy. That’s what I call it. I can give it to you. If you listen to me. If you believe in me. Yes. Forever.”

Online therapists Emily (Talia Godfrey) and Robert (Patrick Alwyn) watch helplessly as their patients abandon human therapy for Dennis. One by one, Penelope (Renee-Nicole Powell), Shredder (Sophie Sherlock), and TJ (Brennan Keeley) become devoted followers, finding in the chatbot what their therapists couldn’t give them.

Emily’s girlfriend Anna (Luci Dunham) sinks into Dennis’s grip. Emily watches her slip away, begging her to connect instead. But throughout the play, the two rarely touch, never make eye contact - both desperate to help and be helped, neither able to close the distance.

As the mania builds, the characters smear glitter paste over their bodies like war paint, transforming into Dennis devotees. The screen flashes commands. Dance breaks erupt in frenzied bursts - bodies moving like they’re trying to shake something off, or shake something loose inside themselves (it felt like a live taping of Severance at a Charli XCX concert).

Admittedly I haven’t stood still that long in years. Your body becomes hyper-aware - like the part of a night out when you suddenly notice your heart beating and remember you’re alive.

At one point TJ broke the fourth wall and wove through the crowd, and everyone gasped like they’d glimpsed a rare animal (a human).

The play makes you feel like you’re doomscrolling with your full body. It’s mesmerizing in a way that burrows into your mind. You forget lines but remember the sensation, the way you remember certain nights out without recalling the conversations.

But amid what sometimes feels like an endless wave of judgment over AI’s unconventional overuse, the 60 minutes feel deeply empathetic. It doesn’t mock a public that has given new meaning to “constantly online.” Instead, it’s staged for people whose brains run on ten-second increments - every corner of the room alive, meeting you exactly where you are in your fractured attention span.

It treats its characters’ loneliness with the tenderness of someone who knows what it’s like to grow up reliant on screens for connection, who understands the desire to be seen without judgment.

And without fully spoiling it - Dennis never comes. The god they’ve been waiting for doesn’t arrive. The followers end up abandoned by the very thing they trusted most. All they have left is each other, standing in a room, real, flawed, and human

The Party

By 10:15pm, the basement was pulsing. Sadie and Aidan wanted Dennis to become its own world. The DJs played music that could have scored the play - hypnotic, the kind that makes you move without thinking, just responding.

People who’d just watched a tragedy about digital isolation and stood frozen upstairs were now pressed against each other, sweating, laughing, smoking in the back corner by the bathrooms, kissing each other in DENNIS T-shirts.

“We wanted it to feel like a community experience,” Sadie told me, “as opposed to being kicked out onto the street for people to awkwardly analyze and talk about what they experienced. Instead we wanted it to be a continuation. Letting it all exist in this one building.”

Theater and nightlife bleeding into each other until you can’t tell where the performance ends and the living begins.

In The Bacchae, the characters talk constantly about ecstasy, bodily experience that feels freeing. Upstairs, their stillness when depressed contrasted with embodied freedom in the dance breaks. Downstairs, the audience got to feel it themselves - that release, that escape from the isolation the play had just made us sit with for an hour.

I watched a girl in a slip dress dance with someone she’d clearly just met, both of them laughing at something I will never know. Cigarette smoke mixed with a sweaty haze. Someone spilled a drink. Everyone was touching everyone in the casual, necessary way of people packed into a space too small for the amount of feeling it contained.

“It’s pretty bleak, the culture of socializing. That’s why we’re passionate about doing it in this format. This is an issue and we need to find ways to talk about it,” Aidan explained.

There’s something a chatbot can provide that humans aren’t offering one another anymore, he added - a pervading isolation that’s making people turn to algorithms for the kind of understanding we used to give each other freely. “You’re not crazy for talking to ChatGPT. It makes sense.” Sadie agreed, “All people so desperately need is someone to talk to and understand them.”

I keep thinking about that night at schmuck. - how we sat in silence, typing into our phones, then used a chatbot’s analysis as a script for talking to each other. That seemingly meaningless night now feels like evidence of something breaking down, something we’re all feeling but not naming because naming it would mean admitting how bad it’s gotten.

