Last night's Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute Benefit will probably be--in the long run--lost to the annals of time, indistinguishable from last years, or the years before, or any year since Anna Wintour took over, actually. But for us who were there on the sidelines, waving frantically at a very pregnant Kim Kardashian and an actively dismissive Kanye West, screaming for just a moment of Lena Dunham or Kate Beckinsale time while pressed up against the barriers of the press pen like poor animals on the way to the slaughterhouse, listening to the woman next to us ask every female celebrity the same questions--"Did you eat anything today? What did you eat? How long did it take you to get into the dress?"--the irony of the night's theme was not lost on us.

"Punk: From Chaos to Couture" was already going to be a difficult concept for designers, celebrities, and various rich people to wrap their head around. For one thing, it implies that punk--as a movement, as a musical genre--ever evolved out chaos into some sort of couture maturity. Even The New York Times got it twisted: David Byrne and Debbie Harry, while being two great artists, were never 'punk.' Debbie Harry was more punk than most, you could say she lived like a punk, or dressed like a punk, but her voice was always too clear, too lilting, never "Fuck you"-enough to be considered part of the movement.

This sort of mass confusion was amusedly referenced to more than once in the evening. Bee Shaffer, daughter of Anna Wintour, showed up in a giant Dior couture ballgown, shrugging off questions of fitting the night's theme by saying that she was always more of a girly girl. Jerry Seinfeld asked Jimmy Fallon, in what we generously assumed was a joke (as these men were both wearing designer tuxedos): "When did punk start? The 70s? The 80s? I feel like it was the 70s..." Anna Wintour herself was wearing a pink flowered dress, because she had been told that "pink was punk."

Even the younger generation, who you'd think would have had at least  a Good Charlotte notion of what Punk looked like, had apparently seen Pink in one too many ballgowns. The weird Olsens were dressed like....something (Ashley was an orange cloud, her sister looked like a semi-goth librarian), but whatever that something was, it wasn't book.

Then again, it seemed even more offensive when they got it right. Cameron Diaz wore a blue number by Stella McCartney, whose ode to punkness was a confined to a golden belt of long spikes. Donatella Versace wore a dress made of spikes. One woman, wearing spiked Louboutins, decided that to be truly punk, she would spit on the red carpet, which was totally punk...until she delicately traipsed over it to get to her seat. The three or four who got it right (Lily Westwood, whose dress was made from recycled garbage; Greta Gerwig; Madonna;Mily Cyrus; the old women who died their hair pink) seemed ironically out of place at such a black tie ball where everyone else just wore whatever Tom Ford--who wore his usual black tux, by the way, while discussing how "punk" was a state of being--had made for them.

We're just saying: Maybe next year the theme should be something that the 1% can handle without seeming clueless or offensive. "Comic Con" perhaps?

The Wintour of Our Content

Anna Wintour will add the newly created role of artistic director of Condé Nast to her existing duties as Vogue editor and editorial director of Teen Vogue, the Times reports.  The position was created in part to keep Ms. Wintour at Condé Nast, and should put an end the persistent (and persistently debunked) speculation that the Obama-supporting editrix could decamp for a plum ambassador gig. Condé is expected to make the announcement today. 

Ms. Wintour, who will celebrate her silver anniversary helming Vogue this summer, will take on some of Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse's former duties. Last fall, the 85-year-old Mr. Newhouse began to yield the reigns he had held at Condé, amid speculation on plans for his successor.

“Si Newhouse leaves a void, inevitably,” Charles H. Townsend, the chief executive of Condé Nast, told the Times. “Anna, without even having to think twice about it, is the most qualified person to pick up that torch and carry it into the future.” 

In addition to Ms. Wintour's role at Vogue and Teen Vogue, she will take on "broader creative duties throughout the company, and having a say in its expanding portfolio of platforms, including the recent development of an entertainment division," the Times reports.

“It is something I do a lot anyway in my role at Vogue,” Ms. Wintour told the Times about her new position, which she said she sees as “almost like being a one-person consulting firm.”

