At GQ’s Met Gala After-Party, Chase Infiniti, Damson Idris, Lisa, and Paul Anthony Kelly Hosted an A+ Crowd

Reported by Vogue.

There is a reason Cafe Zaffri at The Twenty Two keeps finding itself at the center of Met Gala lore. The London-born private members club — housed inside a former Victorian-era women-only boarding house in New York — has quietly become the First Monday in May's most reliably electric after-hours address. This year, it delivered again.

For the second consecutive year, the venue partnered with GQ, with global editorial director Adam Baidawi and global fashion correspondent Samuel Hine orchestrating the evening. The host committee read like a mood board of the current cultural moment: Chase Infiniti, Damson Idris, Blackpink's Lisa, and Paul Anthony Kelly. "I think every GQ party is just about getting a ton of different people together across art, fashion, music, sports, and Hollywood," Hine told Vogue. "They're all members of this family that we've assembled, so we like to throw it all together and see what happens." What happened was, predictably, everything.

After Midnight, The Real Dress Code Is Chaos

Most guests cycled through a hotel-room outfit change before arriving, but Paul Anthony Kelly showed up exactly as he'd left the Met — still wearing his Dior tailcoat, the one he'd called "dastardly" live on the red-carpet stream. Ruby and diamond pinky ring intact, flashing under flashbulbs. Around 1 a.m., late-night trays of burgers and chicken fingers started making the rounds, and the atmosphere shifted — less exclusive gala spillover, more chaotic basement party with the parents gone for the weekend. Angela Bassett and Babyface. Lena Dunham and Sarah Pidgeon. Laufey with designers Tanner Richie and Fletcher Kasell. Alyssa Liu and Shaboozey. The room collapsed social hierarchies the way only truly good parties do, with guests trading forbidden bathroom selfies from the museum and replaying the Sabrina Carpenter and Stevie Nicks performance in disbelief. "I mean, how could you not cry at a rendition of Landslide?!" one guest reportedly said — and honestly, correct.

On the dance floor: Colman Domingo, BJ Novak, Olivia Rodrigo, and Heated Rivalry's Hudson Williams, who arrived in a beret and boxer shorts — a look that somehow tracked perfectly. The night eventually migrated to an unexpected rooftop situation that stretched well past any reasonable hour. By 4 a.m., the debate had turned to next stops: Rihanna's Lower East Side party or Madonna's in NoHo. Others, with early call times, made the responsible choice and left — a small, humbling reminder that even the most glamorous night in fashion is followed by a completely ordinary Tuesday morning.

The First Monday in May will always belong to the Met, but the real magic — the unscripted, unphotographable kind — lives in the hours after.

Read the original at Vogue.