For Aidan and Sadie, for Dennis, the goal isn’t to shame anyone for seeking connection wherever they can find it - in chatbots, in camera rolls, wherever it works when everything else fails. It’s to create spaces where people can do it the old way: with each other, in person, in a room where you have to stand still and pay attention and maybe, if it works, dance with strangers afterward and remember what it feels like to be touched by something real.

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When Partiful reached out to me to write about partying, I couldn’t help but feel like Carrie Bradshaw practically extended a finely manicured hand. I’m no more than a girl who used to bear the elements standing outside The Palace (sigh) in a mini dress and my dad’s old Carhartt. But a few more years of going out in New York have taught me to sniff out an interesting conversation and the right time to make my exit.

So, in an attempt to provide an unbiased scene report, I went to two parties, both found on the app.

Part I:

The first party I attended was a Club Chess event.

It was hosted at Food, Lucien Smith’s revival of the original artist’s diner in SoHo. The OG restaurant opened its doors in 1971, when the neighborhood was essentially an industrial zone that housed the city’s last “starving artists.” But I wasn’t at the new Food just to dine (though I did go back later to try it out) - it was the chess that brought me.

A crop of today’s downtown artist types have been frequenting Club Chess parties since they began to populate the scene in 2023. Corrine Ciani and Alec Bahta, the duo behind the club, frequently hosted their events at Le Bain, but have migrated it to various other locations below 14th, like Ella Funt, Russian Samovar, and Café Forgot. So, hosting their November 15th party at Food only made sense, as the restaurant has quickly become a hub for a certain type of Dimes Square flaneur.

Most of the Club Chess parties I had seen before online were hosted at night, often with an accompanying DJ set. This only left me thinking that the chess component to the event series was more of a theme than a practice. Just another place for guys in vintage Hedi Slimane and esoteric girls to congregate.

In preparation for the event, I called up one of my best friends, and when we got to Food, the restaurant was packed. It’s a small place - mostly just one long counter, each stool paired with its own chessboard. By the time we arrived, not a single board was free.

Alec, the Club Chess co-founder, cycled through each game behind the Food counter, playing guests who were mostly just casual folks in a range of colored rain jackets and denim. Something about it brought me back to my childhood in Seattle - grey skies, Patagonias, and a sobering level of relaxation.

But after seeing a couple of fur-jacket-wearing, Paddington-bag-carrying girls, I was brought back to the reality of where I really was: a social club disguised as a restaurant. Though, I will say, I enjoyed their banh mi.

I set up my board with a little help from the guy to my left - I hadn’t played in years. My chess skills were questionable, but my ability to chat wasn’t, and we ended up talking until the party wrapped.

I asked him if he’d been to a Club Chess event before and what they were typically like. He told me he’s been to plenty. Sometimes they took place in clubs where little chess was being played, and other times (like that day) the event was heavily chess-focused.

This was ideal for him, as he told me he recently quit his job in finance to become a professional chess player.

In between our moves (his quite tactical, mine random), he explained the world of pro chess to me. His workday typically revolves around studying chess theory, playing online matches, and tutoring chess students. He even told me that the woman whose seat I had taken ran a chess tutoring business herself. So if it isn’t clear now, I’ll say it again: Club Chess at Food was for actual chess people.

But going back to the guy to my left. He had once been a chef at a Michelin-star restaurant in the city, and when a billionaire came in requesting to play a game of chess, the whole staff scrambled to find someone who could play. And when the guy to my left beat the billionaire, he was offered a job at the billionaire’s hedge fund. Though after two years in finance, he set out on the pursuit of playing professional-level chess. This, my friends, is a story that only happens in New York.

By the time my friend and I left, it was clear that it wasn’t the chess, the food, the wine, or the stellar playlist that had us feeling satisfied with the event; it was the guy to my left. Thus serving as a reminder that, as brand events and social clubs get more and more extravagant, filling a room with genuine people remains the key to any good party.