“I advise all sorts of people in the outside world, and really, I see this as an extension of what I am doing, but on a broader scale,” she said.

The New Yorker editor David Remnick said that he has already benefited from Ms. Wintour's input and will continue to do so.

“I don’t expect Anna to be picking the cartoons or directing our war coverage,” Mr. Remnick said. “But I have asked her advice numerous times and always been grateful for it. She’s a great editor. Period.”

On a side note, are we the only ones who want to see Ms. Wintour's taste in New Yorker cartoons?

Grace Coddington with Anna Wintour.

Although long familiar and widely revered in fashion-industry circles, Grace Coddington, the creative director of Vogue, burst into the wider public consciousness as the cussing, henna-haired breakout star of The September Issue, the 2009 R.J. Cutler documentary about the production of the Sept. 2007 issue of American Vogue. An 840-page monument to pre-recessionary tastes that included a Roman travel diary in which Sienna Miller wore a lot of feathers and a Dolce & Gabbana dress that cost $61,000, it was at the time the largest monthly issue of any American magazine ever published. (The Sept. 2012 Vogue finally eclipsed it in overall page count—but in its number of advertising pages, it has never been surpassed.) The movie made much of the relationship between Ms. Coddington and Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Ms. Wintour is chilly and superior—one of the documentary’s most entertaining moments comes when a startled assistant jumps out of her way like a vole before an owl—while Ms. Coddington is warm and generous to peers and underlings alike. Colleagues shrink and wither under Ms. Wintour’s judgments, but Ms. Coddington challenges the boss like an equal.

After the film came out, Ms. Coddington writes in her new memoir, Grace (Random House, 416 pp., $35), she started getting recognized on the street. Her newfound popular appeal was judged to be such that Random House paid a reported $1.2 million to acquire the memoir. But was this acclaim earned? It is no great task to seem warm-hearted next to Anna Wintour, and the creative director is hardly bold. In one sequence in the film that is, in retrospect, a bit of a reach, the camera lingers as Ms. Coddington surveys the palace of Versailles while sharing insights like, “It’s sort of strange to think how old it is.” Let that $1.2 million sink in.

Grace begins with Ms. Coddington’s childhood in Trearddur Bay, a small town on Holy Island in Wales. The book proceeds chronologically through her successful modeling career, her transition into working as a fashion stylist and her years of inching her way up the mastheads at British and then American Vogue. Anecdotes careen into one another.Ms. Coddington and her co-author, Vanity Fair’s Michael Roberts, jump from a story about powdering Prince Charles’s nose for a British Vogue shoot in 1969 to a discourse on the primacy of Yves Saint Laurent on the Paris couture schedule of the time to a bit about meeting her ex-husband’s new wife and what everybody wore at that gathering. The effect is somewhat like going ’round for tea at the home of a very cultured, enjoyably potty-mouthed aunt who only needs a little prompting to commence holding forth. Only Ms. Coddington’s stories include that one about the time she made out with Mick Jagger in the late 1960s. And, somewhat more darkly, how she had to “escape” from Roman Polanski after he offered her a ride home then drove to his place instead, “and tried dragging me inside.”

Ms. Coddington writes frequently of her shyness, a feeling that she says she can remember from earliest childhood. Her parents ran a hotel in a remote island community in Wales, but were left in financial straits after the war. She hints that her mother was a hoarder; her father died of lung cancer when she was 11. She says she was so paralyzed by the thought of talking to the other girls at her strict, French-influenced convent school that she had to eat lunch off-campus, and even today she avoids any situation that involves public speaking. But even young Grace could be sly: one of the most charming stories in the book’s early chapters concerns her boyfriend Bob, a Royal Air Force pilot, whom she went to visit on base with his best friend. “Halfway there,” she writes, “we realized we quite fancied each other. And that was the end of Bob.”

