Eurotrash is back
Ê Julia Chaplin The New York Times
Saturday, December 14, 2002
NEW YORK
There were no celebrities at Pangaea, a downtown nightclub with African safari decor. Instead, at 2 a.m. the reserved VIP tables were teeming with Europeans drinking bottles of Moet and Ketel One.
"Look, there's that beautiful girl I met in Monaco last summer," said Jean Bernard Fernandez-Versini, 21, a New York University student from France, who spends summers on the Riviera, spends winter vacations in St. Barts and took last year off just to party.
Fernandez-Versini's evening had gotten off to a bumpy start. He had canceled his usual 10:30 p.m. dinner with an entourage of models and European friends at Downtown because Giuseppe Cipriani, one of the owners, was in Italy. "It's not the same energy when Giuseppe's not there," Fernandez-Versini said. Instead, he rerouted to Serafina on Lafayette Street.
Yes, those hard-partying jet-setters known to American wags as Eurotrash, who flocked to New York City by the Concorde-load in the 1980s sporting black mock turtlenecks, leather pants and sometimes dubious aristocratic titles, are back on the town.
They can be found shelling out $350 for a bottle of Ketel One at reserved tables every Wednesday after midnight at Pangaea, at a party given by Carmen D'Alessio, a Peruvian-born promoter who brought some of the first Europeans to Studio 54 in the late '70s. Elsewhere on Wednesday nights, French, Italians and a few Middle Easterners groove at Lotus, which imports their favorite disk jockeys from the Hotel Costes in Paris and the Caves du Roy in Saint-Tropez. A Euro scene also flourishes at Bungalow 8 after 1 a.m. most nights, and at Powder, a new club in the meatpacking district with disk jockeys who spin deafening techno. Later this month Cielo is scheduled to open in the West Village; a dance club, it is inspired by the Pacha club on Ibiza and decorated by the same designer who did Nikki Beach club in Saint-Tropez. In March, a branch of Buddha Bar, a popular restaurant and lounge in Paris, is to open in the meatpacking district with an Asian jungle theme. (Eurotrash hangouts, apparently, favor a motif of grass huts and tribal masks.)
"This crowd is recession-proof," said Amy Sacco, the owner of Bungalow 8, who said she considers her customers "international," not Eurotrash. "They're super-high-end, well traveled and don't think twice about spending a lot of money to have a good time," she said. Marc Biron, a member of the first Euro wave, who has resurfaced to promote Euro parties at Estate and Lotus, struck a variation on this theme. "Europeans love to party," he said. "It doesn't matter if they have money or not - they will always manage to buy a bottle and go out dancing."
The original crowd of up-all-night, no-office-to-go-to Europeans arrived in New York in the late 1970s, fleeing high taxes, unstable economies and kidnappings. Taki Theodoracopulos, the Greek shipping heir-turned-society writer who wrote the "Eurotrash" column in The East Side Express in the early '80s, explained the origin of his tribe. "The Americans have this rather obscene habit of working," he said. "So when the Europeans came over, you'd look around at a nightclub at 3 a.m., and there'd be 40 Euros hanging around while the Americans had gone to bed at 11:30 p.m. because they had to get up the next morning and go to Wall Street. The term was a little pejorative, but we had a sense of humor about it."
After the 1987 stock market plunge, many of the Europeans went home. The scene fizzled. They began trickling back during the '90s go-go years. With the collapse of Silicon Alley and the waves of Wall Street layoffs, New Yorkers have receded from the nightclub world, leaving the Europeans, like pilings at low tide, all the more visible.
"They're partying on as if the Dow was at 11,000," said Serge Becker, a founder of Joe's Pub, who retains some of the love-hate that New Yorkers feel for such out-of-towners in their nightspots. "It's a totally uninspired, boring crowd," he added. "Yeah, they might pick up the tab, but you still have to hang out with them."
That is a minority report. Regarding the old Eurotrash and the new Eurotrash, the biggest change in perception seems to be that most New Yorkers no longer turn up their noses at them. At a time when such Americans as Sean Combs and Jenna Bush have discovered the retro chic of Saint-Tropez, many New Yorkers are dropping in on the Euro-flavored club nights, nostalgic for their last beach vacation.
"The stigma of Eurotrash has disappeared," said Mark Baker, an owner of Lotus. "In the last few years it's become cool to associate with Europeans on their turf and be able to drop names of the coolest club in St. Barts. New York went to Saint-Tropez last summer, and now Saint-Tropez has come to New York."
Nina Nikpour, a 21-year-old New Yorker : "I just love European men in leather pants," Nikpour said. "American men always talk about how much stuff costs. European men just pay."
Although the stereotype of the party-hearty young European in New York has some truth to it, looks can sometimes deceive. At an art opening in a space in Chelsea Market that is the future site of Zukabar, a tribal theme bar and restaurant to be operated by the owners of Buddha Bar, Aymeric Lombard, a French-Italian investment banker, took in an exhibition called "Lost Worlds." A mostly European crowd made dinner plans on cell phones below the new-agey photomontages of Buddhas, glaciers and landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Tower of Pisa.
"The big trick about Europeans is that we look like we have more money than we do," said Lombard, 31, who was neatly dressed in a collared shirt and a crew neck sweater. "You can get very nice, cheap clothes in Naples and look better than Americans who spent thousands on an outfit at Gucci or John Varvatos." Noni Helms, 26, a German investment banker who moved to New York last year, dresses every evening in a suit, puts his tie in his pocket and heads for the clubs around midnight. He leaves them at about 3:30, pausing to attach his tie, and arrives at work by 4, when the European markets have opened. "New York is great fun," Helms said at Lotus, where he was slumped against a modelesque brunette in the back room. "Except I always feel jet-lagged."
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