My latest pastime is acting fancy. I go to an event in my self-made ballgown and pretend I belong among the women in Valentino who've been doing this for 42 years. As it turns out, Bouquets to Art is the kind of San Francisco soirée where someone will compliment your outfit and mean it, even if you sewed it yourself on a kitchen table in the Outer Sunset.
I should be writing about the flowers. This is, after all, a floral exhibition that's now in its 42nd year, featuring roughly 125 designers creating botanical interpretations of the de Young and Legion of Honor's permanent collection. Nearly 85,000 people visited during its run at the beginning of March.
But I went to opening night, and opening night to me was not really about the flowers. Opening night was about the room and who inhabited it.
Laura Camerlengo—the de Young's curator in charge of costume and textile arts—wore a one-shoulder pink floral dress and made polite small talk with me about nothing I remember just now. She is part of a very rarified group that decides what counts as fashion in two very prominent San Francisco spaces, and that makes this an elbow rub I always look forward to having. (Pictured alongside Brooke Golden and Lisa Zanze.)
So I didn't know this until like two minutes ago, but Annie Shiau is a personal stylist. Pictured left, Shiau sported her signature huge glasses a la Iris Apfel RIP, and a handbag with shears as the handle?? It's designed by Alexis Bittar and I'm obsessed. It feels like Shiau and I always get into scandalous gossip that could get us tossed out of fancy parties; she's hilarious fun.
Count me among the many who are intimidated by one Dede Wilsey, pictured right. I've yet to introduce myself. She wore an appropriately elegant floral print by Italian fashion house Etro alongside Jack Calhoun—who I often spot near Wilsey—in suiting replete with red flowers on midnight blue by British brand Topman.
So then the City College crew gave us this:
Every year, de Young partners with City College of San Francisco's Environmental Horticulture & Floristry Department and selects around six to eight students to design wearable garments made from live flowers. Each one interprets a specific work of art from the de Young's permanent collection.
Pictured above, a team of three students—Cece Chen, Anna Jiang, and Brianna Ang—created a midi strapless dress with a headpiece and parasol inspired by the Teotihuacan mural "Feathered Serpents and Flowering Trees" from de Young's collection. They used flowers native to the region where the mural was found, plus others chosen for color and shape to echo the mural's imagery. Among this was similar such whimsy we love to see:
Sporting my own extra long floral train, a couple gala co-chairs invited me into a room for $20,000 ticket buyers. (!) It's here I met Jamie Li, who makes these insane fancy-ass cakes she calls edible works of art. And they are. I did not ask why this particular one looked like a coffin—and no shade intended here, marketing people, but it did!
It tasted glorious, of course. Li told me the frosting was reminiscent of a London Fog but with a San Francisco twist. I know this drink quite well as I make my own with Lady Grey tea nearly every day.
Great parties for me need conversation that goes somewhere unexpected. They need a little bit of trespassing, and they need to feel like you're both the audience and the show. Bouquets to Art was a great party.
I spent some time taking in the spaces with Erin Badillo, executive director of Dress For Success SF and San Jose, whose gala comes up on April 18th. And I even conversed with a Mars scientist? Erika DeBenedictis is a biological engineer from MIT who runs a nonprofit called Pioneer Labs that's engineering microbes to grow things on Mars. At a party dedicated to earthbound flowers, she talked my ear off about interplanetary botany.
I went home to Forest Knolls that night and hung my floral train on the back of a door. The pink bodice didn't make it. I tore it off on my way into a Waymo and left it somewhere next to Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive. Didn't mean to litter, promise! 🤞 Maybe Laura Camerlengo found it and put it in the costume archive?
Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.
The Bold Italic is a not-for-profit media organization, and we publish first-person perspectives about San Francisco and the Bay Area. We operate under a fiscal sponsorship of a 501(c)(3).
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Most of these photos are taken by the very talented team at Drew Altizer Photography.
