The heady business of art parties

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Cleopatra chats with Yayoi Kusama, who stands beside Raja Ravi Varma’s muse at Delhi’s Taj Mansingh—the opening scene of season 3 of the Netflix show Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives is somewhat surreal until you realise it’s set at last year’s MASH Ball for which guests had been asked to dress like they had “stepped out of a painting". Delhi-based art collector and host Shalini Passi was styled as Cleopatra in a white-and-gold dress by Lebanese fashion designer Elie Madi, who had based the outfit on Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Cleopatra and Caesar (1866) and Frederick Arthur Bridgman’s Cleopatra on the Terraces of Philae (1896).

Despite being on crutches, gallerist Bhavna Kakkar was in a beetle-red skirt and blouse with white polka dots, her short hair and bangs coloured red to resemble Self Portrait by Yayoi Kusama. Film producer Mozez Singh and businessman Shaurya Jain wore costumes inspired by Takashi Murakami’s A Homage to Monopink to the party held, incidentally, to raise funds for Unicef. One of the most striking outfits turned out to be that of Greg Foster, creative director of Jaipur Rugs.

Not a fan of dress codes, Foster was in an all-white Rajesh Pratap suit. He met France’s cultural attaché Amandine Roggeman on the lawn. She pulled out a banana and silver duct tape from her tiny Prada bag and stuck the banana near his right lapel, converting his suit into a hat-tip to Mauizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019).

“I can’t claim credit for it although it looks like I was the intelligent one," Foster tells Lounge. He described the evening as “the Met Gala meets Bollywood Wives meets Marina Abramovic". It might sound like an evening of dedicated decadence, but art parties in India have become