Last week during after-hours at the New Museum, an intimate group of art, fashion, music, and cultural gamechangers met with Virgil Abloh to celebrate his newest creation—Moët & Chandon’s newest Nectar Impérial Rosé bottle. Designed with his signature quotation marks, hinting at the obvious, the bottle explicitly states, “DO NOT DROP.”
“I believe that there’s a version of many things that I can make,” said Abloh. “This was an exercise in executing a best in class product in a new aesthetic—my aesthetic.”
Virgil Abloh.
Courtesy of BFA and Moët & Chandon.
Completely transparent so that the imbiber can see the actual color of the product, the new bottle continues the designer’s thread of changing experience with transparency and relevance.
“I wanted the bottle to be as clear as possible and to see the product. Usually the bottle is a different color and you can’t see the product. I wanted to make it look as similar as it does in a glass,” Abloh explained. “On the bottle is says ‘DO NOT DROP,’ which allows me to add emotion to an object.”
Courtesy of BFA and Moët & Chandon.
Over cocktails downstairs, followed by a seated dinner upstairs in the Sky Room, we heard from Renaud Butel, vice president of Moët & Chandon U.S., and mingled with guests like Emily Ratajkowski, Chloe Sevigny, A$AP Ferg, Winnie Harlow, Heron Preston, Mia Moretti, Shayne Oliver, Ty Hunter, Chloe Wise, Daniel Arsham, and Lucien Smith.
Outside, on the façade of the soon-to-open Sister City hotel, we noticed a projection of guest names. And over family-style bites, we heard from Abloh on the collaboration and his choosing of guests—all creatively inspirational to him. “I get inspired by people and the choices they make in culture,” he said.
Courtesy of BFA and Moët & Chandon.
At the end of dinner, we sampled two new custom cocktails for the event called The New Classic and The Drop, while enjoying DJed music by DJ Venus X and Abloh himself. And of course, before leaving, we had to ask how he is impacted by art, which he said was “a metric to know that an idea had a relevance. If an idea isn’t relevant, it shouldn’t exist.”
