It’s been five weeks since the last model stalked off the runway. Tent stakes have been pulled up, the W and Mercedes lounges dismantled, mirrors and klieg lights packed away. It has taken me almost as long to make sense of the eight-day adventure I undertook when I so casually committed my life to Julia’s and Nonsociety’s fashion mission. At the risk of giving undue importance to such a luxury, Fashion Week changed my life.

My mission at Fashion Week was not to reduce collections to a handful of trends or to a spectrum of moods and spirit, however, but to document the goings-on at Bryant Park through the eyes of a “fashion freshman.” My credentials, I admit, are perhaps more advanced for such a title - I learned my ABC’s by the pages of Vogue, I know the names of all the models - but judging by the size of my eyes as each socialite breezed past, as the walls of photographers’ cameras exploded in flash, mine truly was the great first foray.

Fashion Week changed my life because it gave me a glimpse into a world hitherto only known in magazines, but more than that it introduced me to an industry of creatives who live and die by the pursuit of inspiration. As each look breezed past me (I saw thirty shows in all and thus hundreds of looks), the specific nuances of a collection seemed to blur, but the common threads that kept them relevant and on-trend were easily identified. And these common threads were not fabrics or prints but a mood, a spirit, that hung over Bryant Park. Designers, it seemed to me, were determined to capture an exuberance that has for so long been absent from the city.

Fashion’s Night Out, which kicked off NYFW festivities with an all-night, citywide shopping party, encapsulated that long-overdue light-heartedness. The city’s fashion industry, widely considered a bastion of the holier-than-thou, aimed in that one week to revitalize not only their corner of Manhattan but (in typical NYC grandiosity) the entire known universe. Lofty goals for garmentos, but civic pride had not been so chic since September 11, 2001.

It is this enthusiasm for an industry so unique to New York that I think was sorely missing in seasons past. For Sprint 2010 designers took inspiration from their
city and from the times we now live in to create collections that make sense and will define this era - from the models off duty and the club kids slouching in alleys, the working girls, the Dust Bowl beauties (as seen in all their stoic, denim glory at Ralph Lauren). All played parts in the collections’ casts of characters.

New York acted as muse to the city’s biggest sartorial spectacle. Designers channeled their home. And in this city, in apartments and cubicles and banquettes from Brooklyn to the Barrio to the Bowery, those same sources of inspiration scrambled to acquire and appropriate their own versions of all that is new, forward, optimistic. Fashion Week is now a thing of the not-so-recent past, but the mark it has on a beleaguered industry and the city it calls home and on this writer in particular is indelible and amazing. What a bright, brilliant future we have, judging by the clothes soon to be on our backs.