Ms. Coddington recounts her love affairs with admirable dispassion. I lost count of the fiancés, boyfriends, flings and live-in partners; the men are simply not the point. An entire marriage is dismissed in a sentence, a divorce in a few words. She writes evenly of tragedy—the car accident that ended her modeling career, the miscarriage she suffered in the seventh month of what would be her only pregnancy after some football hooligans picked up the Mini Cooper she was driving and tossed it on its side—and of heartbreak, like the time her fiancé turned out to be carrying on an affair with Catherine Deneuve’s sister. Unlike so many memoirists who seem intent on demonstrating how cool and hip and outrageous the memoirst is (or was, when she was young), Ms. Coddington writes in a bloodless tone. At one point, she says that she lacks Ms. Wintour’s ability to not care what people think of her: “I care whether anyone—from the mailman to the dry cleaner—likes me,” she writes. But it doesn’t come across in her prose.

The meandering quality of the narrative more than occasionally borders on outright sloppiness, however. The book lacks an index. Anecdotes are short on simple temporal markers like dates, leaving the story to unwind in a maddening series of thens and laters and shortly afterwardses. In one unfortunate passage, she imitates her Korean manicurists’ accents: “They love me. ‘Glace! Glace!’ they shout when I walk in.” In another, she writes that her sister, Rosemary, had a child by a man who left her to move to Nepal and then “soon after” died “under mysterious circumstances on the border with Afghanistan.” Nepal does not share a border with Afghanistan.

As a portrait of the fashion industry over the last 50 years, Grace is necessarily incomplete but often enlightening. In particular, the accounts of the author’s close working relationships with two influential countrywomen—Liz Tilberis, who edited British Vogue before her untimely death from cancer, and Anna Wintour—are fascinating. (Especially once Tilberis becomes the editor of Vogue’s main competitor, American Harper’s Bazaar.) Ms. Coddington’s perspective on various photographers’ working styles and personal tics is unparalleled. Who else has been able to observe everyone from Irving Penn to Norman Parkinson to Guy Bourdin to Annie Leibovitz up close over the course of decades? A story about Bourdin wanting the sea dyed bluer for a shoot is worth the price of admission alone.

Dishy, though, Grace is not. Especially in the passages that concern more recent history, Ms. Coddington too often holds back. The biggest critique of Ms. Wintour is that she tends to be chilly with women but flirtatious with men. She loyally slams The Devil Wears Prada. And when she mentions having lunch with the disgraced Christian Dior designer John Galliano shortly after his firing for engaging in a very public racist tirade (he was caught on a cellphone video telling a couple in a Parisian café, “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead.”), it is only to grouse about the fact that pictures of the two of them eating had appeared online before the meal was over. “Modern life!” reflects Ms. Coddington. No confidences were betrayed in the making of this memoir—at least not of anyone powerful.

The chapters of the book that are told thematically, rather than chronologically, stand out as some of the best. Near the end, Ms. Coddington reflects on beauty. In women’s magazines, “beauty” is normally a euphemism for “cosmetics,” but Ms. Coddington ties together stories about influential makeup artists, Botox, plastic surgery and how her own feelings about herself changed after the car accident that entirely severed her left eyelid. It’s refreshingly intimate. And in another chapter, Ms. Coddington tells the story of her life and work through a discussion of her companion animal of choice: cats. Relationships professional and personal, international moves and all of life’s other dislocations are retold as functions of the felines Ms. Coddington has loved, and the results are entertaining and beautiful. (It helps that a cat psychic makes repeated appearances.) This suggests that structuring the book thematically would have done Grace a great service. The chronological approach means that too many related anecdotes—for instance, some insightful recollections of Vogue’slandmark shoots in China and Russia both before and after the Cold War—are spread far and wide across the book. Grouped together, they would have greater resonance. There’s a submerged theme about Ms. Coddington, Ms. Wintour and Tilberis as three British women of the same generation who forever changed fashion, and the fact that the fashion industry is one of the few spaces in media and business in which women wielding significant power is taken as a given. But that thread goes sadly unexplored.

