The fashion Party's Over Ms. Blige was headed to the restaurant Guastavino for an intimate fashion dinner being given by the Baby Phat designer Kimora Lee Simmons, intimate being used here in the mosh-pit sense. “Day of the Locust” mobs are now such a common sight during Fashion Week that it is obvious you didn't have to grow up in the Yonkers projects, as Ms. Blige did, to get caught up in fashion stuff.



Thousands thronged the Robert Cavalli fashion store opening that same evening. Those fortunate enough to have invitations were funneled into a brightly lighted retail space so sardine-packed that even the models were forced to stand sideways.

"Fantastic" Mr. Cavalli said, looking slightly dazed as he shouldered his way toward the exit around 7:15. The fashion party was still in full swing, yet he was leaving for a better one, a dinner he was giving at Graydon Carter's celebrity safe house, the Waverly Inn.

Ms. Miles, as those old enough to remember pay phones will remember, is an actress once as celebrated for her stamina as a partygoer as for her fashion career. To say that she was indefatigable doesn't capture her spirit.

Fashion may be feeling the effects of the stock market wobble. To present his Y-3 collection of high-end sports clothes on Saturday, Yohji Yamamoto annexed a fashion city block beneath the High Line railway, transforming Fashion into the kind of raw subterranean space that used to be common and that now requires event-planner sorcery to reproduce.

Ralph Lauren's has just hit 40. And it says an awful lot about fashion transformations that what began as a line of ties is now a $13.5 billion publicly traded company, of which Mr. Lauren is the principal shareholder.

Yet it is just a couple of miles from the Bronx to the Conservatory Garden on upper Fifth Avenue, as the crow flies, and not much of a stretch that Mr. Lauren would have selected this particular six-acre oasis as the setting for his party. A formal terraced garden grafted onto Frederick Law Olmsted's rustic masterpiece, the Conservatory Garden is a 1939 rendition of the Gatsbyesque estates on Long Island's Gold Coast. Does anyone know that terrain better than Mr. Lauren does?

Some time between the herbed haricots verts with goat cheese and dessert, the mayor rose to toast the designer and his wife, Ricky. “If someone said, “Send me a couple that represents New York,' ” Mr. Bloomberg said, “the Laurens would be them.”

As representative New Yorkers, the two have done the near impossible, stayed "at the top of their game for 40 years."

Not, the mayor added, that he has any particular fashion expertise. "No one will ever call me a fashion ista," he said.