Boston’s stylish set braved the rain to celebrate the opening of luxury clothing purveyor Louis's outpost on Fan Pier Thursday night. Some 700 guests circulated around the indoor-outdoor space overlooking Boston Harbor while live entertainment punctuated the five-hour party.
Though Mother Nature didn’t exactly go along with plans for a boat cruise, the weather did seem fitting for a fete highlighting all of Earth’s elements. “Our goal was to embrace the air, land, and sea elements around us and to celebrate the neighborhood,” said Christine DiCarlo, whose Front Row Associates produced the event. “We wanted guests to feel like they’re on a barge.”
By removing 90-percent of the store’s clothing racks and mixing sleek settees in white and lime green with white hydrangeas and roses in tall glass vases, Front Row transformed the loft-like store into a refined but simple party space. The soaring ceilings and windows overlooking the waterfront set the stage for the evening’s entertainment, which combined aerial performers on fabric and rings suspended from the ceiling and fire spinners outside, with DJ Miss Thang and Los Angeles-based recording artist Tamar inside.
The challenge of designing an event in such a stylized space, according to DiCarlo, was not to over design, but instead allow the industrial space and its surroundings to remain the focal points. “We focused on the beauty of the water,” she said.
Guests arrived to a tented outdoor area with leaf-shaped lounges and low round tables surrounded by green blocks filled with white floral arrangements by Winston Flowers. Inside, the store’s second-floor restaurant, Sam’s, provided appetizers like corn on the cob, pork belly skewers, and chicken wings on simple tables scattered throughout the space. Grey Goose sponsored three indoor bars and one outside, offering signature cocktails, including a classic martini.
The performance artists—some brought in by Craig Sutton Entertainment Services—had an avant-garde, forward-thinking vibe, much like the fashion found at Louis. “We wanted to be consistent with [store owner] Debbi Greenberg’s vision,” DiCarlo said. “There’s that shared goal of promoting new artists and new talent.”