Ms. Coddington, who claims to have “barely read two books in my life that aren’t picture books,” has a winning voice and admirable common sense. Her own book may be frustrating occasionally, but it’s also fun. She is that mischievous girl who will start a car journey with one boyfriend and end it with another. “It’s hard for me to define what is modern, because I am not,” she writes, and for that, she is a walking counter-narrative to the industry in which she works—romantic and backward-looking while fashion pushes relentless innovation, even as it lacks much in the way of real progress. Ms. Coddington is uninterested in any wide-reaching critique of the industry, but who wouldn’t want to spend a few hours in her company anyway?

editorial@observer.com

Anna Wintour and Sally Singer: together again.

Sally Singer is heading back to Vogue in the newly created role of digital creative director, The Fix reports.

Ms. Singer left Condé Nast, where she was Vogue’s fashion news and features director,  in 2010 to become the editor in chief of T. But her two-year stint at the Times came to an abrupt end this past in August. WSJ. editor Deborah Needleman assumed the top role at the Times’s luxury mag last month.

In her new role, Ms. Singer will again report to Anna Wintour and collaborate with Caroline Palmer, Vogue.com's editor. Ms. Singer's will return to Vogue on October 29.

Guess some things never go out of style ...

Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour in friendlier times.

Hearst Magazines has named Carine Roitfeld  the global fashion director for Harper’s Bazaar.  This move ramps up the rivalry between the former editrix of French Vogue and Condé Nast. Ms. Roitfeld, who was once seen as a possible successor to Anna Wintour, abruptly left Condé Nast in 2010.

Ms. Roitfeld introduced her new magazine, CR Fashion Book, just last month and will continue to put out the biannual magazine, which is published by Fashion Media Group, the company behind Visionaire and V magazines.

Hearst said her collaboration “may include covers of many of Harper’s Bazaar’s international editions.”

“This collaboration marks the first time anything like this has been done, and we’re very excited about what Carine will bring to Bazaar editions around the world,” said Duncan Edwards, the president and chief executive of Hearst Magazines International, in a statement.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Edwards described Ms. Roitfeld’s new role "as similar to that of a syndicated columnist." Ms. Roitfeld will write stories that are included in multiple international editions of Bazaar but will be  “independent and separate to the rest of the magazine,” Mr. Edwards told the Times.

Code and Theory's Brandon Ralph with wife Adriana Biasi

“God, have you ever walked into a meeting and thought, This is not going to go well?” Code and Theory founder and creative director Brandon Ralph moaned. “That’s what it was like when we went to pitch to The Daily Beast.”

Sitting with him in his 5th floor SoHo offices, it was easy to imagine what the handsome and lanky 33-year-old was talking about. The Observer had come in to meet with the man who had been hand-picked by Tina Brown, Anna Wintour, Peter Brant, and Jason Binn to create their online platforms. With long, dark, wavy hair; leather bracelets; and a penchant for John Varvatos; Mr. Ralph looked more the part of a hip New York restaurateur.

He was quite press-shy: his only major interview since he co-founded his company in 2001 was with Ad Week, and he obliquely referred to not being happy with the results. In addition, some recent layoffs at Code and Theory had attracted unwanted attention by MediaBistro’s Agency Spy, leading Mr. Ralph to be even more reticent in front of a recorder than usual. So yeah, after five minutes in Mr. Ralph’s office, we actually could visualize a meeting that wasn’t going well.

“They were trying out four different design teams, and I think we were the fifth,” Mr. Ralph told The Observer of his first meeting with Ms. Brown’s staff. “We only had two days to prepare specs, and the whole presentation, people were just checking their watches.”

As they were about to be ushered out, a deus ex machina descended in the form of a bomb threat, forcing the whole building to evacuate. Somehow, Mr. Ralph and Ms. Brown were separated from the rest of their respective teams, and ended up at Cookshop on 10th Avenue, where they drank coffee and connected.

“We just sat at a coffee table, talking about designs and different approaches to the site,” Mr Ralph told The Observer, still incredulous over the series of events. “People kept asking how it went. I told everyone it was ‘very strange, but then very intimate.’”

“Twenty minutes later, we got a phone call telling us we were hired.”
But Ms. Brown and Mr. Ralph didn’t immediately see eye to eye on how to approach the digital news site’s layout. When Code and Theory presented a mock-up using gibberish—a standard design practice—the Newsweek editor demanded to see actual content in its place.

