Prada Sponsors a Dinner for the Lunchbox Fund
Vogue
Alessandra CodinhaAmong all of the sensual pleasures in this life, food and art rank pretty highly, so it would follow that pleasure-seekers would do well at the Lunchbox Fund, whose annual benefit on Wednesday night at the newly revamped Smyth hotel in Tribeca was uniquely well oriented in both regards. With a farm-to-fork menu provided by perennial hot spot creatorAndrew Carmellini and his brand-new endeavor, Little Park, a small clutch of Paddle8 auctioned works by artists like Chuck Close, Kiki Smith, and Ray Johnson, an events committee swelled with hosts like Bettina Prentice, Topaz Page-Green, Aimee Mullins, and Olivia Wilde (the latter was called away at the last minute) and a sponsor like Prada, guests and supporters like Liv Tyler, Sting andTrudie Styler, Michael Stipe and Salman Rushdie arrived assured of a good time ahead. (The various lengths at which they took to arrive—Mullins, for example, resplendent in gold-piped Prada, just landed earlier in the day from South Africa for a 24-hour visit, Page-Green announced—only spoke to their dedication to the cause.)
The Lunchbox Fund provides daily meals for orphaned and vulnerable school children in township and rural areas of Page-Green's native South Africa, a country where 56 percent of all children (more than 12 million, a large number of which are orphans) live in poverty, the Prada-clad model-turned-humanitarian asserted during her moving opening remarks. What the fund has found is that regular midday meals provided at schools encourage increased attendance and the related influx of opportunity. They've provided 2.6 million meals this year, and the current aim is to feed 50,000 kids per day by 2016, a goal which was helped along by a lively auction (Chuck Close's diptych portrait of Page-Green being among the top sellers) and a generous donation from Prada, announced during dinner.
The organization has also been reaping the benefits of its year-old endeavor Feedie, an app that invites the user to "share food; literally" by turning the craze for food Instagrams into donations by participating restaurants. It may have been the first dinner in recent memory where Instagramming at the table was met with active encouragement. "Topaz has world-domination schemes,"Alexander Gilkes crowed. "We're going to make that 2.6 million meals 25 million, 250 million!" As for the lady of the hour? "I'm beyond grateful," Topaz-Green said of her friends' support as a bevy of desserts arrived. And of those desserts? One icy confection known as "lemon fluff" is a can't-miss: Order it, Instagram it (for Feedie, of course), and enjoy guilt-free. What could be sweeter?