admin A week after Saks Fifth Avenue and Dior shut down Fifth Avenue in NYC with the unveiling of Dior’s Carousel of Dreams at Saks, CEO Marc Metrick kicked off the holiday season on the West Coast. Guests, including Kiernan Shipka, Stephanie Hsu, Richa Moorjani, Nicky Hilton Rothschild and Kathy Hilton, the Foster sisters, and Jonathan Simkhai gathered at Beverly Hills hotspot Funke for the event. The evening began on the Bar Funke rooftop, where the party sipped on signature cocktails featuring ice cubes bearing the Saks insignia. Following cocktails, guests moved inside to enjoy a curated menu of chef Evan Funke’s famed handmade pasta, stuffed squash blossoms, pizza, and branzino inside the restaurant’s 1930s Art Deco-inspired dining room.
“This celebration with our L.A. community is an important event for us,” said Metrick as he greeted the crowd. In addition to celebrating the holiday season, the evening feted the upcoming new women’s store in Beverly Hills. The original location on Wilshire Boulevard, which opened in 1938 and was designed by father and son duo John and Donald Parkinson, the architects behind Los Angeles’s Grand Central Market and City Hall, and Paul Revere Williams, the first Black architect certified west of the Mississippi and the designer of parts of the Beverly Hills Hotel, is being restored and redeveloped while the women’s store will be moving one block east into the former Barneys building. “We spent a lot of time debating how we were going to enhance the Saks experience and when the opportunity came to take the Barney’s space and redevelop it, we jumped on it,” Metrick told Vogue. “We’ve been working on it for several years now. It’s been a real labor of love.”
Throughout the evening, guests enjoyed a DJ set by Leslie Kirchhoff as they discussed holiday parties, holiday plans and holiday shopping, naturally. Nicky Hilton Rothschild admired the Gohar World-inspired tablescape featuring tapered candles tied with chic black bows while a photogenic dessert of fruit crostata garnered oohs and ahhs. And, as the evening drew to a close, more plans were already being made to gather again in February to toast the new Saks location.
