The scene at Skylight on the evening of October 25 could be summed up in one word: chic. And we’d expect nothing less from a gala benefit for the Brooklyn Academy of Music—noted for cutting-edge events that match its cutting-edge programming—and the always-elegant Giorgio Armani, the evening’s principle sponsor.
As guests of BAM’s 2005 Next Wave gala entered the venue, they encountered a display of the photographer Mark Seliger’s work while black-clad caterwaiters passed around trays holding glasses of wine and water.
A few steps further into the space, it was clear that the clean, modern Armani aesthetic ruled the decor: black linens and colorful dupioni silk table runners covered long, rectangular tables for 20. Ivory quilted slipcovers draped the chairs. Limited-edition lanterns from Armani’s home furnishings label, Armani Casa, decorated the tabletops, along with arrangements of fiddlehead ferns and bamboo, and maroon- and mango-colored calla lilies in dark mango wood vases, all inspired by Armani Fiore, Armani’s flower shop in Milan. And sheer, floor-to-ceiling scrims, featuring brightly colored images from the Tadao Ando-designed Bergognone theater in Milan (where Armani stages its runway presentations) hung throughout the room to break up the large industrial space. The result was a dinner party for 600 that almost felt intimate.
By midnight, when the last guests had left, the evening was deemed a complete success. “It was one of the best events I’ve ever worked on,” says BAM director of special events Jennifer Stark, who has produced plenty of memorable benefits for the hip cultural organization. “They’re all challenging in one way or another, but this was one of the least stressful from a logistics standpoint.” That’s because the event had a smart, experienced team—including Stark; Shauna Brook, Armani’s U.S. director of marketing and special events; and outside producer Anastasia (“Stacy”) Striegel, owner of production company One Kick LLC—all capable producers in their own right.
Still, the successful event took months of work and collaboration. Back in January, Stark and Lynn M. Stirrup, BAM’s vice president of planning and development, initiated talks with Giorgio Armani to sponsor the gala. The idea made sense: Armani C.O.O. Roberto Pesaro is on BAM’s board, and Armani supports arts organizations. Also, Stark and Brook worked together on one of Stark’s first events for BAM, in 2002. “Because Armani and BAM have such a great relationship, we decided that this gala would be a great partnership,” Stark says.
Stark and Stirrup developed a proposal package for Armani, and in April sat down with Brook and Caroline Brown, Armani’s U.S. senior vice president of marketing, to come up with ideas. (One involved Seliger, a BAM supporter who had photographed Giorgio Armani for his new book, In My Stairwell. The photographer donated photographs for a silent auction at the fund-raiser.) They also discussed leadership, choosing Glenn Close, a longtime friend of the house of Armani and also a BAM supporter, to serve as gala chairwoman.
“We took information from BAM in terms of what [its] goals were, evaluated our marketing initiatives for the season, and committed. From that point forward, the lines were pretty clear,” Brook says. “We wanted to let BAM handle the fund-raising. For us, it was more about giving people an incredible experience and making sure that the Armani aesthetic was maintained in the event’s decor—everything from the feeling of the room to the presentation of the food, to the music and the gift bag guests got as they left.”
So while Stark and her team started focusing on fund-raising—selling tickets, producing and sending out invitations—Armani brought in producer Striegel, who worked on a fashion show at Pier 94 for the company last year, and produces its twice-yearly Armani Privé couture shows in Paris. The group did a walk-through of the venue in June.
“That was really the very first part of the thought process about what was going to be happening in the space—we can have cocktails here, and this is where we’ll hang the art, and dinner will be here,” Stark says. “There was excitement, but it was definitely preliminary. We were talking through what the needs of BAM were and what the needs of Armani were.” Adds Brook, “We had a meeting of the minds on how to incorporate BAM’s fund-raising goals while keeping in mind the Armani feel of the evening.”
From that meeting, Brook, Striegel, and their teams started working on the floor plan, and the gala’s decor. “We wanted to present a unique atmosphere,” Brook says. Because the gala guests would arrive at Skylight immediately following a performance by Brazilian dance group Grupo Corpo at BAM, all of the design elements would have a Brazilian influence that also matched the Armani aesthetic and incorporated an architectural feel. That vision included the long rectangular tables, Amazon-inspired centerpieces, and the scrim panels. And DJ Sean Marquand would spin Brazilian tunes.
“Basically, we took all the inspiration from Armani, and transformed it so it was workable for a dinner for 600 people,” Brook says, crediting Kevin Santos, Armani’s senior vice president of creative services, with coming up with the gala’s visual theme. “I take a creative person’s vision and make it real and workable for an event’s purposes. I have to consider catering, and the sight line of the people. And then, from Kevin and [me] working back and forth, we translate it to Stacy, so she can help us do the hard labor and production.”
