On a gorgeous night, some 4,000 people, dressed all in white, have come to dine in a public, yet secret place in New York's Bryant Park. They have come for Diner en Blanc, an unusual pop-up event that takes place in 20 countries. The guests eat in splendor at a location they only learn about minutes before they arrive. The thousands wave white napkins to signal the beginning of the event. They arrived at 6:30 in the evening last Wednesday, carting white tables and chairs, china, food, wine glasses and cutlery. This is the third year that Diner En Blanc has come to New York. Laura Tyring, who has traveled down from White Plains, stands in a line with her friend, Monica Condor, rolling her cart as the queue moves slowly, carrying a big straw basket filled with supplies. She wears a white shirt, white pants and and a big, white, lacy, floppy hat. How long ago did she learn the secret location of this event? "A minute," she says. "They gave us several locations where to meet." Attendees are told to wear comfortable shoes and have a subway card.
They meet a team leader who says,"follow me," and they don't learn the location until they are almost there. Fitting more than 1,800 tables into Bryant Park means pushing every table very close together. The chaos of setting up flows into organization and beauty: fine white china; white napkins, sometimes folded into intricate designs, flowers — white lilies and roses; little electric candles that would not blow out in a wind. And, of course, the clothes: wedding dresses, styles from the '20s, people wearing white angel wings. Sandy Jarrett came here with her daughter, Michele. "It's all about the adventure," she says. "It's about lugging all the accoutrements to some unknown destination, and then getting there and seeing all these adventurers in white. The co-hosts of this New York event are Sandy Safi and Aymeric Pasquier, who also run the international organization. "It baffles me every time to see how much people invest into this," Safi says. But she says it works because it's spontaneous and different, and it gets back to basic values we forget in the bustle of city life, "sharing a meal with friends, getting dressed up."
Diner en Blanc started 25 years ago, when Francois Pasquier, Aymeric's father, decided to hold a dinner party in the Bois de Bologne, a large public square in Paris. Since some guests were bringing along friends, he asked everyone to wear white so they would be able to spot each other easily. These days, Safi says, Diner en Blanc takes place in 40 cities around the world. But interest exploded after New York hosted its first event three years ago, Safi says: Since then, some 400 cities that have requested Diner en Blanc to come to them. Pasquier says part of the appeal is the effort that's required to participate. "Most of the events now, you just pay a price and you're passive," he says. "In Diner en Blanc, it's [just] the opposite. You work a lot, you have to bring your own table, you have to bring your own chairs, so you commit, and you have to bring back your garbage. All this work is like an achievement, and you will see the joy of people tonight." A few minutes later, I'm walking through the lines of white tables when an acquaintance, Leslie Brown, calls out to me.
She is at a table for six, filled with glorious-looking food and several bottles of wine. "What's on the menu," I ask? She tells me: salmon, an assortment of cheeses, roasted cauliflower and peas, a rice salad with portobello mushrooms, skewers of shrimp and, of course, lots of wine and desserts. Then, just as I am about to leave, Brown says, "Are you going to sit down and eat with us? We have an extra plate. We have enough, and I have an extra knife and fork." So I sit down on a very low box — there are no extra chairs — and take a skewer of lovely grilled shrimp and some of that portobello salad and a little of that dish of cauliflower and peas. And I join the conversation. Next year, perhaps, I will have to find a really nice white dress. Make It Your OwnAny fabric, any frame. Over 1,000 combinations to choose from. New DesignsStraight from our factory, check out our latest designs ready to customize. Customer Photo GalleryGet inspired and see how other customers decorate their spaces.
