It was a Saturday night in Hell’s Kitchen, and the usual swarm of pretty young women were out in force at a Fashion Week event, sipping Prosecco cocktails and nibbling dainty purple cupcakes.
But among the posse of dolled-up 20-somethings, one person stood out even more than the girl with the mismatched handbag — a middle-aged guy from Queens.
It was Peter Hargrove — jowly, balding and bespectacled — loading up his goodie bag before turning to the sample racks crowded with free dresses and jackets.
He pounced on three frocks, then nearly got into a brawl with a fashionista over who’d be walking out with the gowns.
“I don’t need women’s clothes,” Hargrove, 51, told The Post. “I was shopping for my sisters and nieces, looking at what was there.”
Two weeks later, he was at it again, hauling two overstuffed bags from a nutrition expo at the Times Square Marriott Marquis.
A Post reporter observed him flit from table to table, wolf down canapés and collect swag with the determination of a squirrel gathering acorns before winter.
“He’s everywhere,” one magazine writer marveled. “He acts like he belongs at these things. He was at a toy event and looked like Santa. We saw him pick up an enormous bag of toys and leave.”
With an endless rotation of openings, premieres, fashion shows and product launches, New York City is the party capital of the universe. And for an intrepid few, it’s also a way of life.
There’s no need for journalism school when access is afforded to anyone with an entertainment-news site. Just like that, you’re an invited member of the press.
“There’s a whole underground circuit out there,” said publicist Norah Lawlor of Lawlor Media Group. “There’s a few people who compile a list of events and circulate it and then RSVP to everything on the list and hope they won’t be rejected.”
The best of these hustlers can eat and drink for free every night, and maybe even pick out dresses for their favorite nieces.
Hargrove’s strategy is straightforward. He doesn’t sneak in. Instead, he simply RSVPs under his eponymous film-distribution company or Web site, which he says is a syndicated news service.
But his business cards show he uses a PO box in Queens, and there’s no other listed addresses for his companies.
Insiders say the unmarried Hargrove couch-surfs. Records list his residences as relatives’ addresses. He declined to elaborate.
“We work with celebrities, and we get stalked,” he said. “Crazy people think the talent lives under your desk.”
Still, he knows how to talk the talk — sort of. He told a woman at a Tribeca Film Festival event that he was a film rep selling a TV show. When she offered to hook him up with a network, Hargrove, apparently thinking it was still 1997, gave her a pager number.
“Right there, I could smell something wasn’t right,” she recalled.
The Post recently spotted him and comrade Robert Stepanek loading up on freebies at a Chelsea showcase for food writers.
The mustachioed Stepanek was observed gobbling up finger foods and declaring, “That’s good,” to no one in particular.
Neither of the supposed scribes have yet written about their recent party experiences on Hargrove’s site, IBRNews.com.
Though some have blacklisted him, publicists admit Hargrove is, in his own way, a trendsetter. He’s often spotted attending fashion, food and travel events multiple times a week, even several times a day.
With better access to party info, thanks to such Web sites as Guest of a Guest, the network of gate crashers is only growing.
“This is New York, and we give the best parties in the world and a lot of them,” said veteran publicist R. Couri Hay. “That’s why you need savvy people at the door. The crashers are very creative.”
Hargrove’s influence extends to the movement’s most exalted ranks.
But Kaplan is taking a page from Hargrove, declaring his legitimacy because he reports for society mag Talent in Motion.
“I’m the gold standard when it comes to party crashing,” Kaplan boasted. “There’s so many crashers out there now, but without crashers there wouldn’t be a party.”
There doesn’t appear to be honor among crashers.
Last month, Hargrove said, he was booted from an Italian wine event at the Flatiron District’s Metropolitan Pavilion after another crasher notified security.
Fellow interlopers are turning on him over accusations that he’s circulating a list of crashers. A blog called “Party Crasher NYC” began chronicling Hargrove’s antics this year before it was taken down last week.
Hargrove is taking it in stride.
“People are in a conspiracy to libel and slander me and my employees,” he told The Post. “The dust will settle.”
He admitted he attends countless media events not as a reporter but for “research.”
“For me, it’s all about research,” he said “I’m not there to drink booze, eat crappy food, get gift bags. I have a life. I’m busy. You could go to these things every day, but you’d never get work done.”
Hargrove is not above turning on other crashers. Among them is William Gaines, who appears at Soho book launches and designer soirees and is rumored to attend financial conferences for free lunches.
One fashion publicist said Gaines gains access by claiming he works for Comcast, though he’s really unemployed.
But Gaines denies he’s a scrounger.
“This is bull,” he said. “These are insanely jealous people and have a bone to pick with you. It’s baseless hearsay.”
“I would use the affiliation to remind people that this is the industry I’m in,” he said. “If you’re invited, you’re not crashing.”
Among the most notorious crashers was Priyantha De Silva, who since 2006 would claim to be a Condé Nast editor or Oscar-winning filmmaker and drunkenly serenade women. If ever a bouncer expressed doubt, he’d scream, “Do you know who I am?”
But his streak came to an end at a charity gala for the Elizabeth Seton Pediatric Center in 2010, where he bought a $150 ticket at the door and a $1,500 Prada bag — with a fake credit card. He was arrested.
In 2012, he was sentenced to 1¹/₂ to three years in prison after pleading guilty to fourth-degree grand larceny in Manhattan Supreme Court. He remains on Rikers.
For those looking to crash parties, vets like Kaplan recommend scanning the guest list and claiming to be a cousin of an A-lister — or, better yet, simply walking confidently through the front door.
Or a back door. Publicist Hay said he has seen wannabes come in through a fire exit.
“What people will do for a pig in a blanket is crazy,” he said.
Additional reporting by Maureen Callahan