Striegel focused on the floor plan, and worked on all of the staging, sound, lighting, and production.phpects of the event. In addition, she handled the budget for Armani, and negotiated with vendors. “The team at Armani is very easy to work with,” she says. “The internal design people, who make the aesthetic choices, are very tuned in to what they want, and decisions are made very quickly.”
On September 15, Armani hosted a kickoff party at its Madison Avenue flagship to get attention for the gala and to highlight Seliger’s photographs. “That’s where the fund-raising really kicked into high gear,” Stark says. “We were making phone calls and trying to get celebrity attendance, trying to get everybody nailed down and make sure we had a full event. And we were working with Skylight logistically and with Shauna and Stacy and Kevin.”
With several other BAM events to plan, Stark was putting in 10- to 12-hour days by early October, and having her coordinator, Ryan Tracy, “handling print materials, doing a lot of follow up, and making sure things were on track—like getting permits and working with Skylight”—while she focused on fund-raising and the fulfillment of her sponsors’ needs. (Altria was a cosponsor of the gala.) “Part of our job is to make sure we get everything that they need to them and take care of our donors,” she says. “That’s a lot of what we were doing, while the Armani folks and Stacy were taking on a lot of the logistical parts of the design and the space.”
Meanwhile, Striegel and Brook finalized floor plans and met with vendors at Skylight, “just to be in the space and answer questions about technical things, and have all the vendors face-to-face,” Striegel says. “It’s good to have them in the space to work things out, so they all understand the design prerogative.”
The event’s caterer, Great Performances, held a tasting on October 14. “That’s when we got down to the nitty-gritty comfort of the guests—choosing the settings, and what they were going to eat,” Stark says. BAM’s Stark, Stirrup, and Tracy were on hand, as were Armani’s Brook, Santos, and Santos’ assistant, Cinthia Boni (whose Brazilian heritage ensured authenticity). Great Performances’ Colleen Downs and Heather Johanson proposed three Brazilian-inspired choices each for the appetizer, entrée, and dessert.
“Once we decided on the main course, we chose the appetizer,” Stark says. In the end, the menu included grilled shrimp and hearts of palm salad with lemon juice and olive oil; pão de queijo bread; grilled filet of beef with port wine sauce, collard greens, and mashed sweet potatoes; and passion fruit mousse cake and banana chocolate tea cake. “The desserts were so good that we went with two and alternated them on the tables,” Stark says. At past events, “there have been major changes made to menus, based on the tastes of our leadership, but for this one we pretty much kept to what Great Performances had offered.”
“At that point everyone had a real clear idea,” Stark says. “Stacy was having multiple meetings with vendors, Shauna was meeting with vendors. Ryan was in on some of those meetings representing BAM, but we had utter and complete faith in what they were doing; we didn’t have to meet a lot at that point. We were doing our thing and they were doing theirs. There was a lot of trust.”
For Stark, who usually oversees design and production duties, letting go was “a little hard,” but she admits, “They were doing so much of the producing that it was a relief for us. It took a lot of the pressure off, and it let us concentrate on the fund-raising and the follow up.” For Brook, the feeling was mutual: “Typically we don’t work with so many partners; we do everything. So it was a luxury to bring in an event producer, and have a director at BAM working on logistics and working to ensure the success of the project.”
The week of the event, Stark was busy caring for sponsors and getting print materials in. Her team spent an entire day stuffing envelopes. “Every single person involved in the gala gets an envelope with a pass for the evening, their table number, a theater ticket, a drink chip for intermission, and a gift bag ticket. The staff pulls all of that information and makes sure everyone has an envelope so we can minimize any issues on the day of the event. And that’s an all-day process.”
On the Friday before the Tuesday evening event, the teams all came together, visiting Skylight again to walk through every detail. Two days before the event, Stark created a 25-page agenda of how the evening was going to go. (“It’s like choreographing a huge dance,” she says. “It’s crazy.”)
And then it was the day of the event. Stark had members of her staff at Skylight by noon, while she stayed at BAM, preparing for the preperformance cocktail reception and performance. Striegel had an assistant receiving deliveries at Skylight at 7 AM; Brook was there by 9 AM.
Despite all the planning, the day wasn’t glitch-free. Pouring rain produced a leak at Skylight—“and with what those guests paid for those tables, they did not need to get dripped on,” Striegel says, “but the people at Skylight took care of it.” In fact, they even had workers on the roof, sweeping off water.
Guests arrived at BAM at 6 PM for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, including sliced churrasco steak on pão de sal and plantain chips with tuna ceviche. The Grupo Corpo performance began at 7 PM, and by 8:45 PM, guests were heading toward the buses that transported them to Skylight. Stark beat them; when she arrived at Skylight at 7:30 PM, her first reaction was: “Wow.”
“It was beautiful,” she says. “They did an amazing job.”
