Where the Front Row Drinks and Dines During New York Fashion Week

Fashion has a way of getting into New York restaurants before the rest of the city does. While everyone else waits for reservations to open, a brand publicist is already deciding who belongs on the banquette and which editor should sit within whispering distance. Last September, Harper’s Bazaar brought Dua Lipa, Linda Evangelista, Tracee Ellis Ross and Tessa Thompson to Wild Cherry inside A24’s then-unopened Cherry Lane Theatre. Jean’s had made a much longer occasion of its soft opening in 2023, hosting parties for months and welcoming Gisele Bündchen as co-host of Frame’s September dinner before finally admitting the public that October.

Seppe Tirabassi, a New York stylist who began by assisting Vogue fashion directors and has since worked with GQ, has attended enough Fashion Weeks to look at the place cards before the menu. “I’m from Maine, where dinner starts as soon as the food arrives. At Fashion Week, it starts with the seating chart and the name cards. One well-placed chair tells you who a brand is courting well before the first course hits the table,” he tells Observer.

This September, the dinner invitations could introduce a few new addresses. Faux, George McNally’s French restaurant in Tribeca, opened last week, while Marcel has had several months to settle in beneath Sotheby’s Breuer building. Open since April, Marcel hosted executives from Chanel and Gabriela Hearst at a Vogue Business dinner in May, making it a plausible uptown choice for the coming week, though that is a prediction rather than a confirmed booking. Once the front row empties, Fashion Week gets seated first at these 15 tables.