“We ended up having to create a new site mock-up every single day through the launch,” He grimaced. What he learned from the exercise was that his design couldn’t rest on sexy photos; it had to have energy even on a slow news day.

Ms. Brown remembered her first scuffles with Mr. Ralph as well. “He wasn’t used to clients saying they were coming down to the studio to sit in front of the screen and try stuff out,” she told The Observer. “He freaked out at first, then realized how fun it is to marry news adrenaline and digital design.”

Ms. Brown and Mr. Ralph still keep in touch. He refers to the media mogul as one of his greatest teachers. She, meanwhile, gushes about some of Mr. Ralph’s other impressive qualities.

“Brandon’s a heartthrob,” she told The Observer. “Every single woman in the office is a bit in love with him.”

Tina Brown’s colleagues aren’t the only ones vulnerable to Mr. Ralph’s charms. He and Lenny Kravitz became close personal friends after Code and Theory redesigned his web site and filmed and edited two of Mr. Kravitz’s music videos.

“I invited him and his wife down to New Orleans to visit me,” Mr. Kravitz told The Observer. “He’s brilliant designer and a great thinker and a great friend. He’s inspiring. We’re constantly emailing each other things, like photos of camera gear, architecture, art. We like to bounce things to each other. He’s got this amazing eye, for photography and design and everything.”

Mr. Ralph’s LennyKravitz.com is a fresh-looking aggregator of web content about the artist, one that employs bold hieroglyphics and symbols where there otherwise would be titles. Such a heavily accessorized look is risky these days, but somehow, it works—especially considering the rock personality it reflects.

The offices of Code and Theory

“Code and Theory’s sites get attention for disruption,” said Nicholas Daniel-Richards, former CTO of the company. “Making something that’s completely different from what you’d expect might not even make sense at first. Then the industry takes notice and starts trying to do the same.”
The difference between Mr. Ralph’s shop and the larger agencies, Mr. Daniel-Richards told The Observer, is that the big firms will churn out “a very efficient German machine, like a Mercedes: very powerful, with perfect craftsmanship, but no personal touches. And then you have these alternatives like an Aston Martin, which are creative and funky, and have soul. That’s Brandon.”

Code and Theory’s name has become synonymous with old media’s more innovative forays into new media. The most recent example would be last month’s launch of Jason Binn’s 1%-er magazine, DuJour, which sought to create a unique web entity separate from but associated with print. For the project, Mr. Ralph came up with the idea of having the site resemble the physical product: it begins at the cover, and readers have to flip through pages of content, like they would on an iPad (or an actual paper product).

“It was this insight I had,” Mr. Ralph recalled. “No matter how old a magazine is, or if it’s at your house or a dentist’s office...you’ll go from cover to cover.” So Mr. Ralph created a “focused” digital product that didn’t show the top news stories of the day.

When first viewing the DuJour website, readers might be confused by the cover photo and lack of a scrolling content bar. But once the user is accustomed to the unconventional design, the images pop, the stories breathe and the overall effect is uncluttered and refreshing.

“We’re not showing you 100 things on every page, like some websites that have all these links that scream, ‘Please, look at me!’” Mr. Ralph said. “I mean I think that works for websites that need to be very timely,” he amended quickly. (He did design the layout for the scream-worthy TMZ.com, after all). “But for a magazine that needs to be very luxurious, we told the editors, ‘Invest in your content. Users will scroll.’ ”

For Vogue.com’s 2010 overhaul, the challenge was to modernize the site’s color way and typefaces and create a brand-specific social community. In a response that typified reviews among the fashion set, Women’s Wear Daily wrote: “Love the oversize features carousel and the locking navigation bar! A beautiful redesign work by (once again) Code and Theory.”

For the record, Vogue.com is more than happy with the results, editor Caroline Palmer told The Observer. The “relaunch was one of our brand’s most important recent initiatives, making it essential that we collaborate with the right agency. Now that we’ve worked closely with Brandon and his team for more than two years, it’s clear to us that they are one of the top agencies in their field.”