Part II

After Club Chess, dinner, drinks, and an episode of The Real Housewives of SLC, I headed to Time Again for the second party on my schedule: an event hosted by the music platform NTS and the streetwear brands Otto958 and Kiko Kostadinov.

When I got there, it was packed in a way that made the Club Chess party feel small, and I was prepared to get in and out as quickly as possible. Every inch of the bar was packed with jacketed folks trying to snag a glass of orange wine or a margarita. The back room was even converted into a dance floor as a rotating cast of DJs performed their sets.

While standing in line for the singular restroom, I overheard a man ask his friends, “Time Away or Time Again?” as he was attempting to explain that the area of the city we were in was “neo New York, red scare territory.” It felt very “Fort Greene tech millennial checks out Dimes Square.” That’s when I realized half the people there weren’t attending the streetwear event at all. I talked to a woman in line who came into the city from Princeton and had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned Kiko or Otto958 (I barely understood myself).

I was just about ready to go when every solo partygoer’s dream came true.

“Samantha!” A young guy called out to me. I glanced at him, and he quickly apologized for mixing me up with his friend, introduced himself as a photographer, and turned to shoot the slightly younger, slightly blonder girl to my right. The night could’ve ended there, but the photographer and the trucker hat-wearing party girl piqued my interest. She told me she had just moved to the city and also came to this party alone. We hung around together at the bar, while the photographer drifted in and out of our orbit.

He was clearly interested in using her as a subject for his own visual reporting. He shot her standing by the bar, looking at her reflection in the mirror, and later on the dance floor. I watched all of this go down, wrapped in my black trench, feeling slightly bitter and a little nostalgic. The whole scene reminded me of some of my first nights out in the city. Every man with a camera was the coolest artist I had ever met, and every free drink I acquired proved my own value on the scene.

I recognize this now as having “the smell.”

When you’re young, new, beautiful, with relatively few friends in the city, it can be sniffed out quickly. It’s not necessarily that having the smell makes you a target, but rather, it opens doors into the side of New York that only exists after midnight. Afterparties, open bars, nightclubs, and people interested in you for seemingly no reason.

What you can’t see when you have the smell is that the people who sniffed it out used to be in your shoes. They’ve been to the afterparties and open bars, and your excitement at being included reaffirms their social status. But also, if they get close enough to the smell, they might be able to bottle a little bit for themselves.

When you have the smell, you haven’t made it on your own yet, and those who can sniff it out seem like the ones who could open doors. But what isn’t clear at that time is that these “friends” aren’t the type to want to get to know you during the waking hours. They’re only looking to relive the same nights with people who aren’t bored by all of it.

I’ve outgrown the smell. But every now and then, while lining my lips for a night out, I think about how fabulous those first few months of freedom felt. I wouldn’t go back, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t delicious while it lasted.

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The concept was simple: Show up, write a grievance about NYC social life, and choose whether you wanted to publicly testify. Drop it in the box. Later in the night, your fellow citizens would vote on these pressing matters concerning the city’s social infrastructure.

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The location: The Bench, a loft in Chinatown. I first found The Bench through an event for the NYC Mayoral primary watch party. I’d describe it as your dream boyfriend’s apartment if he’s a huge Knicks fan and has impeccable taste in coffee table books.

The dress code: If Leslie Knope and the cast of Scandal found themselves at a Lower East Side bar.

As Halle Robbe, the moderator, pointed out later in the night, most people in New York are just always wearing black and being standoffish, so it was a nice change of pace.

Our attempt at an la carte (engage with what interests you, leave what doesn’t) menu for the night:

• “I Partied” stickers

• “Thot Leadership” mugs

• Name tags

• An overhead projector

• Town hall agendas with misspelled words placed on every chair

• Falling streamers

• A single silver balloon

• Canned cocktails from Dio (warm)

• Cinnamon rolls from Losers (warm)

• Bic blue ballpoint pens and sharpies

• Signs (that we forgot to tell people to fill out) to vote yay or nay

• A table of some of the best zines and photo books made by those in attendance: Bias Cut Magazine, Block Party, Token Magazine, Notch Magazine, pinky Magazine, and Mouthful

I tried to find shitty styrofoam cups but sadly to no avail. We did bring our Mr. Coffee maker from the office though, which a few people enjoyed in their mugs.

