Fashion Meets Finance is a singles mixer series with a simple premise: take several hundred male financiers, put them in a room with several hundred women who work in the fashion industry, and let the magic happen. The series was started in 2007, and it is predicated on the idea that male Wall Streeters and female fashion workers, as the respective alpha ascenders of their tribal clans, deserve to meet and procreate, preserving the dominant line in perpetuity. It’s social Darwinism in its purest, most obnoxious form.
Fashion Meets Finance hit a snag in 2008, when the financial sector nearly collapsed, taking bankers down a few notches on the Manhattan social ladder and necessitating a brief hiatus. But in 2009, it returned with a vengeance. Its organizers proclaimed proudly: “2008 was a confusing time, but we are here to announce the balance is restoring itself to the ecosystem of the New York dating community. We fear that news of shrinking bonuses, banks closing, and the Dow plummeting confused the gorgeous women of the city.…The uncertainty caused panic which caused irrational decisions—there’s going to be a two-year blip in the system where a hot fashion girl might commit to a pharmaceutical salesman.…Fashion Meets Finance has returned to let the women of fashion know that the recession is officially over. It might be a year before bonuses start inflating themselves again, but it will happen. Invest in the future; feel confident in your destiny. Hold on. It will only be a couple more years until you can quit your job and become a tennis mom.”
I almost admired the candor with which Fashion Meets Finance accepted noxious social premises as fact. (One early advertisement read, “Ladies, you don’t need to worry that the cute guy at the bar works in advertising!”) But others disagreed. Gawker called one gathering “an event where Manhattan banker-types and fashion slaves meet, consummate, and procreate certain genetics to create lineages of people you’d rather not know.”
...This installment of Fashion Meets Finance, held after a yearlong break, had undergone a significant rebranding. Now, it was being billed as a charity event (proceeds were going to a nonprofit focused on Africa), and the cringe-worthy marketing slogans had been erased. Now, the financiers and fashionistas were joined by a smattering of young professionals from other industries: law, consulting, insurance, even a few female bankers.
After a few hours of drinking and socializing, I had filled my douchebag quota many times over. I had seen and heard the following things:
A banker showing off his expensive watch (which he called “my piece”) to a gaggle of interested-looking women.
A former Lehman Brothers banker explaining his strategy for picking up women. “I use Lehman to break the ice—you know, get their sympathy. Then I tell them I make twice as much as Lehman paid me at my new job. They love my story, and then they end up in my bed.”
A private equity associate using the acronym “P.J.” to refer to his firm’s private jet.
A hedge fund trader giving dating advice to his down-and-out friend: “Girls come in many shapes and sizes. But just remember: when you hold them by the ankles and look down, they all look the same!”
As the night wore on, I identified the two primary strains of Fashion Meets Finance attendees. There were the merely curious, the people who had heard about the event from a friend and were intrigued enough about the premise to pay $25 for a ticket. These people mainly stood or sat on the perimeter of the roof deck, where they could observe (and, in some cases, laugh at) the commingling of the other partygoers.
And then there were the true believers. A portion of the attendees at Fashion Meets Finance seemingly had no idea that the event had become a punch line. They were bankers and fashionistas who were determined to find their matches at a superficial singles mixer, and they had no qualms about it. “I want the real deal!” said one female fashionista, who was sprawled out on a white sofa on Bar Basque’s terrace, sipping a vodka soda and watching the men walk by. “I’m really independent,” she said, “and I don’t want someone who needs to be around me all the time. I want them to work 150 hours a week at Goldman Sachs.”
From Roose’s Young Money: