McQueen's death overshadows the start of Fashion Week

Digital technology apparently works faster for Anna Wintour than it does for the rest of us.

Or that’s how it seemed Thursday, on the first day of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, when news of Alexander McQueen’s suicide hit the Bryant Park tents.

It was just before the start of the BCBG Max Azria show, only the second show of the day, when Vogue’s commander-in-chief discreetly stepped outside to take a phone call, returning a few minutes later.

“I'm pretty sure it must have been when she got the news,” Fern Mallis said later. Mallis, a VP for IMG, the organizers of this whole shin-dig, explained how soon after, Blackberries and iPhones started lighting up the tent. “You could see it happen across the room,” she said.

After the show, clutches of front-rowers were huddled in groups, speaking in hushed tones and trying to make sense of the thing. But few details were known, other than the fact that the famed British designer had been found dead in his London home, apparently the victim of a suicide. You had to wonder: How could someone who seemed to have so much, do such a thing?

“Well, it's so hard to know,” Mallis said. “We just don't know what lurks in the minds of fragile, creative people."

What a way to start the week—especially this week, the last Fashion Week to be held at Bryant Park. After 17 years and nearly 2,500 runway shows, the whole kit and caboodle is being transplanted uptown, to Lincoln Center in September.

At Bryant, of course, the shows went on…and there was something a little bittersweet about that. Only his McQ show, a presentation of his secondary line, was cancelled. Fact is, as innovative as he was, he just wasn’t that well known over here.

“It would be like if we lost Calvin Klein,” said Patrick McDonald, a Fashion Week regular and unabashed New York dandy. He heard the news as he entered the Duckie Brown menswear show.

That show—flush with a mix of plaids (one plaid on a blazer, another on a workshirt, a third on knickers, all worn together along with smart, tailored Crombie coats—might have pleased McQueen, who wore a tartan kilt to the funeral of Isabella Blow, his friend and muse who committed suicide herself back in 2007. (Weed killer. Yikes.)

Meanwhile, the shows kept coming.

At Milk Studios, the MAC-sponsored venue in Chelsea, Gwen Stefani unleashed her LAMB collection. It was all very “Do Ask, Do Tell,” with cheeky military refs—knit sweaters wrapped round with thin military belts, vivid camouflage pants topped with a shirt and leather corset. Other corsets—or were they strait jackets??—hung loose, haphazard, down the back like aprons.

Stefani seemed to like it. She watched the show from behind the crowd, perched on a step-stool in five-inch heels. Her lips—neon scarlet. Lashes like iron girders. The whole look was kitschy, sexy, almost vaudevillian.

And the polar opposite of what was on hand at the Chado Ralph Rucci, show in SoHo later that night. I confess: I was late and might’ve missed the whole thing if it wasn’t for Martha Stewart. She was late, too, and stood waiting for the elevator, teetering in sky-high gold sandals.

I can’t pass up a Martha moment: “Gotta say—your shoes—fantastic.”

She laughs. “Yeah, great choice for today, all the snow and slush—what was I thinking?”

Rucci, a true couturier, toyed with torn fabric—offering cashmere and wool crepe dresses that looked ripped, but—fret not—were clean-finished and hand-sewn, gaps filled in with sheer tulle. A raincoat was scarred with bleach. And burnt ostrich feathers, trapped ‘tween layers of a tulle dress, created a filmy, translucent effect.

Shouts of “Bravo, bravo,” came for a black slip dress with swirls of braids round back. And who couldn’t love the absurdly appealing bright pink tube gown with a cage of net and feathers hovering round the body? Or—hello—a dress with a mohawk of bright white guinea hen feathers down the spine.

Primal. Powerful. But. Who’s gonna carry that off? Martha? Not likely. Fellow front-rowers Whoopi Goldberg? Fran Lebowitz? Hardly. But wait—there’s Nickolas Ashford, of the husband-wife recording duo Ashford and Simpson. That might work for him. After all, he was always a bit of a peacock.