Tea, Cake, and Gothic Gossip: Inside the Inaugural Vogue Book Club Rendezvous with Emerald Fennell
On Sunday, lit-lovers trekked across an unforgiving landscape—not quite the Yorkshire moors, but a frozen Manhattan dotted with blackened icebergs—to attend a special advance screening of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights for the inaugural Vogue Book Club event.
The afternoon gathering was the cherry on top for readers who had spent the last few weeks getting reacquainted with the classic 1847 novel by Emily Brontë. Ahead of the film’s release, the book prompted no shortage of heated group chat discussions on the Vogue app, spurred on by essays from Joseph Altuzarra, Cazzie David, Upasana Barath, and Chloe Schama.
The festivities began with a tea reception at the Hotel Chelsea, where the storied hallways glowed with lamplight. Despite the cold, the Bard Room was brimming with Book Club members, models, and designers dressed in their gothic best. While some went the practical route with warm layers of lace and bow-adorned sweaters (given the 3° Fahrenheit temperatures outside), others threw caution to the wind and went all-out in silky red skirts, corsets, and fascinators. Either way, it was “the best-dressed book club in America,” said Sarah McNally, who owns and operates McNally Jackson Books.
The ballroom made for a fitting backdrop, with its antique brass chandeliers and faded floral frescoes. Guests sipped tea—as well as mimosas and Bloody Marys—and ate sandwiches, scones, macarons, and mini-cakes while chatting; swapping notes about their newly-acquired Wuthering Heights tote bags which had cookies, tea, and stationery inside.
Chloe Malle, head of editorial content for American Vogue, welcomed the crowd—which included Lila Moss, Peter and Trisha Do, Batsheva Hay, Jonathan Cohen, Kate Barton, Kim Shui, Jackson Wiederhoft, Derek Blasberg, Juliana Canfield, Marlo Thomas, Diane Sawyer, and Candice Bergen—to the nearby SVA Theatre for the screening.
“We’re well aware that there’s another event today,” Malle said, nodding to the Super Bowl, as the audience laughed. “But here, we are pushing paperbacks, not quarterbacks.” Introducing the film, she said, “I’m so excited for you all to see this movie. I saw it this week and I was in technicolor heaven, and I know you will be, too.”
Viewers were soon lulled into a trance as the haunting and obsession-tinged love story between Margot Robbie’s Catherine and Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff unfolded amidst the epic, foggy beauty of rural England. (Without spoiling anything: Let’s just say that this is the kind of film that makes you put down your popcorn and gasp—either out of lust or shock. It opens in theaters, appropriately, on Friday, February 13.)
“On my way to the Chelsea Hotel, I did think of the description in the book about ‘frosty air that cut about her shoulders as keen as a knife,’ so in a way, having this on the coldest day of the year felt appropriate, especially because everyone got so hot and bothered during the screening,” Malle told Vogue afterwards.
Post-screening, director Emerald Fennell joined Malle for a conversation which will appear on an upcoming episode of The Run-Through With Vogue. During the chat, Fennell reveled in the chance to talk about the source material: “This is a book club, so I can really talk about it: I love this book so much.”
“I think it’s partly the magic box that is this novel, that everyone who reads it experiences something slightly different,” Fennell said. “It just completely obliterated me,” Fennell said, describing how she felt when she first read the book as a teenager. That first read ultimately inspired what Fennell is hoping to revive for filmgoers: “The thing that I really wanted to do with this film was to try and recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading this book for the first time,” she said.
The wide-ranging conversation also touched on casting and creative decisions (the backstory to the “skin room,” for example), rain machines on the moors, the Saltburn bathtub scene equivalent, and the particulars of certain goopy, food-related foley.
After the final mist cleared and the credits rolled, guests debriefed in the lobby. It was “fabulously wet,” designer Jackson Wiederhoeft told Vogue, sharing their two-word review of the film.
Sufficiently heated up, everyone readied to brave the cold once more, this time with a Female Filmmakers Collection paperback edition of Wuthering Heights (with a foreword by Fennell) and a tasseled Vogue Book Club bookmark in hand. As for what was in their hearts and minds? That’s another story.
Photo by: Quadir Moore1/13Emerald Fennell, Chloe Malle
Photo by: Quadir Moore2/13
