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Reported by Vogue.

Broadway's biggest weekend doesn't start with a curtain call — it starts with a party. On Friday night, Creative Arts Agency threw open the doors of West Chelsea's Crane Club for its annual New York fête, gathering the constellation of talent orbiting the 79th Tony Awards under one very well-dressed roof. The guest list alone read like a fever dream: Anderson Cooper, Jon Hamm, Penn Badgley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Neil Patrick Harris, Leslie Odom Jr., Ariana DeBose, Adam Lambert, and Kelli O'Hara, among others — all there for drinks, white truffle arancini, and, in very New York fashion, a collective eye on the Knicks game.

The Clothes Are the Plot

The most compelling fashion argument of the evening came from director Zhailon Levingston, whose Cats: The Jellicle Ball is nominated for nine Tonys, including Best Direction. His collaboration with costume designer Qween Jean — also nominated for her work on Liberation — has been widely credited as central to the revival's electric reception. "The costumes and the fashion is as important as the plot itself," Levingston said, according to Vogue. "If you didn't speak English, if you knew nothing about ballroom culture, you could come to our show and have a cathartic experience just by watching the costumes." That's not a costume designer. That's a co-author.

Adam Lambert was in the room celebrating the release of his new single Under the Rhythm, and when pressed on a potential Broadway return, his answer was more nuanced than a flat no. He credits his Cabaret run with reminding him what it feels like to inhabit someone else entirely — "there was freedom in it" — but pop, he said, is still the thing he left theatre for in the first place. Dylan Mulvaney, meanwhile, was wrapping a three-month run as Anne Boleyn in SIX: The Musical, and the moment she kept returning to wasn't the performance itself — it was the stage door. Young trans kids seeing themselves reflected on a Broadway stage. That, she said, was the whole point.

Elsewhere, Ragtime director Lear DeBessonet reflected on a production that was never supposed to last — originally slated for two weeks, it's now a 11-category Tony contender built entirely on audience devotion. Lorne Michaels and Bryan Lourd held court on a red velvet couch while the room filled with the particular energy of people who have spent a year making something together and are finally allowed to exhale. When the Knicks clock ran out and Robyn's "Dancing on My Own" came on, it stopped being an industry party and started being a New York City night.

Fashion on Broadway isn't costume — it's architecture, and right now, the people building the most ambitious structures in theatre know it.

Read the original at Vogue.