The Waldorf's artisanal honey is getting buzz.

The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel is currently cultivating a new kind of honey for its kitchens and bars. The hotel, where President Obama stays when he is in town, is used to painstaking attention to detail and extravagance, which makes its approach to the honey all the more intriguing.

Rather than relying on what could be called the Masa Imperative of luxury, after the top-dollar sushi joint that ships in fish from the Sea of Japan and the Bay of Spain with the urgency and costliness of helicoptered transplant organs (indeed, some of the fish are carried in organ containers), the Waldorf has gone in a direction more evocative of the Brooklyn Flea Market: its honey comes from beehives it is now keeping on a 20th-floor outdoor patio.

The initiative, brainchild of executive chef David Garcelon, relies on the expertise of the city’s premier beekeeper, Andrew Coté, who sells his own neighborhood-specific honeys at the Union Square farmer’s market.

“It sounds like a Portlandia skit,” said restaurateur Taavo Somer, considered by many to be the proto-Brooklyn hipster.

Like other aristocratic brands, the Waldorf is figuring out how to embrace the wildly popular (and youthful) do-it-yourself aesthetic that has gripped broader, scruffier swaths of the market.

Refinement and crispness are suddenly handicaps. The new aesthetic is sometimes referred to as “rough luxe,” bedhead writ large.

Upper East Side stylists, personal shoppers, private concierges and boutique proprietors describe the Waldorf honey as the latest in a sea change in luxury aesthetics, which has come largely as a response to what they perceive to be over-licensed, over-distributed, over-accessible luxury brands. If the devil wears Prada and the devil wears glasses, the devil is in luck: Prada frames are available at LensCrafters. Versace is on the racks at H&M.

“Used to be you could just run up Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue scooping up things at Louis Vuitton and you were done. Now it’s meeting the artist and having a relationship and knowing the whole story about how she made it. It’s luxury with soul,” said Aviva Stanoff, whose handmade pillows sell for up to $500 at Barneys, Fred Segal and Saks Fifth Avenue.

“The Louis Vuitton stuff—I’m picking on them, but it’s all of that: Prada, Armani, whatever—is so easy and kind of nouveau-riche. It’s obvious. It’s not interesting anymore. So now we want more of an adventure. Upper East Side women love to have almost a safari in Brooklyn, to walk through my studio and the piles of fabric and little threads or feathers clinging to their Chanel.”

Lisa Devo, whose all natural, recycled package soaps sell at C.O. Bigelow and the Kenneth Salon at the Waldorf, agreed: “They like to call and be speaking to the owner. You don’t call Diane Von Furstenberg and have Diane Von Furstenberg pick up the phone; they’ll just talk to some bored clerk and, y’know, customers get bored of bored clerks.”

Eva Jeanbart-Lorenzotti, who founded Vivre.com, a two-million-member luxe-hunting shopping site, describes a kind of big-brand boomerang.

“Paris, London, Milan, even Tokyo, it all looks the same, everything so recognizable,” she said. “Two beautiful women walk into a room. One, you can tell head-to-toe what she’s wearing. The other is a mystery. Nothing pleases a woman more than people asking, ‘I love that. Where did you get it?’”

Jesse Garza, co-founder of Visual Therapy, a luxury lifestyle consultancy, said his clients are in search of “realness, and not the kind of realness that applies to Real Housewives.”

“None of my clients want Christian Louboutin shoes anymore, because the Kardashians are clomping around in them at breakfast,” he said. “What my clients want now is that thrown-together, put-together look of Jackie Kennedy Onassis.”

Mr. Garza pointed to the recent popularity of a $3,010 heavy knit sweater that was part of Chanel’s latest spring collection, a notable departure from the brand’s classic flat jacket. At a recent show, Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s creative director, bragged that it took 3,000 hours—125 days—to hand-embroider a sleeveless coat.

While bespoke has always had cachet, handmade has become an obsession in fashion; witness the likes of Salvatore Ferragamo’s blousons of interwoven leather and raffia inspired “by the art of manual knotting threads and plaiting straw.”

