Lykke Li Performed a Secret Set at Highsnobiety’s Holiday Party
Bridges, the restaurant in lower Manhattan, is beautiful. There is thoughtful recessed lighting. There is a wooden wraparound bar. There is an entire archway of glass bricks — the kind that everyone talks about. And on Monday night, the Michelin-starred eatery welcomed guests for a holiday party by Highsnobiety and eyewear brand Thistles.
Throughout the night, the Bridges staff passed around the kinds of hors d'oeuvre that people actually wanted to eat: rainbow trout crudo with horseradish and salted mandarin, and a carmelized sweet potato, pomelo, and salsa verde bite that dissolved in the mouth. Bartenders served Belvedere cocktails, including an especially decent martini. From a corner by the bar, writer and filmmaker Eddie Huang watched the crowd. “It feels like you guys are actually leaning into downtown New York and it’s cool,” he said.
In the room: Hari Nef, Dev Hynes, Chloe Wise, The Dare, Grace Gummer, and Denim Tears’ Tremaine Emory. GQ editor Samuel Hine brought his new fiancée, Emma Kate Sayer. PR magnate Harrison Vail was there, and so was Alexa Chung and her boyfriend, Tom Sturridge. Highsnobiety’s Noah Johnson and Thistles’ Thistle Brown presided as hosts, introducing the evening’s musical guest: Lykke Li, who arrived in a Blacklane car.
Li’s performance was simple: one microphone, one guitarist, and a couple of amps. She started with “Little Bit,” standing on a rectangle of floor surrounded by banquettes. She moved into “sex money feelings die” — her first time performing the song acoustically — while rows of spectators wearing Thistles sunglasses swayed and writhed. And of course, she closed out with “I Follow Rivers,” the song that’s become a queer anthem by virtue of its inclusion in Blue Is the Warmest Color. (If you didn’t know, now you know.) Clad in a leather bomber and black boot-cut pants, Li bent and wove like a tube man outside of a car dealership. The whole thing felt out-of-body, like Euphoria or New York City pre-COVID.
Afterward, the crowd dispersed and started bopping around, and Li approached with a cocktail that she wasn’t quite sold on. “I can’t decide what kind of night I want to have,” she said. “Whether I want to turn the corner…” Eventually, she drifted outside and chatted with Nef as they smoked cigarettes.
As the night wound down, dessert came out — the chocolate hazelnut tart, interspersed with chunks of crystalized salt, was good enough to invoke tears — and people started to disperse, grabbing Thistles and Highsnobiety-branded lighters from a bowl by the door: a souvenir smoke for a crowd of smokers, a reminder of one really cool night that happened one time.
