The Dazed summer party New York edition landed on Thursday, 13 August at Asia Roma in Chinatown, and it ran more or less exactly as New York dictates: loosely scheduled, socially porous, and considerably longer than anyone planned.
Over 200 guests filtered through the two-storey restaurant across the course of the night, among them the Dazed US team, contributors, and what the magazine calls friends of the house. The draw was partly the venue itself, a dive bar-adjacent space of dimmed red lights and wooden booths, the kind of room that compresses time in the best possible way. People arrived intending to stay an hour and surfaced, blinking, several hours later.
Two Floors, One Dazed Summer Party New York
Asia Roma lent itself to the choose-your-own-adventure logic that separates a good party from a memorable one. Upstairs, a karaoke setup ran steadily alongside a long wooden bar that served as the night’s de facto conversation pit. Downstairs, a basement dance floor stayed in motion from early in the evening until the function spilled outward onto the street, where goodbyes stretched into extended conversations, as they tend to in this city.
The DJ lineup kept things moving on both levels. Dazed team members Jordan Stanton and Percy Cobbinah took turns on the decks, making it a genuinely internal affair, while Michael Lieberman and Maxwell Vice handled the opening and closing sets respectively. The handover between them was seamless enough that the night felt less like a magazine party and more like a night out that happened to have very good editorial taste.
The Action Issue Makes Its Entrance
Scattered across the venue were copies of the Dazed summer party New York‘s chosen party favour: the Summer 2026 issue, which gave many guests their first physical encounter with the three covers. Myha’la, Olivia Rodrigo and Ilia Malinin each front one edition of the issue, and the covers circulated through the room across the night, passed between booths and propped against glasses.
What the covers do not say on their face is that this is issue 292 of Dazed, titled ‘The Action Issue’, according to Charlotte Street Magazine. It is a number that carries some weight: issue 292 of a title that has been through more than its share of reinventions is a quiet argument for longevity, the kind that a party in a Chinatown basement makes more eloquently than any press release. The issue is priced at £7.99 in the UK, per Boutique Galleria.
Having physical magazines present at an event like this is a choice worth pausing on. In an environment where so much media consumption happens through screens and algorithms, there is something deliberate about putting the object in people’s hands at a party. It makes the issue an artefact of the evening, something to carry home rather than scroll past.
The New York Community Showed Up
Among the guests were New York-based designer The Twink Next Door and TikTok creator Angel, alongside a broader crowd of Dazed readers who, as is customary at events like this, arrived in a manner that suggested they had thought carefully about arriving. The room had the texture that good magazine parties occasionally manage: a mix of familiar faces and new ones, with enough social friction to generate actual introductions rather than just acknowledgements.
The night’s closing note was the street outside, where the usual New York phenomenon of the extended goodbye played out fully. Summer in the city, as the Dazed team put it, has been non-stop, and the energy at Asia Roma seemed less like a farewell to the season than a refusal to concede it. ‘The Action Issue’ has now had its launch moment; issue 292 goes on sale in the UK at £7.99.
