The real terror? … New York goes on orange alert today -for skinny models and venal fashion editors with big, bony feet! -as Fashion Week begins with shows by Michael Kors (neutrals, riding crops), Oscar (de la) Renta (ruffles, color) and Carolina Herrera (more ruffles, polka dots), all in the big tents at Bryant Park. Meanwhile, Marc Jacobs just has to be difficult and have his show at a top-secret location, and you have to beg to be invited- by fax …. Who has the stamina for these "artists"? O.K., here's a nice party with 1998-esque "shop-a-tinis" (applemartinis rimmed with hot pink sugar) given by the gals at Girlshop, who have published a book called The Girlshop Guide to NYC Shopping . But what is Girlshop? "We're an 'e-tailer,' an online boutique," said contributing writer Jane-"like Tarzan"-Weiner. "We feature all up-and-coming designers. It's basically for not-conventional people, people who like a little oomph in their fashion." That's us, sister ! What should we wear to Fashion Week? "A stiff upper lip."

[All fashion shows by invitation only: Michael Kors, noon, theater, Bryant Park, 894-9262; Oscar de la Renta, 2 p.m., pavilion, 917-351-8600; Carolina Herrera,

4 p.m., theater, 944-5757; Girlshop party, Glass, 287 10th Avenue, 6:30 p.m.,

by invitation only, 645-6240, ext. 303.]

The crying of Lot 61: We were going to send you to the opening night of the New York Philharmonic this evening (new maestro Lorin Maazel will be whipping

the orchestra into a

frenzied Beethoven's Ninth ), but then

notice came in for the premiere of Secretary , the hotly anticipated James Spader movie, based on a story by highbrow dirty-book writer Mary Gaitskill , about a small-town lawyer's affair with his secretary, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal . The Gyllenhaals appear to be the new Ronsons : Father Stephen is a director, brother Jake was this summer's underage sex object of choice (in Lovely and Amazing and The Good Girl ). Predictable sponsors: Paper and Nerve.com, which means probable naked karaoke at the after-party …. Is anyone else tired of the way New York single life has been infiltrated by all these Nerve- clickin' eroto-fascists , all pierced and priapic 24/7 ? Doesn't anyone go for walks in the park anymore?

[Screening, Clearview Chelsea West,

33 West 23rd Street, 8 p.m., after-party to follow, Lot 61, 550 West 21st Street ,

by invitation only, 869-7233.]

Thursday 19th

Blass-phemy: Wake up early, still brimming with Fashion Week vim, and decide: " Yesss -I'm going to make it to the early Bill Blass show" … then realize that Mr. Blass has gone (alas) to that big trunk show in the sky, and that his label is now designed by some tight-lipped Swede , so maybe just stay home this morning, nestled among satin pillows, and read his excellent memoir , Bare Blass , edited by New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn . Bonus fashion-groupie dirty excerpt from page 117: " … out of the crowd steps a girl with long hair and wearing a white rayon blouse and along black skirt. She looks like a cellist. 'Mr. Blass?' I say 'Yes,' smiling. 'I'd like to suck your cock,' she says." Yikes ! More proof that this is a dirty town: Workman Publishing releases The Breast Book , co-authored by Lithe Sebesta and Maura Spiegel, an illustrated romp through bosomdom.

[Bill Blass show, 9 a.m., Celeste Bartos

Forum, by invitation only, 204-7435.]

Two animalistic benefits! One jacket-and-tie affair on the fancy Upper East Side with Astons and Rockefellers and Selfridges , the

other "among the people" on Coney

Island . Guess which one is more expensive? Wrong . The Young Friends of the ASPCA benefit for the dogs and horsies starts at a mere $175, while the New York Aquarium's Dinner by the Sea gala for the dolphins and jellyfish is $300 . But the coral reefs need your help …. Just imagine a row of pretty coral reefs, and then picture President Bush going up and kicking them ….

[Young Friends of the ASPCA, cocktails, Steuben Gallery, 667 Madison Avenue,

7 p.m., dinner to follow, Doubles, 783 Fifth Avenue, 8:30 p.m., 876-7700, ext. 4652; Dinner by the Sea gala, West Eighth Street and Surf Avenue, cocktails, 6 p.m. at Sea Cliffs, a re-creation of a rocky Pacific coast; dinner to follow, Seaside Pavilion, 718-265-3427.]

