Julia Roberts Kicks Off NYFW With Jacquemus and Veuve Clicquot

Typically fashion weeks, be it New York or Paris, attract a relatively repetitive group of celebrities season after season. And then there’s Julia Roberts, A-list of A-list, a rarity on the fashion circuit. Fresh off premiering her new film “After the Hunt” at the Venice Film Festival, the actress arrived in New York to support friend Simon Porte Jacquemus at a dinner thrown to celebrate his bottle design for Veuve Clicquot. 

The French designer took over the Central Park Boathouse for an evening of music, mingling and, of course, Champagne, all washed in shades of Veuve’s signature yellow. Grapes, figs and mounds of butter tided guests over during golden hour while guests like Solange Knowles, Charlotte Le Bon, Imaan Hammam, Miles Chamley-Watson and Jordan Roth posed for photos. Yellow-painted rowboats manned by models paddled across Central Park Lake, ahead of a surprise musical performance by alumni of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect.

Roberts’ arrival, in an oversized menswear suiting look, caused a hush throughout the cocktail hour. She’d become friends with Jacquemus after attending one of his shows in Saint Paul de Vence in Provence.

“We have friends in common and I’m a fan and so I said to our friends in common, ‘let’s put this together,’” she said after posing for photos with the designer and her niece, Emma Roberts. “And I went to his show in [Provence], and we just sort of had a sweet connection. So I’m so happy to be here again and see him.”

Roberts motioned to her suit and said that as a lover of menswear, she was immediately drawn to Jacquemus’ take on suiting. 

“I love that it’s still feminine and comfortable and beautiful and just impeccable details. Those are some key components for me,” she said.

“I haven’t been to a lot of fashion shows and when you see the clothes up close and the clothes coming around, you can see how people work so hard — and then it’s just over in minutes,” she said of being at the runway show. “It’s astonishing, really.”

Her time at Venice featured another viral menswear fashion moment: she debuted Dario Vitale’s first designs for Versace, a blazer, button-down and denim look that she then lent to Amanda Seyfried.

“Sharing is caring!” she said of the swap.

“After the Hunt,” out this fall, costars Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri and is from director Luca Guadagnino. 

“It was a lot of work, but we had a great time and it was nice just to be reunited with my castmates and with Luca because it’s been a few months, and so that was the best part,” she said of the festival. 

“I saw some old friends, I saw some new friends, it was a little getaway for my husband and I. So yeah, it was just fun. And there’s some slumber party element to all staying in the same hotel, which is really fun,” she added “You’re stumbling down to breakfast, getting ready to go to work, and there’s all these people.”