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Why Diddy’s iconic party was the ultimate celebrity invite
A night to remember in Manhattan
The venue, a downtown Manhattan club hidden away on a lively side street, was packed with movie stars and hopeful attendees alike. The party was still ablaze at 3 a.m. despite hitting capacity at midnight. As the editor-in-chief of a popular urban women’s magazine, I had the privilege of slipping inside long before most. The scene was electric: artists, executives, designers, athletes, and models filled the lush red leather booths.
Glimmers of light intermittently flashed as servers in minimal black outfits delivered bottles of Cristal to the VIPs. The DJ spun an endless succession of hip-hop hits, compelling me to stay on the dance floor for hours. Just then, the DJ lowered the music, and our host, Puff Daddy (or Diddy, or Sean Combs, take your pick), took to a table with a microphone.
“Everybody chill out,” he commanded, “5-0 is in the house.”
I pushed a sweat-soaked curl from my eye to see policemen entering as Puff pleaded, “Please, Mr. Fire Marshal, don’t shut it down. Look at all the honeys here. Stay and have drinks on me.”
The fire marshal wasn’t swayed. The lights came up, officially ending New York’s 2001 party season opener.
The rise and fall of an iconic party host
Years later, Diddy’s once glamorous lifestyle took a sharp turn. Facing serious federal charges, including sex trafficking and racketeering, Sean Combs now sits in solitary confinement. This somber setting starkly contrasts with the vibrant bashes he once threw, just miles away in Brooklyn.
That night in Manhattan, however, remains etched in memory as a shining example of early 2000s hip-hop culture’s peak. This era saw urban art forms — music, fashion, media — dominate pop culture not just in New York but globally. The parties were not merely social events; they shaped trends in clothing, music, and nightlife. High-end designers drew inspiration from these gatherings, DJs gained prominence, and record labels used parties to hype new releases. These affairs revolutionized nightlife with VIP sections, bottle service, and extravagant champagne showers. As a former music label lawyer aptly put it, “Hip-hop parties weren’t just expressions of influence; they were influence.”
Pioneering the party scene
No one defined this culture better than Puff Daddy. With a retinue of celebrities, models, and security, Puff was the master of ceremonies. He turned every event into a spectacle of fun and influence. Unlike other parties, a Puffy party was universally acknowledged as an unparalleled celebration of vibrant culture and solidified reputations.
Luminaries like Donald Trump, Anna Wintour, Clive Davis, Ashton Kutcher, Jennifer Lopez, and Kim Kardashian were regular fixtures at his events. These gatherings rivaled even the Met Gala’s exclusivity, with invitations eagerly sought after.
According to Rob Shuter, Diddy’s former publicist, “The last one to do this was Truman Capote with his Black and White Ball. Diddy’s primary talent was his knack for promotion; he knew how to command attention.”
A mentor’s influence
Through Andre Harrell, founder of Uptown Records, Puff learned the art of “ghettofabulous” living. Influenced by flashy figures like Nicky Barnes, Harrell’s vision of urban culture included designer suits, expensive cars, and flowing champagne. Uptown wasn’t just about music; it was selling a lifestyle, and Puff was the perfect ambassador. He epitomized ghettofabulous with his mix of high-end fashion and streetwear. As a student of both urban and mainstream cultures, Puff became the living embodiment of Harrell’s conception.
Armed with this ethos, Puff launched Bad Boy Records and reinvented downtown club culture. He created an aspirational VIP scene, setting the bar for party standards. Forbes magazine named his famed White Parties as one of the “World’s Hottest Parties.” These events, complete with custom decor and extravagant elements, eventually cost around a million dollars each.
Jessica Rosenbloom, the head producer of these events, once estimated in Ebony magazine that the mid-2000s White Parties were a significant financial endeavor. However, Shuter noted that Diddy always found sponsors for these lavish events.
Breaking barriers and setting trends
The iconic White Parties did more than just dazzle; they opened previously exclusive locales like the Hamptons to hip-hop culture and Black attendees. They normalized opulence within the urban community and set a new trend that spilled over into mainstream culture. Russell Simmons, Lennox Lewis, LL Cool J, and Al Sharpton were a few prominent figures who graced these Hamptons events.
Meanwhile, the city’s elite could no longer ignore the growing influence of urban parties. Puff Daddy made the Hamptons accessible and fashionable for everyone, including those who might have previously been sidelined by its elite circles.
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For trailers and updates on upcoming films, check out Movie & TV Trailers., he was still able to bring all races and creeds together. One year, Trump even flew to the Hamptons in a helicopter to go to a White Party afterparty at Club NV,” Johnny Nunez, who’s been the main celebrity photographer of high-end urban parties since the 1990s, elaborates. “Puff imported the DJs that ran the New York City nightclub scene to spin. Socialites who had only ever listened to Z100 and who never knew the depths of Black music were turning up to Bonecrusher and DMX or Luther Vandross and Stephanie Mills. The music was amplifying the exchange of culture. And now, the hip-hop dances on TikTok that every race goes viral doing can be traced back to our culture and the way Puffy introduced Black music to the white elite.”
Shuter echoes the sentiment, noting that white superstars were desperate to get clout with a Diddy hang. “Their publicists would call for their A-listers, wanting to get them into parties,” he says. “All of these white people could hang out with a person of color … and it would make them look cool.”