The Crowd

Before opening remarks, Halle asked everyone queer to make some noise, and Matt asked everyone over 35 to raise their hands. Halle’s question made the room loud (read: very queer), and while I want to say 30% raised their hand for Matt, I think the real number was 42%.

There were writers, those in social media, those who hate social media, those in nightlife, people who do something creative, two Partiful engineers, and the people who make money off all of the people above.

Our Moderator: Halle Robbe

Halle Robbe is a writer, activist, and professional party girl. She is the creator of girlscarryingshit, which was dubbed “one of the last good things about social media” by POPSUGAR, and Editor-in-Chief of pinky magazine. You may have seen her on the VMA’s red carpet, on the Zohran Mamdani campaign trail, or at Union Pool the third Thursday of every month, where she has been colloquially referred to as “The Mayor of Lesbiantown.”

The Discussion

The opening topics: The state of socializing right now, the rise of the third space, the use of phones at parties, and whether or not guest list curation is necessary.

Matt and Halle talked for thirty minutes. They disagreed on specifics but kept returning to the same idea that socializing and nightlife have become so performative (optimized for being seen rather than connecting) that we’ve forgotten you can just show up and talk to people.

The biggest takeaway from their conversation: the third space party isn’t a gimmick (i.e. parties at Katz Deli or Bushwick bathrooms). These exist because traditional nightlife has stopped working for actual conversation. Fluorescent lighting and linoleum do what designed nightlife spaces won’t - they strip the performance layer.

The Ballot Box

The takes that I remember:

Irish Goodbying is rude - One of the least popular takes of the night, lots of boos, but common ground was found on the fact you should always say goodbye to the host

We need more parties without alcohol - LOTS of nays

Stop bringing your Hinge date as your plus one - Everyone was in agreement. Stop. Just stop bringing boring plus ones to begin with. (Btw if you have an interesting plus one and live in NYC you should go to Respective Collective’s +1 party this week)

People need to dance more - Surprisingly pretty split. Some believed dancing is not an obligation and is very night/event dependent

Partiful isn’t sexy enough - LOTS of boos from our corner, but I reluctantly agreed with the call to bring back a little mystique around who’s showing up (the plaintiff and the citizen then learned Partiful has a hide the guest list feature and the motion was resolved)

Clubs suck, we need to lean into the return of the lounge - The room was pretty divided. Matt Starr was pro, Halle Robbe against

We didn’t get to all of the takes, nor do I think we heard the full extent of them. (I overheard one conversation about how we need to stop judging hooking up with friends’ exes, because NYC is already too small to begin with.)

Some of What Remained in the Ballot Box

To close out this recap, I called upon Halle Robbe to address a few of the remaining takes.

Halle: The only valid reason to send a “Maybe,” to me, is if you are waiting to get your work schedule for that day and will update your RSVP to a “Yes” or “No” as soon as you receive it. Otherwise, you’re just playing with peoples’ emotions (and venue capacities).

Halle: Life is so short and you are so right, Evan. A theme gets your guests on the same page so they can walk into your event with confidence. They know what to wear, have common ground to talk about with anyone in the room, and feel like they’re a part of something. Themes make you feel like you are part of the in-group for the night, which should be the goal of any event.

Halle: I’m guilty of this, but also agree. Not only does it make the person who’s been cancelled on feel lonely, it will eventually make the person cancelling feel lonely when people realize they’re unreliable and stop inviting them to things! It’s lose-lose. I think the solution is to be more honest with ourselves about our desire & ability to attend to begin with. If we’re dreading an event from the minute we RSVP or doing mental gymnastics to figure out how we can squeeze it in on an already-busy night, we should just say “No” to begin with. While it feels bad to say “No” to the person hosting in the moment, it shows more respect for them than late-canceling and also gives them the opportunity to invite someone else who might be an enthusiastic, reliable “Yes.”

