“I love a good ribbon,” the actress Sarah Jessica Parker said on a muggy Thursday night at the New York City Ballet’s annual fall fashion gala.
She was dressed in a custom Simone Rocha white tulle tutu dress, embroidered with tiny rosebuds and adorned with cascading pink ribbons. Her hair fell in a long fish tail braid threaded with pale pink ribbons.
“In fact,” added Parker, a vice chair of the ballet company’s board, her eyes glinting behind turquoise eye shadow, “we asked for extra ribbon.”
The actress, who seems to set a new bar on the gala’s red carpet each year, typically wears a look by a fashion world fixture who has designed costumes for the gala performance. In the years since Parker helped to conceive the gala in 2012, she has walked the carpet in a fuchsia ball gown by Zac Posen, a scarlet Giles Deacon couture gown and ruby red stilettos and a flared, off-the-shoulder Caroline Herrera dress with a long bow. Last year, she even wore a pair of enormous black wings.
In shimmering ball gowns, sequined jackets and pastel suits, dozens of other actors and guests posed on a red carpet in front of cameras and curious onlookers before heading into the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.
The singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks, in a pink gown and cascading flower crown, served as the evening’s honorary chair. The crowd included the actress and model Julia Fox, a chair of the gala; and the actors Fran Drescher, Amy Sedaris and Murray Hill.
“I actually had another piece with a little tutu kind of tulle thing, but I’m in that stage of my life where I can’t wear too many layers,” said the actress Bridget Everett, a gala chair for the evening, who wore a blue, floral off-the-shoulder House of Larréon dress and sparkling silver heels.
Just after 7 p.m., Parker and her husband, the actor Matthew Broderick, slid into their customary seats in the theater’s first ring, and an enormous gold curtain rose on dancers in gleaming gold costumes.
The gala performance featured three world premieres. It began with “Auspicy,” choreographed by Alysa Pires, with music by Jocelyn Morlock and costumes by the Dutch fashion house Viktor & Rolf.
It was followed by the pas de deux “Mirror/Sky,” choreographed by Justin Peck, the company’s resident choreographer, and performed by Roman Meija and Tiler Peck. It was set to music by Gabriel Kahane, inspired by Nicks’s song “Landslide,” from Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 self-titled album. It was performed by the New York City Ballet Orchestra and the indie folk singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx, with costumes by Rocha, a London-based designer.
The program closed with “Shared Rain,” featuring choreography by Jennifer Archibald, with music by Lisa Gerrard and Patrick Cassidy, Taufiq Qureshi, Hauschka and Hildur Gudnadottir, Roger Goula, Deskant, Sebastian Plano and Tokio Myers. The costumes were by the London-based designer Robert Wun.
Scattered around the room were several of the gala chairs, among them Fox and Nicole Ari Parker. Joining them were the company’s dancers. After boycotting the red carpet and dinner last year, they received a 4 percent annual wage increase in their latest three-year contract.
After the performances, about 800 attendees spread out at candlelit tables for a dinner of green globe artichokes, honey-glazed salmon and upside-down apple cake. The event raised about $3.5 million for the New York City Ballet.
“I’m thrilled,” Parker said. “If it weren’t a company that could really rise to the opportunity, it wouldn’t be so sticky. I couldn’t have imagined we’d still be doing this 14 years later.”
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