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Scrolling through the book online, even robbed of the ability to flip through physical pages, the famously independent singer-songwriter’s vision shines through. Every white space, lyrical turn, and aesthetic decision feels deliberate. As is the case with the best, long-awaited works, one immediately understands that the artist has taken exactly as much time as they needed—not one year more, nor one second less. This creative control extends to the accompanying album, a 21-track experience that Solange has described as “a project on identity, empowerment, independence, grief, and healing.”With her longest list of collaborators yet, A Seat at the Table shows off a tonal range that other artists can’t touch. From Lil Wayne to Dev Hynes to Q-Tip to Kelly Rowland to Sean Nicholas Savage, the breadth and depth of Solange’s influences mirror the wide reach of her poetry. A Seat at the Table, both the book and the album, defy easy comprehension—luckily, they’re beautiful enough on first glance to appease both diehard fans and surface skimmers.
Sweet and clear, Solange’s voice inarguably shares her sister’s DNA. But Solange uses her instrument in distinct ways, weaving together synthetic funk, electronic pulses, and woven vocals to hypnotic effect. From the second track, “Weary, which opens, “I’m weary of the ways of the world,” A Seat at the Table wears its politics proudly. “And do you belong? I do,” an essay Solange published earlier this year about black bodies living in white spaces, echoes throughout the album. There’s the exhaustion with always being treated differently, and the anxiety of being constantly on guard. In the essay, she wrote, “You and your friends have been called the N-word, been approached as prostitutes, and have had your hair touched in a predominately white bar just around the corner from the same venue.” On “Don’t Touch My Hair,” she croons, “Don’t touch what’s there / When it’s the feelings I wear / They don’t understand / What it means to me.” Songs like “Don’t Touch My Hair” might strike certain listeners as containing some harsh, confrontational truths.
They are not mistaken. In a recent interview, Solange explained, “I think that A Seat at the Table for me is an invitation to allow folks to pull up a chair, get very close and have these hard uncomfortable truths be shared. It’s not going to be pretty, it’s not going to be fun, you may not get to dance to it, you’re not going to breathe easily through it, but that is the state of the times that we’re in right now.” This album unapologetically lives in a racial divide that it cannot, and will not, bridge—it’s not here to lecture or enlighten the people who “don’t understand.” Or as Solange puts it succinctly on “F.U.B.U.,” “Don’t feel bad if you can’t sing along / Just be glad you got the whole wide world.” The eighth track on the album, “F.U.B.U.” couldn’t be clearer: “This shit is for us / All my niggas let the whole world know / Play this song and sing it on your terms.” It’s a crescendo and a mission statement, informed and aided by the spoken interludes that came before it.
On “Dad Was Mad,” Mathew Knowles describes decades’ worth of anger, stemming from his experience as one of the first young black students to integrate a Southern school. Tina Knowles pipes in later to say that “there’s such beauty in black people” adding, “It really saddens me when we’re not allowed to express that pride in being black.” Rapper and entrepreneur Master P chronicles some of the potential pitfalls of growing up black, warning, “Black kids have to figure [it] out—we don’t have a rehab to go to. You gotta rehab yourself.” A Seat at the Table is its own brand of rehab—a response to anger and weariness that seems set on joy and self-love in spite of it all. A Seat at the Table invites two lazy-but-apt comparisons—to Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and to Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Blonde, another highly-anticipated, recent release from a painstaking artist, similarly manifested as both an album and a magazine. Both projects aren’t easily designated to one genre, and boast collaborators across the realms of hip hop, R&B, pop, indie rock and electronica.
Lemonade, in addition to being the brainchild of Solange’s own sister, is also a meditation on black womanhood, love, and tenacity. Of course, Beyoncé and Solange are very different artists. Beyoncé is one half of hip-hop’s royal couple, and arguably the greatest living pop star. Her fan base is mammoth and her work is universal, if not universally beloved. Perhaps due to her wide-reaching audience, Beyoncé often seems to be creating in broad strokes. Her political allegiance to the Black Lives Matter movement, and her dedication to highlighting black beauty and black experiences through her art, particularly on Lemonade, is undeniable. But like any unfathomably famous person, Beyoncé keeps breathing room between her personal life and her public projection. To some people, Lemonade is proof that Jay Z was stepping out on his wife. To others, it’s an amalgam of experiences of black womanhood—an artistic expression, not a personal admission. Meanwhile, A Seat at the Table is so clearly under Solange’s skin.