Bash Compactor: Park Life

True to theme, Thursday Night Fever, a benefit soiree at Prospect Park’s Audubon Center last Thursday, started with a steamy-hot 1970s groove. Even Mayor Bloomberg wondered why he hadn’t worn his “white polyester suit and disco boots.”

Then Scott Devendorf, the bassist of The National, took control of the disc jockey’s table, and the music moved forward, with special emphasis on Depeche Mode and New Order.

But this wasn’t a night for nostalgia.

The park was not pristine or hip or safe in the ’70s and ’80s. It took about 30 years of fundraising and TLC from the Prospect Park Alliance—whose founding president, Tupper Thomas, is retiring in early 2011—to make the park a green haven.

At the annual soiree, organized by the Junior Committee of the Prospect Park Alliance, the park has also become a fashion-industry haven, thanks to influential fashion editor Sally Singer, a resident of Park Slope.

Several years ago, when Singer was an editor at Vogue, she became the co-chairwoman of the Junior Committee.

Each year since, she has brought more of her colleagues, as well as designers (many of whom live in Brooklyn).

Recently Singer became the editor of T, the style book of the New York Times. So this year the party had double trouble, with staffers from both Vogue and T magazine (to name a few: from Vogue, Valerie Steiker and Chris Knutsen; from T, Christine Muhlke and Melissa Ventosa Martin, and there were many more). Officially, the New York Times had sponsor credit and a copy of the latest issue of the weekly magazine in the gift bags (last year, it was an issue of Vogue).

What the fashion quotient at the party meant for this reporter: Not only was it possible to ask guests what designers they were wearing and get really thorough answers—Muhlke and Ventosa Martin named Zero, YSL, Hermès, Phillip Lim and A Piece Apart among theirs, which included credits for shoes and handbags—but it was also possible to ask designers what they would design expressly for this party. Bibhu Mohapatra envisioned a “cotton dress, kind of orange yellowish with an underskirt.” Jason Cauchi of Dallin Chase said, “I saw these amazing dragonflies as we were coming into the park, so I’d say an abstract print with the dragonflies, with dark blues, purples and a little light green, in a long flowing, Empire-style dress.” And Mandy Coon, a designer-turned-model, said, “What I’m wearing right now,” of her layered black sheath. And where would one shop for the right dress? Bird, the Brooklyn-based boutique owned by Jennifer Mankins, who wore a dress by Acne to the event.