—Erika Rasmusson Janes
Photos: Anna Persson Herbst for BiZBash
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As guests of BAM’s 2005 Next Wave gala entered the venue, they encountered a display of the photographer Mark Seliger’s work while black-clad caterwaiters passed around trays holding glasses of wine and water.
A few steps further into the space, it was clear that the clean, modern Armani aesthetic ruled the decor: black linens and colorful dupioni silk table runners covered long, rectangular tables for 20. Ivory quilted slipcovers draped the chairs. Limited-edition lanterns from Armani’s home furnishings label, Armani Casa, decorated the tabletops, along with arrangements of fiddlehead ferns and bamboo, and maroon- and mango-colored calla lilies in dark mango wood vases, all inspired by Armani Fiore, Armani’s flower shop in Milan. And sheer, floor-to-ceiling scrims, featuring brightly colored images from the Tadao Ando-designed Bergognone theater in Milan (where Armani stages its runway presentations) hung throughout the room to break up the large industrial space. The result was a dinner party for 600 that almost felt intimate.
By midnight, when the last guests had left, the evening was deemed a complete success. “It was one of the best events I’ve ever worked on,” says BAM director of special events Jennifer Stark, who has produced plenty of memorable benefits for the hip cultural organization. “They’re all challenging in one way or another, but this was one of the least stressful from a logistics standpoint.” That’s because the event had a smart, experienced team—including Stark; Shauna Brook, Armani’s U.S. director of marketing and special events; and outside producer Anastasia (“Stacy”) Striegel, owner of production company One Kick LLC—all capable producers in their own right.
Still, the successful event took months of work and collaboration. Back in January, Stark and Lynn M. Stirrup, BAM’s vice president of planning and development, initiated talks with Giorgio Armani to sponsor the gala. The idea made sense: Armani C.O.O. Roberto Pesaro is on BAM’s board, and Armani supports arts organizations. Also, Stark and Brook worked together on one of Stark’s first events for BAM, in 2002. “Because Armani and BAM have such a great relationship, we decided that this gala would be a great partnership,” Stark says.
Stark and Stirrup developed a proposal package for Armani, and in April sat down with Brook and Caroline Brown, Armani’s U.S. senior vice president of marketing, to come up with ideas. (One involved Seliger, a BAM supporter who had photographed Giorgio Armani for his new book, In My Stairwell. The photographer donated photographs for a silent auction at the fund-raiser.) They also discussed leadership, choosing Glenn Close, a longtime friend of the house of Armani and also a BAM supporter, to serve as gala chairwoman.
“We took information from BAM in terms of what [its] goals were, evaluated our marketing initiatives for the season, and committed. From that point forward, the lines were pretty clear,” Brook says. “We wanted to let BAM handle the fund-raising. For us, it was more about giving people an incredible experience and making sure that the Armani aesthetic was maintained in the event’s decor—everything from the feeling of the room to the presentation of the food, to the music and the gift bag guests got as they left.”
So while Stark and her team started focusing on fund-raising—selling tickets, producing and sending out invitations—Armani brought in producer Striegel, who worked on a fashion show at Pier 94 for the company last year, and produces its twice-yearly Armani Privé couture shows in Paris. The group did a walk-through of the venue in June.
“That was really the very first part of the thought process about what was going to be happening in the space—we can have cocktails here, and this is where we’ll hang the art, and dinner will be here,” Stark says. “There was excitement, but it was definitely preliminary. We were talking through what the needs of BAM were and what the needs of Armani were.” Adds Brook, “We had a meeting of the minds on how to incorporate BAM’s fund-raising goals while keeping in mind the Armani feel of the evening.”
From that meeting, Brook, Striegel, and their teams started working on the floor plan, and the gala’s decor. “We wanted to present a unique atmosphere,” Brook says. Because the gala guests would arrive at Skylight immediately following a performance by Brazilian dance group Grupo Corpo at BAM, all of the design elements would have a Brazilian influence that also matched the Armani aesthetic and incorporated an architectural feel. That vision included the long rectangular tables, Amazon-inspired centerpieces, and the scrim panels. And DJ Sean Marquand would spin Brazilian tunes.
“Basically, we took all the inspiration from Armani, and transformed it so it was workable for a dinner for 600 people,” Brook says, crediting Kevin Santos, Armani’s senior vice president of creative services, with coming up with the gala’s visual theme. “I take a creative person’s vision and make it real and workable for an event’s purposes. I have to consider catering, and the sight line of the people. And then, from Kevin and [me] working back and forth, we translate it to Stacy, so she can help us do the hard labor and production.”
Striegel focused on the floor plan, and worked on all of the staging, sound, lighting, and production.phpects of the event. In addition, she handled the budget for Armani, and negotiated with vendors. “The team at Armani is very easy to work with,” she says. “The internal design people, who make the aesthetic choices, are very tuned in to what they want, and decisions are made very quickly.”