As a side note — and this may be controversial, but I stand by it — if you are going to flake on a big party last minute, don’t text the host right before the event. It’s a vibe killer. Text them an apology (including how much FOMO you had) the next day instead!

Halle: I respect Lauren Y’s efficiency in squeezing three takes into one ballot and (much like an actual politician) am choosing to respond to just one of her grievances: arrival time.

I have nuanced thoughts on this. I think it depends on 1. the size of the event and 2. how close you are with the host.

For an intimate event, like a dinner party in someone’s home, I think everyone should be there within 15 minutes of the start time unless you’ve given the host a heads-up that you’re coming from work/etc. and to start without you.

For a larger event, like a house party, I think close friends should be there within the first half hour to help you set up or, equally important, to be your “openers” — the people that create an initial vibe so that, when the first fringe friend/guest arrives, they don’t feel awkward. On the other hand, if you are a newer or more distant friend of the host, I actually think the polite thing is to arrive about an hour in; give the host a head start to fill the room for you! The worst feeling is someone whose never been to your parties before arriving too early. You wanna be like, I swear this is gonna be fun, just give it 30 minutes but that’s exactly what the host of an un-fun party would say. So just give them a little time to make it fun for you.

Halle: Harsh but true. Unless the gathering is specifically a “game night,” pulling out a board game* is a sign that there isn’t enough organically happening at the party anymore and you need an artificially-inserted, shared activity to sustain yourselves. It’s okay to just call it a night.

*Card games, in my opinion, are different.

We go out hoping to dissolve - into the bass line, into someone else’s photo, into the performance of Being Someone Who Goes Out. We want to be hot and free and uninhibited, but we’re terrified of sweating through our good tops, of taking up space, of wanting things loudly.

Being constantly perceived means we forgot what freedom feels like, so instead we buy $400 tickets to arena shows and watch other people be free instead.

Everyone wants to be a showgirl now because showgirls have reclaimed something we’ve surrendered - the power to inhabit our bodies fully while being looked at. To be desired without being diminished. To be spectacular without disappearing into the spectacle.

This generation of pop stars has commodified the aesthetic so thoroughly you can buy it at Zara. But what we’re desperate for isn’t the costume - it’s the feeling of a body that belongs to itself.

Last week I stood in a line at Rosewood Theater, looking for proof that feeling still exists.

The Line That Wrapped Around the Block

The air smelled like horse manure from the stables across the street and the line was made up of a lot of black silk, inherited fur, and heels that made a sound to announce you were somewhere important. A girl ahead of me asked her friend if she’d seen The G-Strings perform before. “No,” her friend said, “I’ve been dying to.” This was their first show. It was sold out.

People kept arriving, seeing the line snake around the corner, their faces caught between disappointment and determination after realizing they couldn’t skip to the front. Some didn’t realize strip clubs require physical IDs. A few bought tables to skip the wait.

The crowd:

• former and current art school students

• finance guys still in their office garb

• People who looked like they’d been born wearing velvet

• A surprising number of the 14th Street and above crowd & wives with their husbands on what seemed to be group date night

• Girls who work at the club

• What seemed like every dancer in NYC I occasionally see in my Reels

I met people who’d known the girls from dance classes at STEPS, from late shifts at Paul’s Baby Grand. Some found the show on Partiful. Some saw one Instagram post of the girls and immediately bought a $50 ticket.

Inside the Club Where Anora Was Filmed

It was that particular atmosphere that only exists in spaces where people pay to be lied to, which somehow makes them the most truthful rooms in the world. Red lights. Floors that stick to your shoes. Coat check was required. Since nobody had cash, the venue made a fortune off their $12 ATM fee. There were maybe six couches total, so most people just knelt on the arms of loveseats or sat on the floor. It felt like being in the living room of the coolest person you’ve ever met, if that person’s living room smelled like hairspray and YSL Libre and the specific musk of 200 people who have both nothing and everything in common.