Friday 20th

Stell-lla! Stell-ll-llaa-aa! Wave your Fashion Week pom-poms one more time for the opening of clothier and Beatle daughter Stella McCartney's 4,000-square-foot emporium in the meatpacking district-an odd choice for the designer, a noted

vegan. It's an abstract space with free-floating sheer screens and a 30-square-meter pool. Unclear at this point: if Madonna ("Mrs. Ritchie") Ciccone -who, on the cover of Vanity Fair this month, looks strikingly like Betty White, of NBC's smash comedy hit The Golden Girl s-is gonna jet in from bonny Britain …. If you can't crash that , here's an easier mark: magician David Copperfield's birthday party at the GQ Lounge ! Mr. Copperfield called Eight-Day Week special correspondent Anna Jane Grossman from Miami, where he'd deplaned from a vacation in the Bahamas. "The only thing I made disappear there was food ," he said, clearly cadging some Henny Youngman material for his magic act. He said he's preparing something called Portal , in which he "takes people in the audience and suspends them over the head of the audience, and then transports them to a tropical island." So how old is he? "Forty-six going on 29, acting like I'm about 15."

[Stella McCartney store opening, 429 West 14th Street , 8 p.m., by invitation only, 255-1556; David Copperfield birthday party, 110 University Place, 10 p.m., 445-8446.]

Saturday 21st

The WASP's and the fleas: Two WASP-y shows today , one the real thing and the other faux but more WASP-y than the real thing: Lilly Pulitzer and Ralph Lauren …. And meanwhile, near the flea circus of Fashion Week, it's an actual flea circus in Times Square! "I started off as an actor," said ringmaster Adam Gertsacov , "and then I realized that all of my work as an actor was about being a clown, and I went to the Ringling Brothers Clown College , and then I realized that I really wanted to not be a small cog in a larger wheel … I wanted to be the large wheel!" That's why he bought two fleas named Midge and Madge -watch those little buggers pull teeny chariots!

[Lilly Pulitzer, Celeste Bartos Forum,

11 a.m., by invitation only, 646-366-9216; Ralph Lauren, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 8 p.m., by invitation only, 857-2596; flea circus, Palace of Variety, Times Square, 125 West 42nd Street, noon, 726-1935.]

Sunday 22nd

Eine Kline Nachtmusik ! Welcome to autumn, the thinking person's favorite season -and how better to celebrate it than a night's worth of that very autumnal actor, Kevin Kline, doing unplugged Shakespeare in a benefit for the Acting Company ? "This was all Kevin's idea; he's putting it together," said Acting Company flack and former thespian Gerry Cornez. "It's just going to be him, and he's going to be doing a variety of scenes from Shakespeare-he will, of course, be doing Hamlet. " Any famous people coming? "Julie Harris, Amy Irving-Phoebe [Cates] will be there, definitely . I just met her for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and she's like the sweetest thing in the world."

[Juilliard Theater, Lincoln Center, 155 West 65th Street, 7 p.m., 239-6200.]

Monday 23rd

Mamma Mia! Liv Tyler's half-

sister Mia serves two mistresses tonight : She's hosting Avon's Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer concert , and she's on the honorary committee for Humane USA's Savoir Vivre Gala , co-hosted by actress Alicia Silverstone . Linda Nealon (wife of SNL actor Kevin Nealon) and Mary Max (wife of artist Peter Max) are directors of Humane USA. "I was a fur-wearing, crocodile-wearing, meat-eating person until a couple of years ago," Ms. Max said. "But then my husband brought home a cat , and now we have five, and we just took in a puppy. Before, I loved Madison Avenue-I'm sorry, I did-and now I don't want another ring ; I want another puppy! I thought I'd be meeting these bleeding-heart liberals in the animal-rights movement, but I was surprised to meet very educated, sophisticated people from the get-go. All of a sudden, I was meeting men from Cornell and Harvard and Yale and Oxford and Princeton , and I was like , 'Excuse me? ' So we wanted to have a party that shows people that we're not just munching on seaweed and protesting on street corners."

[Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer Concert, Avery Fisher Hall, 8 p.m., 875-5030;

Humane USA Savoir Vivre Gala, W New York Hotel, 149 East 49th Street, 6 p.m.]

Tuesday 24th

Be my Beard! Did you know that the James Beard Foundation-that hoary collection of shawl-wearing food obsessives -has a junior committee, the 25-to-40-year-old "Greens"? Hey, it's a great way to meet someone whose idea of a good time is a Sunday at the Broadway Panhandler, the kind of fella who likes to sweep the dishes off the dining-room table and make mad, passionate love right there next to the legumes …. Tonight, the Greens mix - ho, ho -at Grace restaurant for a cocktail party with Manhattan cocktail expert Dale DeGroff …. Meanwhile, more Beards-artist Peter and wife Najma -join the Austers (author Paul and author-wife Siri Hustvedt ) to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Modern Painters magazine! "I'm involved just because I write for them regularly," said Ms. Hustvedt from what we can only imagine is the couple's Park Slope idyll -kids, manuscripts, sunlight-dappled furniture. "And they just borrowed Paul, ha ha ha . It should be a fun party. The editor is lively and charming-she's American, but has lived in England for many, many years."

[Greens event, Grace Bar and Restaurant, 114 Franklin Street, 6 p.m., 800-36BEARD; Modern Painters party, Cheim and Read Gallery, 547 West 25th Street, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 228-5555.]

Wednesday 25th

Cruel shoes: Fashion Week is officially over, but refuses to release its jaws from New York's flesh …. Remember artist Damien Hirst, the sicko Brit with the penchant for chopped-up cows? Why are we not surprised to learn he's teamed up with Manolo Blahnik to create a commemorative shoe? They and other shoe-designer-and-artist teams have cobbled up shoes for a benefit bash tonight for the New Museum of Contemporary Art (strapping on the strappy sandals: Anne McNally, Diane Von Furstenberg, Barry Dille r) at the freshly renovated Bergdorf Goodman shoe salon, which is much bigger and much more nicely decorated than our apartment.

[754 Fifth Avenue, 7 p.m., after-party to follow, Chambers Hotel, 15 West 56th Street, 219-1222, ext. 394.]

From time to time, Blass, who was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1922, was likened to Jay Gatsby, another character who escaped the American hinterlands and acquired great wealth and celebrity in the East. Given the frequency with which his name appeared in boldface alongside those of America's best-dressed column campers, and his passion for filling his much-photographed apartment on Sutton Place and his 18th-century stone house in New Preston, Conn., with princely furniture and pedigreed antiquities, it may have seemed that Bill Blass was gleefully living out the fantasy of Fitzgerald's "elegant young roughneck." But to those who knew him, the comparison didn't hold up.

It wasn't just that Blass-whose mother was a part-time seamstress, and whose father owned a hardware store and committed suicide when Bill was 5-never did anything to fabricate his past. Or that all the books on his shelves were real. Unlike Gatsby's West Egg mansion, Blass' homes were furnished with the rigorous taste of a man who acquired things not for show, but for the satisfaction of his own curious eye. His old friend, the Picasso biographer John Richardson, who advised him on his collection of drawings, said, "Bill didn't want anything religious or rococo. Nymphs and putti-out! He liked basic, vivid images-a human figure, a battle scene. Whenever we went to a museum or an art dealer, he knew exactly what he wanted to look at, and then we'd be out of there in 10 minutes."

The idea of throwing open his home to hordes of voyeuristic revelers would have been abhorrent to him. There were never more than six people for lunch or dinner in the cozy, wood-beamed dining room in Connecticut that had once been a tavern patronized by George Washington. ("He never slept here," Blass hastened to add.) The meals consisted not of caviar, sculpted mousses and baked Alaska, but a perfectly charred hamburger (slathered with Stilton cheese) or his robust, much-celebrated meat loaf, followed by a crisp green salad and a fruit cobbler with ice cream (all washed down with excellent claret). The visitors' length of stay would be carefully regulated-the handsomely understated rooms were devoid of chairs conducive to extended after-meal chatter-so that the master of the house could retreat to his bedroom with the good book he was always in the middle of, usually a work of biography or history.

