Renaissance Relaunch Party
Last week, we hit up Renaissance Hotels’ official brand “re-launch” at the Hotel 57 in Manhattan (which is now a Renaissance property). Across the pond, plenty of folks were partying in Paris at the Renaissance Arc de Triomphe several hours earlier to celebrate the new look of the Marriott-owned chain the same way.
So: when a not-too-trendy hotel chain like Renaissance gets the word out about a total image revamp by throwing much-hyped, almost-simultaneous parties on two different continents, what kind of vibe might we expect the newly-refreshed brand to deliver? From what we saw at the Hotel 57 party, Renaissance is going for trendy, chic, and modern — and according to David Marriott (Regional Vice President of hotel operations for NYC, Baltimore, and Philly), the brand is aiming to compete with W Hotels.
Renaissance, listen: we’ve gotta be honest. We never knew you had it in you to pull off a W-ish vibe, but we’d be inclined to believe you’ve got the goods to go head-to-head with Starwood’s trendiest brand after this party. At the soiree, we mingled with (er, “mingled with” is a little strong — let’s go with “followed around”) Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley and the beautiful Brooke Shields while sipping on Absolut cocktails among the funky, fresh, inventive decor. There were sparkly dresses a-plenty, a few A and B-list celebs, DJ’s, drunk people, and contemporary light fixtures. If we squinted real hard, we would have thought we were hanging out at one of W’s Living Room bars.
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