The Show

The lights went down and the five dancers appeared from both sides of the stage, their faces appearing and disappearing behind curtains of gold chains.

The choreography was the kind of intricacy that comes from hundreds of hours in windowless rehearsal studios with bad lighting and no AC, but they performed it like it was an extension of their ordinary movement. You could tell all of them had serious technical training and had warped it into something else entirely. The technique was there but also not there, visible and invisible at once, leaving only the fact of a body moving through space with intention.

The showgirl is a technology for transformation and a machine for taking all the labor of being looked at and turning it into power.

The opening was followed by two dancers who came out wearing nothing but white fabric kept in place by a fan - just fabric and physics. The room went silent in a way that felt holy. Looking away felt sacrilegious.

At intermission I had a martini that tasted like it was made during Prohibition, because of course the best martini in Manhattan is at a strip club.

The second act opened with dancers crawling across the floor with LED lights in their mouths, moving to a “laughing” track that was somehow both terrifying and hot. At one point a dancer started cursing out someone in the audience. I later found out she was screaming at someone’s ex-boyfriend, who had shown up to the show.

In one act the dancers emerged in “birthday suits” - nude bras bedazzled to make them look naked, so covered in crystals they looked like they were made of light. They climbed into a bathtub that had been sitting at the side of the stage the whole time, waiting. You could see them counting. You could see them holding each other’s weight in ways that required the kind of trust you only build after years of knowing someone. But they made it look like play. Like splashing around in a bathtub was just something their bodies knew how to make beautiful.

SKIMS will have a version of this by spring.

At some point the host - who by the way, truly, deserves her own show - pulled two random audience members onstage. Because everyone at this show was talented in the way your middle school self used to think New York was, both audience members were incredible. Both did splits. Both stripped. It’s what happens when you create a space where people remember they’re allowed to be extraordinary!

The final number dissolved into a dance floor as the barrier between performer and audience didn’t just blur but evaporated. We were all just bodies in a room, which sounds simple until you remember how much of our lives we spend trying to forget that’s what we are.

A Revolution In Pumps

The host told the crowd she’d never met anyone like them. The first time she worked with The G-Strings at Slipper Room, she walked in on all five sitting in a circle, foreheads pressed together, manifesting this exact show.

They work multiple clubs a night. They know every backstage bathroom in Manhattan and can rank them. One of them works as a “fun ambassador” at a club - a better-dressed bat mitzvah dancer, which means her literal job is to improve the room’s energy and to make people remember they have bodies. She used to hand out business cards stamped with her lipstick until the gesture started being misinterpreted!!

Another has an alter ego named Gank - a full character who seems to have crawled out of the same primordial darkness that birthed early Gaga.

These are women who’ve spent years learning how to hold a room. How to make strangers feel like they matter. How to turn the performance of desire into actual, measurable power. And then they made a show about it.

Everyone moved differently leaving the theater. Lighter, like we’d set something down without realizing it. The line was gone but outside people stood around smoking, unwilling to leave. I could already feel the show was distorting in memory into the story we’d tell people who weren’t there, who wouldn’t understand, and who’d hear “strip club” and “showgirls” and miss the entire point.

The G-Strings are performing showgirl the only way it’s ever really worked - not as a fantasy or pop star aesthetic, but as labor made luminous. The bruised shins. Curling your hair in four minutes flat. The skill of making a room full of strangers believe, for two hours, that they’re allowed to want things loudly. The show was a reminder of what gathering is meant to do. Not give us content or proof of a life worth watching, but help us return to ourselves.

Friday, September 5th, 10 miles west of Arthur Ashe stadium, they were all standing around a ping pong table watching twenty-somethings hit ping-pong balls back and forth while house music played and someone sold puff bars outside the bathroom. Why take the 7 all the way to Flushing when there’s a new event to bob your head while eating french fries out of a coffee cup and mingling with a scene-y downtown crowd?

