Before opening to the public in mid-February, Paris Match was able to experience the first very private evenings at Silencio in New York.
It’s almost midnight this Wednesday, February 7 when rapper Kasseem Dean, aka Swizz Beatz, arrives in a black limousine. When he walks past us, he gives us a big smile and a V with his fingers. Once inside the club, it’s an indescribable rush. Followed by a bodyguard, he is surrounded by photographers and his friends who film him with their phones. He goes up to the square reserved for the DJ, gets behind the decks, takes the microphone, starts to rap, then rushes into a dressing room, where he distributes jackets stamped “DC” (“Dean Collection”) to a few of the three hundred “happy few” invited to the party. Among them: Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald (painters who created the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington), top model Joan Smalls, actor Evan Ross (son of Diana Ross) and his girlfriend Ashlee Simpson, but also Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum… In short, the elite of the arts and New York trendiness. The day before, Swizz Beatz inaugurated “Giants”, the exhibition of his collection of African-American art at the Brooklyn Museum, with them, with his wife Alicia Keys. To party (without her, because she chose to stay at home), he chose the Silencio, for which this is the inaugural evening, for a simple reason: he loves going to the Parisian Silencio, a place famous for its programming artistic.
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A youthful dream
In the darkness, Arnaud Frisch smiles. The evening is a “big gamble,” he admits. A childhood dream, too. He has been fascinated by America since he did an internship at the French embassy in Washington in the 1990s. He is a professional, not a figure of the night like Régine in her time: he was good student at school, went to a prestigious business school (ESSEC), and speaks with the calm tone of wise and reasonable people… If he got into a slouch, it’s because of his passion for music techno from the age of 15. Thanks to Jack Lang, his teacher, he achieved his first feat of arms in 1998, with the organization of the first Love Parade. After a career as a producer, he decided, in 2011, to open the first Parisian night club with artistic programming centered around fashion, art and architecture. A project that he called “Silencio”, inspired by the film “Mulholland Drive” by David Lynch. He, a very Francophile and protean artist, then agreed to decorate the place himself. Well born, the Silencio was an immediate success. Christophe opens. The stars flock there: Lana Del Rey, Damien Chazelle, Puff Daddy, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Roberto Saviano, The Weeknd, etc. Arnaud Frisch then thought about internationalizing it: he opened a second club in Ibiza. Pharrell Williams suggested he open another in Miami, but he preferred New York, “a city in the process of rebuilding itself,” he says today.
Silencio inspires mystery
Obviously, in Manhattan, he adopted the recipes that made the success of the club in Paris, while hiring a local designer Harry Nuriev, “to avoid doing the same thing again”. The place therefore inspires mystery. There is not the slightest sign outside. Just a sign: “Fire exit, put nothing there” (emergency exit, do not block access), hung on a narrow black metal double door, surrounded by Gothic decorations. The club is located in the basement of a “pre war” building, one of those huge neoclassical buildings built before World War II, on 57th Street, next to Central Park and the skyscrapers brand new from the “billionaire row”, the square of billionaires.
Access is cramped: you must first go down a narrow staircase lined with red lights, then walk in a long service courtyard overlooked by around fifty floors, to finally enter a cellar covered in vermilion velvet of the floor to ceiling. The place is cozy, intimate, not very big. With its golden benches nestled in alcoves, it is entirely in the style of David Lynch. After Swizz Beatz last Wednesday, it was the turn of Olivier Zahm, the founder of the cult Purple magazine to organize a party last night. The opening to the public is scheduled for mid-February. While waiting, perhaps, for other American openings, in Los Angeles for example…
2024-02-11 09:53:19
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