“I think the proof, as they say in English, is in the pudding,” said Sandra Choi on Sunday night, glancing around the intimate setting of Taglialatella Galleries where Jimmy Choo and Off-White were hosting a dinner for their shoe collaboration. “If you look at all of these shoes around you, they’re totally princess-worthy.”

 

While Choi donned mismatched heels with oversize bows for the event, several — Hailey Baldwin, Caroline Vreeland — had chosen weather-appropriate plastic-covered designs.

“The whole thing is about merging two worlds together. When we first started to talk about it I was thinking, ‘ooh, urban, urban, what do we do?'” said Choi, surrounded by the work of street-cool artists Space Invader, Shepard Fairey and Basquiat. “One thing about this project is, I’ve been doing Jimmy Choo for twentysomething years, and this really freed my mind. And I said to myself, what happened to remembering why I started twentysomething years ago?”

More simply put: “Creativity is in my veins, and without it I think I’d die,” said Choi.

Virgil Abloh certainly knows how to draw a crowd. Based on the enthusiasm with which Kendall Jenner and Naomi Campbell greeted the low-key designer, one can assume they showed up on their own pro-bono volition. Even Bella Hadid made it out, pulling a chair up to Abloh at the long white lacquer dinner table just in time for dessert and the bespoke Jello-O shots. (Alcohol content? “I don’t know, most likely vodka,” said one of the Off-White c/o Jimmy Choo-costumed waitstaff.)

“It was an idea I had,” said Abloh of the unlikely brand match-up. “I’d met Sandra [Choi] at the Bowery hotel, and I always had this idea within my collection to sort of get more specific and storytell,” he continued. “I was working on this collection that was a tribute to Princess Diana and [Jimmy Choo] were a shoemaker that were making shoes for her. And I thought it could have been a cool way to relate the product and the narrative of Princess Diana to a younger audience.”

Kith, Vlone, Moncler, Nike, Vans, Levi’s, Ssense, Jennifer Fisher, Ikea and now Jimmy Choo — how does the designer and DJ (who relinquished duties during the dinner to DJ pair Simi and Haze) keep his collaborations fresh?

“Just sort of have a story to tell, you know?” said Abloh. “I’m not interested in making anything that doesn’t have a reason for existing.”

Case in point, Abloh’s fashion week plans:

“Nah, this is pretty much it,” he said.