Even if you’re a famous person with a jam-packed social calendar, the opportunity to attend a Beyoncé album release party only comes along so often. What’s more, the party in question was for a Beyoncé album full of dance music of all kinds, from Chicago house to ’70s disco—an album that has the very notion of party baked into it. Happily, when many famous people gathered in New York City on Friday night to fete Renaissance, Bey’s seventh studio album—and, consequently, her seventh studio album to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart—Donald Glover did not squander the opportunity.
The evening’s theme was, fittingly, “Club Renaissance,” and Glover pulled up to the Times Square Edition hotel seemingly ready for any direction the night could take. Wearing a chest-bearing, iridescent white mesh bodysuit; a flowing, green satin jacket; metallic winged eyeliner; and a pair of $2,350 cashmere-trimmed hiking boots from Loro Piana, he somehow managed to embody the many flavors of Midtown Manhattanites past and present: the club kids, the weirdo fashionistas, the wealthy businessmen, and the local free spirits who also manage to dress like all of those things at once.
Among partygoers including Leonardo DiCaprio, Kendrick Lamar, Yara Shahidi, and Trevor Noah, Glover certainly wasn’t the only one to get festive. (Lamar wore a great pair of groovy, Liberace-esque rhinestone-covered boots.) But there is an element of surrendering to a theme here: Glover, who has already embraced a sort of retro NYC seasonality in a pair of very short running shorts, came to let loose. And since we are in the dogs days of a quite meshy summer, maybe you should feel free to let loose, too.
