Party STARTER

Known for mixing elegance with the absurd, food artist LAILA GOHAR dips into beauty

- Laura Regensdorf

WHITE LACE CURTAINS, relics from Greece, hang in the storefront windows of Laila Gohar's Lower East Side studio, as much a means of privacy as they are an understated calling card. Such old-world materials are a signature for the Cairo-born New Yorker, whose finely tuned food installations bring an off-kilter wit to fashion and art events.

Gohar World, the line of entertaining whimsies she and her sister, Nadia, launched earlier this year, offers lace "dresses" for otherwise naked eggs; the baguette gets similar habiliment with a black satin carrier. But on a recent gloomy afternoon, Gohar finds herself in need of a pick-me-up. "Today would be the perfect day for a red lip because I'm feeling so tired and kind of scruffy," she says, which, for her, means a Prada chore coat, black pants, and pearlsshaped, in Gohar World fashion, like chicken feet. Red is assertive, she adds.