Prada turned Katz’s Deli into a silver, logo-stamped party space on Wednesday night and used the Lower East Side institution to launch Prada Mode 14, drawing Cole Escola, Hunter Schafer, Allison Williams, Ella Emhoff and Ziwe into a room that usually belongs to pastrami.
The timing mattered because the kickoff happened on June 3, 2026, when New York’s fashion crowd was looking for the next stop on the city’s nightlife map. For Dara, who said she had lived in New York City for 10 years, the invitation came with a first: her first bite of pastrami, taken at the same deli where she met Schafer for the party. “A New York institution!” she said, before adding, “I’ve lived in NYC 10 years and this is my first bite! Blasphemy! I know!”
The night had the feel of a fashion field trip with celebrity traffic at every turn. Dara said she ran into Cazzie David and Derek Blasberg at the counter, saw Sophie Thatcher in what she called maybe her favorite dress of the night, and met Hideo Kojima. She and Schafer also collected stickers and prizes from a blind box vending machine, with a cater waiter winning them prizes. AnnaSophia Robb was spotted taking a sip of the celery margarita, another sign that the deli’s usual routine had been replaced by a more curated kind of mischief.
That swap was the point. Katz’s did not function as Katz’s for the evening; it was papered over in silver and dressed for Prada Mode instead of serving regular dinner service to its usual pastrami-enjoyers. Prada Mode is billed as a roving cultural series, and this was its 14th edition, but the brand did not say here what the rest of that program would look like after the launch night in Manhattan.
Dara later returned to the Chelsea hotel for a late-night kiss session with Schafer, a final note that fit the whole evening: this was less a formal product launch than a night that moved from a deli counter to a hotel room with fashion people, chrome uniforms and a DJ cueing the crowd along the way. She even broke into, “Hey, Mister DJ, put a record on! I wanna dance with my baby!” before the night was done.
