The New Museum Parties Like it’s 1993

ABOVE: DJ ANDREWANDREW. PHOTO COURTESY OF NICHOLAS HUNT/PATRICK MCMULLAN.

The 1990s were a great time. Grunge meant you didn’t have to care—not pretend to not care, Williamsburg style, but really not care—and look awesome doing it. Leonardo DiCaprio still played dreamy, wide-eyed boys, not creepy slave-owners. Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, barely in their 20s, were filming Harmony Korine’s Kids. Though we now have Spring Breakers to look forward to, it-girls these days just aren’t… all that.

So we were ecstatic for the flashback at the New Museum’s party Wednesday night, in celebration of their exhibition “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” which runs through May 26. The soirée was everything that we remembered about the decade, and more. The best part of the more—definitely not in existence pre-2000—was the PHHHOTO booths. These allowed posers to create .gifs of themselves, which were then projected on a wall above DJ AndrewAndrew in the lobby, blending with the Ian Schrager (of Studio 54 notoriety) hotel-inspired swirling colored lights.

In the seventh-floor SkyRoom, vintage Absolut Vodka ads from the ’90s were projected on the walls, and, for a short time, on buildings opposite the balcony, to the tunes of DJ Ghostdad.

Specialty drinks included the My So-Called Martini, The Zima, The O.J., and The Clinton, an extremely strong vodka-and-vermouth mixture finished with a pink bubblegum cigar —assume the connotations of said cigar at your own risk (of impeachment? Sorry, we had to).

For our overall thoughts on the evening, we’ll let this Dazed and Confused (1993) .gif do the talking.