New York Fashion Week is built around spectacle. There are packed venues, photographers lining the streets, backstage teams moving against the clock, and collections that can take months to create being presented in a matter of minutes.
But before Christian Siriano stepped into that whirlwind, the celebrated American designer made room for something considerably more personal.
Ahead of his highly anticipated NYFW presentation, Siriano gathered approximately 25 of his models for an intimate dinner and dance party at Bar Bas in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. Tucked beneath the longtime French restaurant Marseille, the cocktail lounge provided a warm, atmospheric setting for the group to come together away from the frenzy surrounding Fashion Week.
Rather than another traditional industry party packed with press, influencers, and flashing cameras, the evening centered on the people who would soon help bring Siriano’s collection to life on the runway.
A Different Kind of Fashion Week Gathering
For models, Fashion Week can mean long days filled with fittings, castings, rehearsals, hair and makeup, transportation, and the pressure that comes with stepping onto one of fashion’s most visible stages.
Siriano’s pre-show gathering offered a contrast.
The mood inside Bar Bas was celebratory and relaxed, giving the designer and his cast an opportunity to eat, drink, dance, and spend time together before show day arrived.
Among the models joining Siriano were Anna Schilling, Larissa Marchiori, Daphne Velghe, Marquita Pring, Jocelyn, Solo Savka, Anna Savka, Ya Jagne, Leah Brown, Vlada, Alena, Kylie Vonnahme, Yulia Saparniiazova, Irina Kravchenko, Chloe Evero, Aqua, Marcela Ohio, Siri, AJ, Alena Frolova, Lovisa, and Sophie Longford.
DJ Gas provided the soundtrack for the night, with pop favorites from Britney Spears, RuPaul, Janet Jackson, and Madonna helping turn the gathering from dinner into a full-fledged pre-runway celebration.
It was Fashion Week without the runway, at least for one night.
French Dining Meets Fashion Week
The evening also leaned into the French influence of its setting.
Dinner began with roasted beets paired with goat cheese alongside crab and avocado toast. For the main course, guests selected from sliced New York strip steak, grilled Atlantic salmon, and seared yellowfin tuna.
The table was rounded out with roasted rainbow carrots, mashed potatoes, sautéed spinach, and French fries.
Fresh berries with mango sorbet followed for dessert, but another surprise was waiting.
Bitee Pastries created a specialty Christian Siriano cake for the occasion, adding a playful and personalized finale to the dinner.
Cocktails and wine flowed throughout the evening, including Bar Bas’ signature Le Chat Noir and a fittingly named Runway Espresso Martini.
The People Behind the Runway Moment
For an industry that often focuses heavily on the finished image, evenings like this reveal another side of Fashion Week.
A runway show may ultimately be remembered through photographs, video clips, celebrity appearances, and the clothes themselves, but its creation depends on a much larger community. Designers, models, stylists, producers, makeup artists, hairstylists, dressers, casting teams, publicists, and countless others contribute to the few minutes audiences eventually see.
Siriano’s dinner placed some of that community at the center.
It also felt particularly fitting for a designer whose career has repeatedly challenged fashion’s historically narrow ideas about who belongs on a runway.
Throughout his career, Siriano has become known not only for dramatic silhouettes and red-carpet glamour, but also for casting women across a broader spectrum of body types, ages, backgrounds, and identities. His shows have frequently reflected an approach to fashion that treats individuality as something to amplify rather than erase.
Gathering his models around the same table before sending them down the runway carried that philosophy beyond the clothing.
One Night Before the Fashion Week Rush
There would be plenty of time for the intensity of NYFW.
Soon, the relaxed atmosphere of Bar Bas would be replaced by call times, fittings, beauty preparations, final adjustments, photographers, editors, buyers, celebrities, and an audience waiting to see what Christian Siriano had created.
For a few hours, none of that needed to take center stage.
There was dinner. There were cocktails. Madonna and Janet played through the speakers. Models danced. Friends talked. A designer celebrated with the people preparing to represent his vision.
In a week defined by what happens under the runway lights, Christian Siriano’s evening at Bar Bas offered something different, a glimpse at the camaraderie that exists before the first model ever takes a step onto the catwalk.
And perhaps that was the best way to begin Fashion Week.