Although Blass may have been photographed in black tie more often than any man in America, he was essentially a stay-at-home. At the occasional big soirée he felt obliged to attend, he never worked the room, but stood off to one side, coolly surveying the babble and always ready with a quick, side-of-the-mouth assessment of the whole faintly ridiculous parade: "She had been a has-been," I once heard him remark about the entrance of a woman who was conspicuously on the comeback trail.

Blass liked to say that he learned how to design for women from observing how they lived, and he cited as influences such society doyennes as Kitty Miller and Elsie Woodward, who welcomed him into their stylish houses when he arrived on Seventh Avenue in the late 40's as an unconscionably good-looking young man with rakish charm. But his inimitably American sense of style-which led him to put a T-shirt with a taffeta skirt, or a camel's hair polo coat over a short evening dress-came out of more accessible terrain. He loved to talk about how, as a boy, he'd spend entire days in a movie house luxuriating in the distant domains of Kay Francis, Carole Lombard and Constance Bennett. He once told me that the best years of his life were spent in the Army during the Second World War as an enlisted man, in a camouflage unit whose job was to position simulated weaponry to draw enemy fire. "It was the camaraderie I loved with men of all different types," he said, "from artists to coal miners."

More than any other designer of his generation, he took his cues from his clients-not just from women in New York, but from women all over America. He was the P.T. Barnum of the trunk show, hauling his wares from Pittsburgh to Portland, bringing to his well-heeled patrons his own highly refined notions about what they looked best in, while absorbing-and adapting-their own notions of what they felt comfortable in. He cultivated America. Blass designed by sketching on whatever was at hand-notebook, napkin, even saucer-and, like his observations, his figures are elegantly direct to the point of bluntness, teasingly alive for all their frugality of line. "He was a great editor of everything-rooms, people, clothes," says Brooke Hayward Duchin. Blue jeans, he wrote in The New Yorker a few years ago, are "the most significant contribution America has made to fashion."

On the road, he collected some awfully good tales, which I hope found their way into the memoir he finally got around to writing. (It will be published in the fall by HarperCollins under the title Bare Blass .) I heard no more telling comment about why Bill Clinton succumbed so readily to the charms of Monica Lewinsky than his account of taking a trunk show to Little Rock, Ark., and being repeatedly propositioned by a young hussy who kept turning up in his hotel suite, despite his requests to the management that she be thrown out. "Apparently in Little Rock," Blass said with the dry amusement of a rock-ribbed Republican, "they go with the room."

Stories of his generosity were legion among his friends, and not just because eight years ago he gave $10 million to the New York Public Library, which put up a plaque bearing his name in the card-catalog room. (The gift was testimony, in part, to his close friendship with the late head of the library, Father Timothy Healy, who friends surmise became something of a father figure to him.) Peter Duchin recalls admiring an unusual painting in the Connecticut house-a large, half-painted scene of the Corso in Rome-and jokingly asking whether it might be left to him in his will. A few weeks later, Blass turned up at a birthday party for the bandleader with the painting under his arm.

A lifelong bachelor, Blass maintained what John Richardson called a "cordon sanitaire" around his private life. It was a line that his friends, if they wanted to remain his friends, knew instinctively not to cross. And yet he was the most down-to-earth of companions. Marguerite Littman, one of his best pals in London-where he went four or five times a year to stay at the Connaught, have lunch at Harry's Bar, and prowl for antiques on Pimlico Road-remembers taking him to meet Princess Diana at Kensington Palace and being struck by how easily Blass, with his Midwestern straightforwardness and mid-Atlantic drawl, converted the princess into an old friend. "They were both enchanted with each other," Ms. Littman said. "Of course, he immediately saw the point of her-how funny she was-just as he always saw the point of everything."

Carolyne Roehm recalled the time, many years ago, when her boss, Oscar de la Renta, asked his good friend Blass to look after her one evening while they were all in Lake Como, Italy. "I was a 24-year-old assistant making $175 a week, and I was in awe of him," she said. "The very first grown-up dress I ever owned was a Blass. But he took me out to dinner and said, 'O.K., kid, so you want a martini?' He treated me as though he'd known me all my life, which of course is how he treated everyone, no matter who they were. I went to visit him a week ago and, as I was saying goodbye, I whispered in his ear, 'I love you very much.' He looked at me and growled, 'Oh, don't get all teary-eyed on me.'"