On September 15, Armani hosted a kickoff party at its Madison Avenue flagship to get attention for the gala and to highlight Seliger’s photographs. “That’s where the fund-raising really kicked into high gear,” Stark says. “We were making phone calls and trying to get celebrity attendance, trying to get everybody nailed down and make sure we had a full event. And we were working with Skylight logistically and with Shauna and Stacy and Kevin.”
With several other BAM events to plan, Stark was putting in 10- to 12-hour days by early October, and having her coordinator, Ryan Tracy, “handling print materials, doing a lot of follow up, and making sure things were on track—like getting permits and working with Skylight”—while she focused on fund-raising and the fulfillment of her sponsors’ needs. (Altria was a cosponsor of the gala.) “Part of our job is to make sure we get everything that they need to them and take care of our donors,” she says. “That’s a lot of what we were doing, while the Armani folks and Stacy were taking on a lot of the logistical parts of the design and the space.”
Meanwhile, Striegel and Brook finalized floor plans and met with vendors at Skylight, “just to be in the space and answer questions about technical things, and have all the vendors face-to-face,” Striegel says. “It’s good to have them in the space to work things out, so they all understand the design prerogative.”
The event’s caterer, Great Performances, held a tasting on October 14. “That’s when we got down to the nitty-gritty comfort of the guests—choosing the settings, and what they were going to eat,” Stark says. BAM’s Stark, Stirrup, and Tracy were on hand, as were Armani’s Brook, Santos, and Santos’ assistant, Cinthia Boni (whose Brazilian heritage ensured authenticity). Great Performances’ Colleen Downs and Heather Johanson proposed three Brazilian-inspired choices each for the appetizer, entrée, and dessert.
“Once we decided on the main course, we chose the appetizer,” Stark says. In the end, the menu included grilled shrimp and hearts of palm salad with lemon juice and olive oil; pão de queijo bread; grilled filet of beef with port wine sauce, collard greens, and mashed sweet potatoes; and passion fruit mousse cake and banana chocolate tea cake. “The desserts were so good that we went with two and alternated them on the tables,” Stark says. At past events, “there have been major changes made to menus, based on the tastes of our leadership, but for this one we pretty much kept to what Great Performances had offered.”
“At that point everyone had a real clear idea,” Stark says. “Stacy was having multiple meetings with vendors, Shauna was meeting with vendors. Ryan was in on some of those meetings representing BAM, but we had utter and complete faith in what they were doing; we didn’t have to meet a lot at that point. We were doing our thing and they were doing theirs. There was a lot of trust.”
For Stark, who usually oversees design and production duties, letting go was “a little hard,” but she admits, “They were doing so much of the producing that it was a relief for us. It took a lot of the pressure off, and it let us concentrate on the fund-raising and the follow up.” For Brook, the feeling was mutual: “Typically we don’t work with so many partners; we do everything. So it was a luxury to bring in an event producer, and have a director at BAM working on logistics and working to ensure the success of the project.”
The week of the event, Stark was busy caring for sponsors and getting print materials in. Her team spent an entire day stuffing envelopes. “Every single person involved in the gala gets an envelope with a pass for the evening, their table number, a theater ticket, a drink chip for intermission, and a gift bag ticket. The staff pulls all of that information and makes sure everyone has an envelope so we can minimize any issues on the day of the event. And that’s an all-day process.”
On the Friday before the Tuesday evening event, the teams all came together, visiting Skylight again to walk through every detail. Two days before the event, Stark created a 25-page agenda of how the evening was going to go. (“It’s like choreographing a huge dance,” she says. “It’s crazy.”)
And then it was the day of the event. Stark had members of her staff at Skylight by noon, while she stayed at BAM, preparing for the preperformance cocktail reception and performance. Striegel had an assistant receiving deliveries at Skylight at 7 AM; Brook was there by 9 AM.
Despite all the planning, the day wasn’t glitch-free. Pouring rain produced a leak at Skylight—“and with what those guests paid for those tables, they did not need to get dripped on,” Striegel says, “but the people at Skylight took care of it.” In fact, they even had workers on the roof, sweeping off water.
Guests arrived at BAM at 6 PM for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, including sliced churrasco steak on pão de sal and plantain chips with tuna ceviche. The Grupo Corpo performance began at 7 PM, and by 8:45 PM, guests were heading toward the buses that transported them to Skylight. Stark beat them; when she arrived at Skylight at 7:30 PM, her first reaction was: “Wow.”
“It was beautiful,” she says. “They did an amazing job.”
—Erika Rasmusson Janes
Photos: Anna Persson Herbst for BiZBash
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In Style Hosts Pre-Fashion Week Runway Show
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