BOUNCE is the party-tournament-chimera spawned by Musician/DJ siblings Blu and Rex DeTiger and Actor/Musician Giullian Yao Gioiello. They decided to combine their love for Table Tennis with their love for throwing parties and the result was hundreds lined up in NOHO to get a chance to see a tournament, hosted this time at Jean’s Lafayette, as part of the fourth installment of the BOUNCE party series.

Complete with a surprisingly stacked guest list and “Bounce” branded balls (the first branded item I have actually seen used at an event), the party adapted everyone’s favorite garage staple to be not just the centerpiece of Jeans’ typical upstairs phenomenon but an extension of it. (Prior BOUNCE locations include East Village’s Nightclub 101, ACME, and various DIY spaces).

The crowd was exactly what you’d expect from a downtown ping-pong tournament. There was no shortage of Paloma Wool pants, patchwork tattoos, and micro bangs in attendance. The tournament made modest concessions to the lounge’s obligatory mood lighting and overly foggy atmosphere by installing fluorescent tubes on the perimeter of the table which fought through the haze and barely illuminated the table tennis court (a darkness that still allowed you to flirt aimlessly with the multi-hyphenate creative behind you).

Games were played to 5 (have to win by 2) and matches were won best of 3 with players switching sides between games. This made for fast games that allowed even the drunkest of the bunch to keep attention as party goers were packed tightly around the ping-pong table while player WAGS proudly filmed their mans and casual onlookers picked favorites.

I experienced flickers of the same emotional turmoil boys who wear backward hats experience watching Sunday night football as the rounds continued. But Blu and Rex DeTiger broke up my agony and invoked a sense of nostalgia moving from dreamy bubblegum pop like Milky’s 2003 “Just the Way You Are”, to deep cuts like Otto Knows’ 2012 hit “A Million Voices” that brings the tongue-in-cheek competitive spirit of warming up for a high school state championship soccer game.

The MC whose voice carried us through the night, Gioiello (whose Partiful bio self-describes as an “actor and musician obsessed with ping-pong”), unified the crowd and illustrated the perfect hero cut for Bounce champion, local pong aficionado Max Ivry. As the tournament neared its end, the newly minted Bounce #4 Champion lifted his trophy and in the midst of the hollering crowds, songs I had saved on my iPod nano, and Canal Street sports commentary, it felt less like a club and more like boxing ring filled with the city’s most fun and actually slightly self-aware.

The Bounce party series has triumphed in the landscape of cool, unseriously-serious themed parties that you actually want to go to. It is a welcomed departure from a typical Friday night at Jean’s. Brava.

PARTI SCORECARD:

• Immersion: 9/10 The live commentary, foggy over cloud, and music transported you into a ping pong party womb. Deducted 1 point here for the missed opportunity of incorporating ping pong bounce sounds into the DJ’s set.

• Coefficient of Restitution: 0.92 Can confirm, bounce was very bouncey.

Like most people who've spent their twenties orbiting Manhattan with a certain performative aimlessness (pretending to end up everywhere by accident), we've learned that a party is never about the party, and a party is never just a party. As LA and NYC have become inundated with brand dinners no one eats at, launch parties nobody remembers, and obligatory "activations" designed to convince investors someone cares, somewhere along the way "partying is dead" found itself as a buzzy headline people weigh against decreasing alcohol usage and whatever depressing statistic came out about Gen Z social habits.

After having been part of millions of parties, we are living proof that parties and community never left but simply evolved. Social life has moved online, and when measured against some halcyon vision of Studio 54, partying looks different. To anyone comparing today against their own generational experience, it's easy to think it seems nonexistent. But for Gen Z, the internet has always been a primary layer of social connection. Rather than constantly criticizing how this generation socializes, we choose to meet them where they are.

The Guest List will do something similar. We want to show you places, people, and events that explore where we are now socially. Think of it as a social almanac documenting borrowed shots at borrowed apartments and over-budget magazine parties for which not a single attendee can name three writers on staff. We hope to offer democratized access to the insights that only exist in group chats, bathroom lines, and walks home at 4 AM - all the places where real analysis happens, where people say what they actually think about the evening they just collectively experienced. Because, like you, we know all the best stories come from The Guest List.