MIDTOWN — Forget the red carpet.
To drive home the ecologically friendly theme of Christie's third annual Green Auction: Bid to Save the Earth, the event's VIP carpet was green — "fir green" to be exact, said party planner extraordinaire Bronson Van Wyck.
And the décor at the Rockefeller Center space followed suit, with rainforest greens and even bananas decorating the auction hour, making it a topic of conversation.
"I'm a pale shade of green," said actor Paul Blackthorne. "I fly around the world in big fat airplanes just like the rest of the world, but when I'm home I'm still driving a battered 10-year old hybrid that I've had forever."
He added, "The one thing I try to do is observe how many buttons we're pushing each day."
New "Real Housewife of New York" Aviva Drescher admitted that everything in her house is chemical-free and organic, including paper products. "There's this organic stuff you can buy at the health food store that is made not from trees," she intimated. "It's not as soft, but we rough it. Toilet paper too."
Model Coco Rocha, clad in Fendi, said she has a new house in Hastings-on-Hudson that she's been decorating. "We're very vintage people," she said, "so we buy a lot second hand. We bought a 100-year-old barrel to use as a dirty hamper for all of our clothes."
Well that's one way to use an antique. "It's recycling," Rocha explained.
Model Angela Lindvall admitted that everything on her 7-acre property is grown organically —except her fashions. "Fashion is difficult, whether you're green or not," she said.
The auction's co-chair, jewelry designer Susan Rockefeller, does her part by carrying a stainless steel or silver straw with her at all times to sip drinks. "Every time I go into a restaurant, I try to educate them about the plastics that go into our oceans," she explained.
Singer Grace Potter was willing to wing it when it came to her performance at the auction. "I have no f---ing idea what I'm going to play," she admitted, while also discussing the auction items she'd perused online.
Actress Glenn Close was just back from a trip to Wyoming, where "we have moose, we have deer, we have owls, and my mom saw a mountain lion," she said. "There's a lot of wildlife."
While some were talking green, others were letting their green do the talking.
During the live auction of a seven-day charter cruise aboard the Hemisphere — the largest sailing catamaran in the world — the bidding got heated between a man wearing a vest and a man sporting a pocket square. When the bidding stalled at $140,000, auctioneer Lydia Fenet acknowledged her preferred winner. "My heart is with the vest — I grew up in Louisiana," she said, after which the man in the vest upped his winning bid to $150,000 to benefit Oceana.
The winner, Nicholas Gollust, was bidding on behalf of his mother, Barbara Hemmerle Gollust, a crack sailor who won the St. Barths Bucket Regatta this year. "She just needed some encouragement," he said.
Back on the green front, model Angela Martini was taking baby steps. "I'm a vegetarian and I don't wear fur," she boasted.
Earlier in the evening, former Vogue editor Filipa Fino celebrated the launch of her shopping website FinoFile.com with friends, supporters and fans at Philippe Chow on the Upper East Side. Fino told DNAinfo of the launch, "The hardest part was the technology, because that's not what I know." She added, "I surrounded myself with people who did," including her teenage daughter, "Fino Girl" editor Natalie Morfogen.
Designer Rebecca Minkoff took time off from planning a May vacation to Israel to pop by and show her support for Fino, along with Vogue's Meredith Melling and Fino's husband, Phillipe owner Stratis Morfogen, among others.
