The New York Times article is very good and paints a touching, three-dimensional portrait of Ben Cho. Here are excerpts and a photo that reference the importance of "Smith's Night" in his circle of friends:
"All the while that Mr. Cho was designing, he was also going out, and in 2003, he helped create a Sunday night party, Smiths Night, that would become legendary in New York circles.
The idea for Smiths Night was Paul Sevigny’s, Ms. Sevigny’s brother, and when he was programming Sway, a small, Moroccan-themed club on Spring Street in the far west hinterlands of SoHo, he allowed Mr. Cho and his friend Brian DeGraw, a member of the band Gang Gang Dance, to play only music by and influenced by the Smiths, the moony, moody 1980s British misery specialists.
“I treated it at first almost like a conceptual art project,” Mr. DeGraw said. “Obviously, I was a huge fan, but there was no way anyone was going to come out and only want to listen to these records.”
Photo
The invitation Mr. Cho drew for Chloë Sevigny's 30th birthday party in 2004, playing on a line from a Morrissey song.CreditBenjamin Cho, via Rizzoli
At first, they didn’t, and Smiths Night existed as a friends-and-family affair. In the last days before omnipresent cellphones, Mr. Cho and his friends had haunted a small number of local bars and clubs that reliably delineated their social life in New York: Max Fish, then on Ludlow Street; Cherry Tavern on Sixth Street near Avenue A; the Hole, now defunct, on Second Avenue. Smiths Night at Sway quickly joined the rotation.
“That was the party that defined my youth in New York,” said Carol Lim, Mr. Leon’s partner at Opening Ceremony. “You would come a little bit early, get a beer at Ear Inn across the way and slowly walk over. If you had a crush on someone, you’d know that they would probably be there later.”
As time went on, it began to draw crowds, first of downtown scene-making types, later of celebrities — Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan. In 2006, New York magazine named it the best Sunday night party in New York.
“At some point, I couldn’t even get in, it was so crowded,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, who was for years so close to Mr. Cho that people assumed they were a couple.
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Mr. Cho began to withdraw from many of the friends with whom he had spent so many years. He was hired to be the D.J. for fashion events — he played the Met Gala in 2007 and Lauren Santo Domingo’s engagement party later that year — but in 2008, he staged his last fashion show. (Mr. Hundley recalled it as “a bit of a disaster.”) Smiths Night at Sway continued until 2015; Mr. Cho briefly moved with it to another bar. (Mr. Sevigny has since bought the original Sway and
reopened it as Paul’s Casablanca, where Smiths songs once again play on Sunday nights.) But Mr. Cho was seen less and less.
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That community was gathering last week — in person and in calls, emails and texts — to remember him, unnerved by his absence. “The difficult part to his passing is everyone I know I know through him,” Mr. Hundley said.
They don’t go out as often as they once did. Ms. Sevigny said she couldn’t remember the last time she had been dancing, and Mr. Fitzpatrick could come to the phone one night only after putting his son to bed. But they have been dredging up drawings he made, pieces he gave them. Ms. Lyonne spoke fondly of a blazer by Mr. Cho, with “too many buttons on the lapel to make sense.”
“Twenty years later, it’s still my favorite blazer,” she added.
The soundtrack, naturally, is the Smiths. In many of the remembrances, one song in particular stands out: the customary evening-ending (morning-ending?) song at Sway. Mr. McGinley called it Mr. Cho’s anthem: “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”