That doesn’t mean Mr. Ralph and company will work for any media entity with a blank check. Without naming names, he told The Observer, “We’ll tell clients we want to work with them, but we don’t think they should do this project, because it’s set up to fail.”

Bossing around big names is a far cry from the firm’s humble beginnings 11 years ago, when Mr. Ralph opened up shop out of his Lower East Side apartment with childhood friend Dan Gardner. The two had $500 to their names.

They had grown up on Long Island, and spent time working in the dot com age with smaller, online agencies before being asked to create the digital department of a traditional ad firm, Draft. When Ralph and Gardner got the opportunity to strike out on their own, they went for it. One of their first jobs was creating a site for Sony using Flash Video Player.

Today, they employ more than 100 people at Code and Theory, which Mr. Ralph stressed, was another kind of collaborative process. “There are creative people who have moved into the strategy group, and creatives who have taught themselves how to be engineers.”

“Everyone here is a Swiss army knife,” he boasted.

Like many arty types that have taken the corporate route, Mr. Ralph—who also dabbles in interior design, fashion, and photography—worries that he’s sold out his craft. Meanwhile, his colleagues sometimes wonder whether they can possibly execute his outside-the-box ideas, according to a former employee.

“Brandon has the ideas, but then there are the realities of the situation, and they’re not always feasible,” said the employee. “You can’t expect people to work 110 hours a week and not get burned out with the crushing hours and a volatile employer, but that’s how they get things done there.”
In January of last year, Code and Theory helped recreate Interview magazine’s web site, and then the two companies traded spaces. The design shop’s new space is more than 20,000 square feet, all the better to branch into print design and TV commercials, Mr. Ralph’s next moves.

After we had turned our recorder off and packed up, Mr. Ralph offered to give us the grand tour, culminating in his favorite place in the never-ending floor of Code and Theory. Leading us through a side door into a cramped, almost hidden corridor lined with two stories of books, he flung open the heavy wooden doors to the library: a gigantic room with thousands of books left over from the Interview days.

“Now if we could only figure out the Dewey Decimal System they were using when they organized everything,” Mr. Ralph grinned.

Mr. Ralph shook his head at the archaic line of code that had created order from the massive amount of data. It was a design he could respect, and for the first time since we had walked into his office, he looked genuinely happy.

Diana Vreeland led Vogue from 1963 to 1971, but her present-day counterpart Anna Wintour is not featured in the movie, nor is Andre Leon Talley, the famous Voguester who got his start working with Vreeland at the Met Costume Institute.

"Vogue hasn't touched the movie," director Lisa Immordino Vreeland told THR, noting that Mr. Talley had requested to be interviewed by a specific, unnamed, prestigious "fashion scholar"; he was not even given a comp ticket to the Tribeca Film Festival screening. Anna Wintour, apparently, opts to appear mainly in documentaries about her own tenure at Vogue.

Ralph Lauren’s richness of an España that is long gone these days was le look du jour in New York.

There is something organized and memorable about the last day of fashion week. Despite the grueling pace, late nights, early mornings and simply divine personalities we endure, there is an orderly sense of energy at the Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein Collection shows. Publicists are graceful and polite, photo check-in is straightforward, seating disasters are delicately avoided and celebs are accessible, or, if not, polite about it.

Such was the case yesterday morning in West Soho when Mr. Lauren held his 80th runway presentation. His front row of stars dressed in his premium line included Jessica Alba, Olivia Wilde and most of the members of the Ralph Lauren Royal Family.

For spring 2013, Mr. Lauren progressed from something South American to ornate looks that were undeniably Catalan and Castilian, with tomato suede jackets, amethyst silk marocaine trousers, cotton ruffle shirting in white and beautiful scarlet dresses. There were black calf woven totes and hats. The styling seemed a bit overwrought, but the majority of this overload was eliminated when the evening wear flowed in.

