Though it’s been a month since it took place, people are still talking about the 50th birthday party the event planner Bronson van Wyck threw for his sister Mimi in Ibiza. No doubt it was the party of the year, and one people will gab about, well, at least until van Wyck throws another one.
Over three hundred guests—among them Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, John and Gela Taylor, Stacey Bendet, Darren Star, Jill and Harry Kargman, Celerie Kemble, Meredith Melling and Zach Iscol, singer James Blunt, Dana Goodyear, Nancy Walker, Naomi and Rowan Hajaj, Bonnie Morrison, Leslie Stevens, Indre and Justin Rockefeller and Adrien Brody and Georgina Chapman—descended on the Balearic Island in mid-August to watch the Eclipse and then, the following night, dance the night away in a rock quarry (sometimes used for local music festivals) as redesigned by the van Wycks and their team.
There were: multiple musical acts, plentiful pans of paella, contortionists, a replication of the Nile, a full-scale pyramid, a singer who sang “Walk Like an Egyptian,” another who sang “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” several dj sets, lots of gold-dusted bare abs and must-be-seen-to-be-believed laser-mapped animation projected on the surfaces of rock boulders.
In a lot of ways, it felt like walking on to a movie or stage set. “The guests are the actors in the show,” explained Bronson “We create the mise en scene, and we give them the stage directions. And then there’s that amazing moment when it stops becoming my party, and the guests become the party.”
In January of this year, Bronson read that Ibiza would be the best place to see the totality of the Eclipse. So he texted five or six people suggesting they throw a party around it. “None of them bit, and I thought, Somebody has to do it,” he said. So he suggested his sister use it as the backdrop for her birthday. “Throwing parties is like the love language in our family,” Bronson explained.
What made it so exciting for the Van Wycks was that, this time, they were their own clients. “There wasn’t anyone to say no,” he said. “There wasn’t anyone to say, ‘This idea is too wacky.’ It was just the art. It was just the creative. What we typically do is very collaborative. It’s a lot of listening and adapting somebody else’s vision, and this was a pure implementation of our own.”
“Throwing a party is my favorite thing to do,” he continued. “I was up until 4:30 in the morning last night planning parties I don’t have clients for.”
