V. F. Camera

D.C. CONFIDENTIAL

'Last year Sid Blumenthal swore he could get me into the Vanity Fair party/' said President Clinton at the 85th annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, held at the Washington Hilton. "What a difference a year makes. This year I have to take him." Here's who did show up at V.F.'s sixth annual after-party at the Russian Trade Federation: Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, Henry Kissinger, British ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer, Peter Jennings, Steve Rattner, Sumner Redstone, Senator Russ Feingold, Senator Robert Torricelli and Patricia Duff, Barbara Walters, Christopher Buckley, Portia de Rossi (whose blindingly beautiful hair was fashioned in a much-admired cornrow/dreadlock extravaganza), M.C. Hammer, and 300 others who helped inject Washington with a little glamour—Veuve Clicquot-style. And

what would the Establishment be without a splinter group? Sean Penn, tieless and chain-smoking, held court in the garden with Claire Danes, Tom Ford, State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin, and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., who stayed until the champagne ran dry at 2:30 A.M.

EVGENIA PERETZ