Incredible brocade and beaded boleros influenced by los toreros of Spain, black double-faced wool jackets and dresses, a stunning, full-length beaded tulle skirt, and scarlet dresses with embroidery and beading. It was wearable and eternally elegant.

Once we had caught our breath from all that beauty, The Observer beelined it to U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte.

“You’ve been to quite a lot of fashion shows and events this week, what are some of your highlights?” The Observer wanted to know.

“You know what? This right here. I love dressing in Ralph Lauren. It’s just amazing, it fits perfect,” replied Mr. Lochte.

Yes, yes we all love a wardrobe chock full of Ralph Lauren, Mr. Lochte, we’re wearing some ourselves for god's sake! Nevertheless, Mr. Lochte refused to move off-script despite our uninterested posture and facial expresses.

Connor Dwyer and Ryan Lochte

“No other better way to end fashion week with this show,” he continued in his monotone jock voice.

Moving on, we asked the decorated Olympic swimmer if he planned to carry the party on to London, Milan or Paris. He commented that his favorite event was the Us Weekly party.

“Have you got the Fashion Week fever?” we asked. " Will you be going to shows in Paris?"

“You know what? If they asked me to, I’d be more than happy to. I’m getting back into the water next week to train.”

“How has your life changed or your daily regimen after the stardom?” The Observer questioned.

“No it really hasn’t, ’cuz I always have time to find the swimming and workout and change. Nothing has really changed except going to shows all the time,” he huffed, as if it were a chore.

“What would you change about Fashion Week?” we wanted to know, catering to his runway fatigue.

“That there are so many opportunities to see great designers that you can’t really go to everything. You really have to pick and choose.”

Mr. Lochte's all-American sizzle and brawny physique, while a brilliant match for the Ralph Lauren brand, didn’t quite light our fire. Drowning in his pool of mundanity, we elected to approach someone a bit more engaging; we headed toward Vogue’s André Leon Talley, who lingered long after Anna Wintour, Grace Codington, Hamish Bowles, etc. had slithered for the exit of Skylight Studios.

“You looked entranced during the show; what’s so intriguing about him still, even after all these years?” we asked.

“He is a master! This was a tour de force. This show was a virtuoso tour de force,” proclaimed the extravagant editor, replete in his muumuu and couture platinum/gold chain necklace with hanging bone horn. “You can take Spain and you can absolutely sink the theme. The theme never sunk into a disaster because of the details and the workmanship."

Jackpot! Mr. Lochte had sunk our ship, but ATL was keeping us afloat!

“The attitude was modern, but the romance was Spain. But just a hint of it.

Team Vogue, with Mr. Leon Talley on the far left.

"Mr. Lauren is not saying you have to go out of the house in a dress like that. But he’s saying you have to [have a] dash of romanticism in your wardrobe. You have to have that new shoe that looks so marvelous with raffia. Or you just might want to have that perfect double-breasted suit in white.”

Mr. Leon Talley spoke the truth about Mr. Lauren’s heightened excellence in design, construction and materials. “For me it was a couture show. It was like an haute couture show in New York, which is rare.”

Truth be told, we’ll trust ATL for the Fashion Week critique and commentary and keep Mr. Lochte safely at bay underwater.

Jay-Z and Beyonce (Getty Images)

Probably not, seeing as the Vogue editor in chief was just announced as being the fourth-biggest fund-raiser for Barack Obama's re-election campaign in a document released to The New York Times. But this was due in no small part to the $40,000-dollar-a-plate dinner she held over at Sarah Jessica Parker's house back in June: that event raised approximately $2,000,000 on that night alone.

Now the president and first lady of hip-hop want to give the editrix a run for her money.

On September 18, the duo will be holding a fundraiser for President Obama at Jay-Z's 40/40 Club in the Flatiron District. The event will also charge $40,000 aplate, but the scoop from Page Six says that they will cap the number of guests at 100 ... meaning that they expect more than that to try and show up. If they reach their capacity, the duo could end up raising $4 million for the president's re-election campaign, putting him leagues ahead of Anna Wintour, or even Andrew Tobias for that matter.