07/09 At Fashion Week, It’s Where You Sit That Counts

By ERIC WILSON

Bright and early Monday morning (Labor Day, though you wouldn’t know it), every seat in the offices of the fashion publicist Paul Wilmot was filled with a young account executive whose holiday weekend was being disrupted by the mechanics of New York Fashion Week, which begins on Thursday. At one table, the designer Naeem Khan was personally overseeing, with a team of three publicists, where each of the 872 guests will sit at his runway show on Sept. 16 at Lincoln Center.

Dennis Valle
At a Dolce & Gabbana show in Milan last year, an assortment of old and new media types in the front row: from left, Suzy Menkes, Michael Roberts, Bryan Boy, Sally Singer, Anna Wintour, Hamish Bowles, and Tommy Ton of the blog Jak and Jil.


Only 104 of them will be in the front row.

“The front row is such a trauma,” said Mr. Khan, who will surely draw more eyes to his show since he dressed Michelle Obama for that infamous party-crashed state dinner last November. “I can’t have people coming backstage, crying, ‘I’m in the second row.’ ”

So each seat on a chart before him was color coded for news media members (blue, about half the audience), retailers (green, maybe a quarter), friends (purple, 100 or so) and celebrities (pink, at least a dozen, front and center). Some seats were requested by cast members of “Entourage,” but who knows if they will really show up.

Complicating matters for designers and their publicists as they hurtle through preparations for some 300 shows over 8 days is the fact that last season’s seating charts have had to be thrown out. In addition to the usual wrangling of seats for celebrities (Blake Lively, Claire Danes and Julianne Moore are the usual suspects, but Snooki would probably be welcome by now), and finding new seats for popular bloggers, there has been a stunning upheaval amid the ranks of traditional glossy magazines this season that is making it hard to figure out just where to place the most important editors, without offending them.

Since the industry last convened for its twice-yearly convention of clothing, in February, no fewer than 30 longstanding cast members have changed jobs, baffling those whose livelihoods depend on correctly divining the most up-to-date nexus of power — and thus who gets one of the 100 or so seats front row and who is banished to the relative Siberia of the second row.

James LaForce, a veteran publicist who is organizing at least six Fashion Week shows, was contemplating the oh-so-delicate placement of Very Important Editors in the front row when it occurred to him that the old rules — like always ensuring a proper distance of at least two seats between the competing editors of Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar — have been replaced by a complicated set of new ones.

“It’s quite possible there will be a land grab for seats,” he sighed.

Among the changes are new top fashion editors in the ranks of W, Elle, Vogue, New York, Women’s Wear Daily, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and The Wall Street Journal’s fashion supplement, WSJ — many involved in rivalries that make “The Devil Wears Prada” look like a children’s book. Where those editors end up sitting this week at Lincoln Center and other runway-show sites will be scrutinized by industry insiders as a declaration of their relative standing. “Front row seating at a fashion show is as much like the quote-unquote cool table at a high school cafeteria as anything I have ever seen,” said Dan Peres, the editor of Details. “I want to see who gets the seat next to Lady Gaga.”

The planning for this year’s event also serves as a reminder that the days when magazine editors were kings and queens at Fashion Week are long over. Their turf has been eroded by the ceaseless arrival of barely recognizable celebrities, followed by a wave of top bloggers — not to mention anyone who has the slightest connection to Mrs. Obama.

Now, as magazines struggle to reinvent themselves for the 21st century, they are increasing their online presence and expect prime placement for their dot-com writers. After its close association with Style.com for the last decade, Vogue is breaking away with its own Vogue.com franchise, which will compete head-on with the reviews and runway news of Style.com. For the effort, Vogue hired two former Style.com writers, Sarah Mower, a critic, and Candy Pratts Price, its creative director. That makes it tricky to seat the Vogue and Style.com teams together, as had been the norm.

“I’d still put Style.com in the front row, but not anywhere near Vogue,” said Corinna Springer, who produces shows for several emerging designers. Likewise, Women’s Wear Daily editors, many of whom wore dual hats by writing for W and used to sit together as a team, might appreciate some distance from Stefano Tonchi, the former editor of T: The Times Style Magazine who moved to W in March and promptly fired half its staff.

The press agent for one designer, who would not speak on the record for fear of offending one side or the other, said Vogue.com is also asking for previews of the major collections, tromping on the inside-baseball territory once owned by WWD, “and that’s a little bit scary.”

Each editorial move has been scrutinized like an upset in the midterm elections. Brandusa Niro, the editor in chief of The Daily, a publication that follows the comings and goings of the front row and delights in its own grudge match with WWD, said the “summer of 2010 post-apocalyptic mood in media” is a subject she plans to devote an entire issue to during Fashion Week, tracking the intricate connections and conflicts caused by the shuffling. She was particularly curious about the appointment of Peter W. Kaplan, the former New York Observer editor, as the new editorial director of WWD. He is not exactly known for his sense of style, she said.

“I’m going to be sending my reporters to ask him questions all the time,” Ms. Niro said. “I’m fascinated to see how he will react to this circus.”

Elsewhere, Deborah Needleman, the former editor of Domino, became the new editor of WSJ, and Sally Singer, a longtime top editor at Vogue, took over as editor of T: The Times Style Magazine. There are also new fashion directors at Glamour, Elle, Essence and Vanity Fair — positions that dictate front row seating at the shows.

Before all the cross-title poaching, a newspaper critic or indie magazine editor could be positioned as a buffer between the rival factions — a sort of neutral country — but now, they may well be involved in intramural rivalries of their own. “We’ve lost our Switzerlands,” Mr. LaForce said.

Thank heaven for celebrities, the reality-show stars and the ubiquitous cast of “Gossip Girl.” They are the new buffers, with a caveat, as Ms. Niro noted. “If you put someone next to Glenda Bailey,” she said, referring to the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, “Anna Wintour might not like it.”

Worse, any seating faux pas will be instantly broadcast by the pack of journalists and photographers whose beat is the choreography of the front row. “It has been changing for a while, since Billy Boy and that funny little girl who was 13 and looked 97 came along,” said Michael Roberts, who was the Vanity Fair fashion director until June, when he was replaced. (Mr. Roberts, now a style editor at large for the magazine, was referring to the famous-before-their-bedtime bloggers Bryan Boy and Tavi Gevinson.)

Mr. Roberts, a reliable Switzerland, was not certain whether he would even bother attending shows in New York this season. The new environment of editors armed with diaries, Flip cams, laptops and Twitter no longer suits his taste. “I certainly don’t see myself growing older, fatter and grumpier in the front row, which a lot of my dearly beloved colleagues tend to do,” he said.

That leaves one seat open.