Donna Karan, Tommy Lee, Mariah Carey, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Star Jones and Rev. Run at Diddy’s 2007 “Real White Party” in East Hampton. Bryan Bedder/CP/Getty Images Puffy elevated partying to an art form, and his events became the most coveted invitations at that time. If you weren’t there, you weren’t culturally relevant. Actors from the biggest films and television shows clamored for invites; NBA and NFL stars hounded managers for hookups; Wall Street honchos tried and failed to buy their way in. But even when they were on the list, people were turned away at the door if their clothes weren’t right. We worked on our outfits for days for a Puffy party because we had to come correct. It was Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Fendi, Louboutin, Blahnik or bust. The White Parties took it to the next level because you couldn’t come in if you dared wear beige or ecru. Puff had a PR rep at the door who managed the list, policed the pure white attire and also judged the fashion. She had no problem telling anyone, no matter how powerful, to get lost if their outfit wasn’t right or their toes were hanging over their sandals. One Puff party invitation from the early year aughts, a post MTV Video Music Awards party he co-hosted with Guy Oseary in midtown, exemplified the stringent standards of admittance:
“If your shoes are scuffed, you’re going to have a problem. If you’re wearing jeans, you’re on the wrong track. Pull out the flyest sh*t in your closet, or have your stylist pull something for you,” with suggestions including Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana and his own Sean John collection. Men were told to get clean shaves; women were told “hair-dos, waxing, manicures and pedicures” were a must.
“He was just the perfect ringmaster at this because that is what he was: He was our generation’s P.T. Barnum, he put on a show,” says Shuter. “Everything was about detail, everything was about press.”
At the center of the concentric circles of power was a tight-knit community of pure Black excellence. The former CEO of a music label explains, “We were part of an ecosystem of talented young music execs that had never had money like that before in our lives. Puff introduced us to a new lifestyle. He showed us what the next level looked like. A-list non-Black creatives were desperate to be next to us because we were the hot shit!”
At the height of Puff’s era of legal revelry, we’d be partying with the artists who made the music we were dancing to; we were wearing the designers whose brand executives were at the next banquette, and we were making brand representation deals and booking magazine covers in banquettes with artists and athletes alike. The ability to create cultural moments alongside culture creators was, yes, legendary.
Puff’s talent for curation made his events so legendary that they, along with hip hop culture, spread around the world. Soon, Puff was throwing parties in St. Tropez, Ibiza, Miami, Morocco and Los Angeles. And everyone was there: Mariah Carey, Martha Stewart, Jay-Z, Lindsay Lohan, Howard Stern, Oprah Winfrey, Lil’ Kim, Donna Karan, Al Sharpton, Paris Hilton, Jermaine Dupri, Jon Bon Jovi. No matter in which country, when you were at a Puff party, you knew you were part of an elite multicultural crowd of tastemakers, changemakers, powerbrokers, newsmakers, creatives and some of the most gorgeous cover girls you’ve ever seen.
Sean “Diddy” Combs during a White Party in St. Tropez. Jon Furniss/WireImage Although by the early aughts, Puff had become the undisputed leader of the ghettofabulous movement, Harrell didn’t see Puff’s interpretation as empowering. To him, the Bad Boy version was empty, full of glitter and gold with no inspiration. As Harrell told me in an interview before his death in 2020: “When I first met Puff, I could practically feel the fire coming from deep within his soul. Even though my hiring Puff as an intern put him in the game, it felt more like I was just getting out of the way of a bullet train, speeding inexorably down the track toward an ultimate goal. But the faster a train goes, the easier it is to jump the tracks.”
And that’s exactly what happened.
There is a stark difference between the first Puff party I attended and the last. The first was a White Party at his house in the Hamptons in 2000. The last was a Grammys afterparty at his mansion in Los Angeles in 2017 to which Harrell had invited me, as he and I were working on a book together. At his first White Party, Puff was dancing, he was on the mic hyping the crowd, he was sending Champagne to VIP banquettes, he was making it “grown and sexy” as he used to say. In the later years, he wasn’t happy or partying, nor did he look interested in hyping his guests. Instead, he was sitting in a corner, surrounded by a mass of random people, looking glassy-eyed and bored. At that last party, I remember Cassie glued to his side, looking equally glassy-eyed and sad. And although it was his party, you no longer got the sense that it was a Puffy party.
While I never personally saw anything illicit other than some drug use in corners, there was a feeling of freedom at the early-year parties. Perhaps because it was so hard to get in, most of us, naively, felt as if we were in a tight-knit circle of trust where we could let our guard down, dance on tables and do tequila shots until dawn. We were in a “safe space” that turned out to be utterly unsafe.
It’s not surprising that absolute power corrupted Sean Combs absolutely — especially within the context of the larger hip-hop music and culture trajectory from fun to dangerous as gangsta rap took over. Along with gangsta rap’s glorified depictions of violence came sexually explicit themes within lyrics and urban iconography that, ultimately, yielded widespread misogyny. As a woman working adjacent to the male-dominated urban music industry, I realized that the misogyny — and accompanying hypermasculinity —created dangerous situations for me in too many environments, including the parties that had, at one time, seemed like a harmless good time.
I hate to see the conflation of Puff’s legal parties in the heyday with the abuses of power and depravity that have now been alleged in the last few years, and detailed in criminal documents.
But in reading the allegations against Diddy, one could perhaps see the throughline between the orchestrated extravagance of those parties and the way in which he purportedly controlled the so-called “freak-offs” and those involved. And there was always another side to Diddy than the charming party host: The man who was acquitted of gun charges in a 1999 shooting that left three people injured and resulted in a years-long sentence for his protégé Shyne, who later said he took the fall for Diddy; or the mogul who violently assaulted Steve Stoute in his office over his anger over the direction of a Nas-Diddy music video (felony charges were dropped at Stoute’s request and the case was settled out of court).
Thankfully, while Sean “Puffy” “Diddy” “Love” Combs has been undeniably impactful to urban culture, the urban party world has long since moved on. Branded events at Cannes, Martha’s Vineyard and Sundance have replaced Puff’s bacchanalias, and Michael Rubin’s annual Hamptons White Party is now the place to see and be seen. Can’t stop, won’t stop.
