It’s been a very long, very hot summer, and really, what more excuse for a party could you need? David Schulte, CEO of fashion’s favorite frame purveyor, Oliver Peoples, took up the mantle of host with the most for the weekend, teaming up with Rachelle Hruska MacPherson’s Guest of a Guest for a paella-centered cocktail party at The Crow’s Nest in Montauk on Saturday night. Ostensibly, the fete was to celebrate the brand’s elegant new East Hampton flagship (a Hans Wegner–filled jewel box on 53 Newtown Lane), but among weary, humidity-tortured urban dwellers, any excuse to get out of the city and into the surf (and a pair of coveted Oliver Peoples sunnies) would have done the trick.
For the second year in a row, Hruska MacPherson and her husband, The Crow’s Nest co-owner, Sean MacPherson, flew in chef Fernando Trocca from José Ignacio, Uruguay, in order that he might serve up what very well may be—with its giant, Instagram-ready pan of decadently sizzling shellfish, chorizo, rice, and bursts of saffron—the perfect summer party food. The consensus among guests, like Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne, who sipped themed cocktails (the Peoples Choice, a watermelon and vodka mix, lived up to its name), or who, like Jemima Kirke, came with extended family in tow, spending the hour as the sun set looking for hermit crabs with her brood by the bay, was that there could not possibly be any better place to be, at the end of a sweltering summer Saturday, than with your toes in the sand under the stars. (Like the remains of the Perseid meteor shower that night, the paella was just a bonus.)