PAPER x Ayo Edebiri Cover Release Dinner
Collage by COMPOSITE
PAPER Magazine tapped me to document the cover dinner celebrating Ayo Edebiri's latest issue. The night unfolded at Maxwell Social in Tribeca. Candles, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a long family-style table packed with Ayo's world. The whole shebang. Jeremy O. Harris, Tyler Mitchell, Olivia Washington, Rachel Hilson, Kara Young, PAPER’s Mickey Boardman were among the room full of writers, friends, and collaborators that gathered to toast the whimsical cover shot by Jaša Müller. My job was to move through it quietly and catch the cocktail hour around the fireplace, the toasts, the table talk, the cover star herself weaving between old friends in no rush to leave.
Cover girl! Put the bass in your walk. Head to toe in Chanel…
Mm-mm, put her in Chanel, mm-mm, put her in Chanel.
Maxwell is a members-only social club in Tribeca, named after Elsa Maxwell, the 1920s socialite famous for her dinner parties and talent for pulling together artists and thinkers. Founded by David Litwak alongside Kyle Channing-Pearce and Joelle Fuchs, the idea was to build something that felt less like a scene and more like a second home. It’s a 150-year-old Romanesque Revival brownstone with a two-floor library, hand-painted wallpaper, a grand kitchen, and a hot air balloon basket bar tucked into the Explorers Room. Members join through a cohort system, moving through rituals and shared dinners over three months before becoming part of the house. It's the kind of place that draws a certain downtown creative crowd, and the kind of backdrop that made a PAPER cover dinner feel like it was thrown by a friend rather than a magazine.
India Sleem, Alana Raquel Bowers, and Kara Young.
