New Delhi, August 06, 2018: The “meowdels” wore couture and the crowd was cat-tastic at The Algonquin Hotel’s annual feline fashion show, presided over by the historic Times Square establishment’s 12th resident cat, a ginger boy with a theatrical name, Hamlet VIII.
Thursday’s catwalk and lobby party, with some human attendees in cat-ear headbands and feline-adorned finery, was “The Purring ‘20s.” That’s the era that Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott and other writers, critics and actors first sat around the hotel’s famed Round Table.
The event is a fund-raiser for the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, which helps support more than 150 animal shelters and rescues in New York. Organisers said more than $10,000 was expected to be raised, fuelled in part by $75-a-pop ticket sales and a silent auction.
According to reports published in thehindu.com As for the fashion, it came courtesy of “certified” pet fashion designer Ada Nieves. Leather? Absolutely not, she said in a pre-show interview. There were Art Deco touches in crystals and laces, a pink-fringe flapper dress and feather head-band worn by a longhair named Aine, and a knockout orange youngster that goes by Mango in bowler hat and double-breasted tuxedo.
A rescued cat named Sake got a wide-brim garden hat and lavender low-waisted dress a la the Roaring 1920s, while Baloo scored a striped suit for his big runway moment.
The long history of cats presiding at The Algonquin is a bit murky but dates to the early 1920s with Billy, who during the heyday of the Round Table belonged to hotel owner and manager Frank Case. After Billy passed away, so the story goes, a stray marmalade cat made his way into the hotel in the early 1930s and was declared Rusty. The name didn’t sit well with actor John Barrymore, a hotel resident at the time, so Rusty became the first Hamlet, honouring what is said to have been Barrymore’s greatest stage role.
A legend is born
“They thought the name Hamlet was more dignified for the Algonquin,” said Alice De Almeida, the hotel’s Chief Cat Officer. “And a legend was born.”
The current Hamlet is a people cat, though he’s not terribly fond of huge TV cameras. He loves a good scratch behind the ears, Ms. De Almeida said. The hotel chef cooks him special meals on holidays and his portrait hangs above the front desk. The white-glove treatment for felines stretches back to Rusty, who had the run of the hotel (Hamlet VIII is restricted to the front desk area) and was given milk out of a Champagne glass, Ms. De Almeida said. As for the Round Table crowd and whether they were cat people, she wasn’t sure.
“We know Dorothy Parker had dogs,” De Almeida said. “At that time there was no board of health, so Rusty was in and out of rooms, and they had a special door for him to go in and out of the kitchen. He sat in the Blue Bar. I mean, who had a better life?”
“I’m looking around the room and thinking this is one place, at least for the next hour, where every person has a smile on their face,” said Kathleen Duffy, a hotel spokeswoman. “We need that right now.”
