Candy and costumes are just the beginning of Allison Sarofim's annual Halloween party. This year, in keeping with her Surrealist theme, the Texas-born hostess carpeted and draped her New York town house's entire first floor—including the pond and Henry Moore statues in her garden—in red velvet, hired topless waiters to serve orange martinis, covered her bathrooms in lobsters, and even staged a Surrealist performance piece.

"I think it's safe to say her party has reached legend status," Fabiola Beracasa, dressed as Autumn in a vintage orange gown with leaf accents, said. Donna Karan, Lance Armstrong, Calvin Klein, and Gina Gershon seemed to agree. In the middle of it all was Sarofim herself, in a costume of a corset, fishnets, and peacock feathers that she commissioned from a former Vegas showgirl. "Oh, honey, I'm not messing around," she said from beneath her oversize hairdo and even more oversize collar. "When it comes to Halloween, I'm very serious!"

On the left coast, meanwhile, the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art capped off a weekend of parties for its new Takashi Murakami exhibition with a gala Sunday night. Guests including Carine Roitfeld, Tom Ford, Anjelica Huston, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, and L.A. art luminaries John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha mingled among the acid-hued flowers and mutated 3-D manga girls. Christina Ricci, up next as Trixie in the Japanese anime-inspired Speed Racer, said Murakami was a big influence on the film's production design. "It's great to see it up close," she added, admitting that the Louis Vuitton boutique within the exhibition was more elusive: "We couldn't find it." Up a ramp, across from a diptych of a Zen Buddhist monk, the somewhat controversial shop was doing a swift business, selling bags and signed Murakami LV canvases.

Marc Jacobs, with a blue buzz cut and carrying vintage Vuitton, was clearly jazzed by this "collision" of art, fashion, and commerce. "What is the art?" he asked. "Is it the visual on the bag? The bag itself? Or the people buying the bag? I love blurring those lines." Decades owner Cameron Silver was happy to help: He was buying one of each size of a bucket bag with a Day-Glo camo logo for a collector friend, and had yet to see the exhibition: "I have a feeling most of the art, for the people coming tonight, is in this room."
— Derek Blasberg (Sarofim) and Steffie Nelson (MoCA)