The first thing you learn about attending a cocktail party that includes King Charles—as I did last night at Christie’s—is that you’ll spend nearly every minute thinking about King Charles. I say thinking, because as any New Yorker knows, obsessively talking about a celebrity guest is déclassé. Yet try as you might to chitchat about summer vacations (Greece) or new restaurants (Marcel) or the $100-million-dollar Jackson Pollock hanging on the wall that will hit the auction block in a few weeks (should we pull a Louvre-style heist?), everyone, including you, will be craning their necks and checking their watches, waiting for one man to walk into the room. So is the power of the royal family, whose pomp and circumstance charmed even Donald Trump during their US visit to celebrate our country’s 250th anniversary. Part of the fanfare is that he rarely appears here—the last time King Charles visited New York was 2007. Another part is his immense global fame. And yet another part is, while celebrities are a dime a thousand—there’s only one King of England.
After a white-tie dinner at The White House on Tuesday, King Charles and Queen Camilla headed north to New York City on Wednesday to visit the 9/11 Memorial, the New York Public Library, and other sites, before hitting the King’s Trust Global Gala. Founded by the then Prince of Wales in 1976, the King’s Trust was launched to provide educational and employability programs to disadvantaged youth in the United Kingdom. Fast forward to 2026, and it now operates in over 25 countries, including the US.
While the royal family’s charitable initiatives are often glanced over for more juicy tabloid tidbits, consider this: Peter Morgan’s fictionalized series The Crown, which arguably sensationalized the whole lot into cold-blooded sociopaths, even dedicated part of an episode to the good work of the King’s Trust.
“I grew up in Ladbroke Grove—a very poor neighborhood in London,” Edward Enninful, the former editor in chief of British Vogue and a global ambassador for the King’s Trust, tells me. “I had cousins, friends in our neighborhood who were really told they couldn’t amount to nothing. I watched the Kings Trust firsthand change their lives.”
Despite the odd timing (cocktails at 4:30 p.m.), logistical hurdles (closed streets), and general mood dampeners (bomb-sniffing dogs), the galleries at Christie’s were packed. Dame Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington, Karen Elson, Karlie Kloss, and Donatella Versace conversed in front of a Rothko, estimated at $80 million. The billionaire philanthropist Stephen Schwarzman milled about with his wife, Christine. In another corner stood party planner Bronson van Wyck and Nelly Moudime—maitre d’ of The Polo Bar and therefore arguably the second most powerful person in the room, other than the king himself. She wore a pinstripe brown suit with Ralph Lauren’s signature polo pony emblem peeking from her cuff. Iman was there in a fantastical sculptural jacket, along with the White Lotus couple Meghann Fahy and Leo Woodall, who were affectionate throughout the night. Waiters carried trays of champagne and mini Yorkshire puddings with beef and horseradish. Word got out that the bathroom was stocked with free Charlotte Tilbury products, donated by the beauty maven herself. (Like Enninful, she’s also a global ambassador.) I scurried over to find the stash already half depleted. “It goes darling! It’s gone!” Tilbury told me, snapping her fingers, when I mentioned the bathroom’s supermarket-sweep energy.