Last Friday, when I texted Emily Dawn Long to ask what I should wear to the party she was throwing in SoHo that night, she replied with a simple brief: “Things ur down to sweat in.”
The party, dubbed “No One Dances Anymore,” was smack in the middle of New York Fashion Week, but Dawn Long—one of the buzziest designers among the downtown style set—wasn’t all that pressed about the timing. “Really, this has nothing to do with Fashion Week,” she told me. “It has nothing to do with my collection. I’m showing a collection, and you can come see said collection. But this is just, like, fun for the homies.”
Though Dawn Long was dismissive about the connection between the fête and her latest line, her designs do include plenty of options for social sweating. In the years since she rose to prominence via her Kendrick-cosigned crocheted hats, Dawn Long has expanded her purview to include, as my colleague Samuel Hine recently noted in his newsletter, “a perfectly boxy button-up shirt, a pleasantly cropped blouson, and cheeky screen-printed vintage tees.” She once famously brought Kiera Knightley’s iconic going-out top from Bend It Like Beckham to life, and sells an array of mesh-y and cotton wares one might imagine a chicer version of the Skins UK cast wearing to the club. In fact, that sort of sleazy, youthful, euphoric energy seemed to be exactly what Dawn Long was asking her guests to bring to (Sub)Mercer, the swanky lounge underneath the Mercer Hotel, last Friday night.
The ground rules for the evening were laid out in a post the designer shared via Instagram story in the hours leading up to the event: “We aren’t here to catch up. Or chat. Or network. Dancing only. Phones will have stickers on them. Daniel Arnold pics only. And myself. I repeat. DANCING ONLY.”
As I entered the cavernous, thumping club, I found myself pressed against a sea of glamorous bodies. The music was loud, bass-heavy, and nostalgic—the lineup of DJs cycled through hits ranging from Donna Summer disco classics to LMFAO’s “Yes” (a classic in its own right). I overheard Maude Apatow ordering a Cosmopolitan at the four-person-deep bar, while a smattering of somebodies tore it up on the dance floor. Artist Chloe Wise danced with actor/editor Blake Abbie; I Love LA stars True Whitaker and Jordan Firstman clinked champagne flutes; stylist Ian Bradley held court at a table while girls-about-town Ella Emhoff, Gutes Guterman, and Ali Royals took turns trying to spin on the pole that stood stationed as a sort of a challenge, right in the middle of the action. At some stage in the night, I heard Jack Harlow was about to be escorted in through the back.
In the low, red light of the subterranean sweat lodge, I felt I’d been swallowed up into a vision of New York I’d only ever seen on TV: the New York of the late 1990s, of Sex and the City and Ryan Murphy’s Love Story. A New York where going out is a kind of athletic event, where clothes move with the body, and everyone at the bar is a friend, a friend of a friend, or someone famous.
Part of what made the sense of time travel so total was the seeming cohesion of everyone’s style: tank tops, bralettes, hoodies, track pants, jeans that fit just right. “I just think it’s a cool streetwear brand, an everyday brand,” one guest told me of how he understood the Emily Dawn Long dress code. “Going to the grocery store, going to the gym, very comfortable, very relaxed.” I raised this with Dawn Long, too: “It’s all beyond wearable,” she said of her clothes. “It’s what real people want to wear. Not what fashion people tell us to wear.”
It’s the same thing that keeps us all coming back to the Getty Image archives of the late ’90s. The lived-in-ness of the clothes, the un-styled combinations, the sense of simply being caught out and about. That’s what Dawn Long nails, both in her designs and in the world she creates around them—a world she seems eager to expand with more events like this one. “It's gonna be a thing,” she assured me. “You know the loft parties in the 1970s? Yeah, I wanna do that. I just want really good dance parties with people that are actually dancing.”