On Monday night, 3000 revelers descended onto Lincoln Center in New York City for a pop-up white dinner, the Dîner en Blanc. With the location kept a tight secret until the very last moment, guests met at designated locations and were brought to the location of festivities just before the event began.
As an attendee of the Paris Dîner en Blanc for the last three years and the New York debut last year. I thought that this year's dinners at Notre Dame, Place des Vosges and Versailles would be hard to beat, but the dance party at the Lincoln Center dinner may have trumped them all.
In 1988, the first official Dîner en Blanc took place in the Parc de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne upon Francois Pasquier's return to Paris after living abroad. He planned a dinner party but so many friends wanted to come that he asked them to meet at the Bois de Boulogne and to dress in white so they could find each other. Not surprisingly, it became a yearly affair. Friends were allowed to invite friends in a system known as the pyramid amicale. Until 1991, the venue remained the same but the numbers quickly escalated from 200 to 400, to 800 in 1990 and 1,200 in 1991. By 1992, it was necessary to conceal the location and the current method of using group leaders to coordinate batches of tables began.
At Monday's Dîner en Blanc at Lincoln Center, Untapped New York captured this timelapse video from the balcony of Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center using a GoPro HD HERO2 camera. Special thanks to Aymeric Pasquier, the Dîner en Blanc International and Lincoln Center for making this video possible. Sign up for next year's dinners in locations around the world, stretching from Kigali to Singapore and 11 locations in the United States on the official Dîner en Blanc website.