There’s also holistic, repurposed art (at a recent check, Bergdorf Goodman’s seventh-floor curiosity shop had three wall sculptures of upholstery coils, each handmade over a six-month period in Brooklyn, ranging in price from $8,000 to $19,500), twee literary affectation (Marc Jacobs briefly sold hand-embroidered Olympia Le-Tan-designed book clutches that would look at home in Greenpoint’s Word bookstore, save for their $1,500 price tag) and foppish hobbyist whimsy (Tiffany’s $375 sterling silver harmonica, for example).

“We’re seeing more traffic on the road less traveled,” said Scott Schramm, Henri Bendel’s senior vice president in charge of general merchandise management. “It’s definitely quirkier, more independent, more imaginative. Our girl is more curious, and when you have curiosity, you have more confidence too, more uniqueness; it’s almost rediscovering that luxury is about specialty, not a uniform.”

He said buyers and customers were not only embracing brave new merchandise, but brave mixes and matches as well, specifically citing the pairing of a traditional Hermès bag with a Tom Binns cuff. Those cuffs are almost Damien Hirsts: a gold-plated shark mandible, a bejeweled oversize silver safety pin and, for 2013, a hulking gold-plated hammer-and-nail cuff.

Meanwhile, the status of a Tiffany engagement or wedding ring has been challenged by the likes of Sam Abbay, who runs a make-your-own-wedding-ring workshop in the Financial District and whose client base has shifted from Brooklyn to Manhattan in recent months.

“Tiffany’s or Harry Winston or Cartier, they’re selling rings they’ve already had designed,” said Mr. Abbay. “You can mix and match this carat or this cut or this setting, but it’s not that much variety. I mean, isn’t that how they do things at Chipotle? Lots of the city’s richest women have pretty much the exact same symbol of their husbands’ love.”

While the Waldorf eschews the exotica of Yemeni Wadi Do’an or Sidr honeys, the most expensive honeys in the world, it is doubling down on its newfound folksiness: Mr. Garcelon, its executive chef, explained plans to expand the beekeeping patio to include herbs and vegetables. But first, he plans to develop a private, locally sourced cheese label as a honey pairing.

Mr. Garcelon cast the decision as a mix of ancient tradition and modern environmentalism: “Sure, it’s great for the environment, for local pollination, for our guests to know that it is made right here. But it’s also great for me in the kitchen; any really old recipe from Europe was made with honey, not sugar. So we get to return to that real flavor: honey in soup, honey in salad dressing, honey in ice cream.”

If not for the nine-foot, two-ton, 119-year-old bronze and marble clock sounding Westminster chimes every quarter-hour behind him, the conversation could have been happening in Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Co-op.

“The other day, an older man, the kind who wouldn’t be caught dead with Chanel because that’s too nouveau-riche for him—old-school, real true Upper East Side—was name-dropping a restaurant on Smith Street,” said Jonathan Butler, founder of Brownstoner.com and the Brooklyn Flea Market, who grew up on the Upper East Side and said he went to Brooklyn “maybe five times” before he was 21. “I was amazed that Brooklyn was even part of his universe.”

editorial@observer.com

The after-party for the special screening of Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's in celebration of its 111th Anniversary. (Neil Rasmus)

“I hope I have a job tomorrow.” That was personal shopper Betty Halbreich’s reaction to the Sept. 12 preview of Matthew Miele’s fashion documentary Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s. Ms. Halbreich explained, “I spurt things without thinking!” But to others, her brutal honesty and WASPish sense of humor made her one of the film’s firm favorites. Gossip Girl costume designer Eric Damon spoke for all when he said, “It’s all about Betty.”

Ms. Halbreich, The Observer thinks you’ll be just fine.

As Fashion Week comes to a close, the celebration of Bergdorf Goodman’s 111th anniversary stepped into the spotlight. Swapping Lincoln Center’s front rows for the old-style stadium seating of The Paris Theater, a confluence of fatigued fashionistas enjoyed a show that for the first time in seven days allowed them to remain in their seats for more than 10 minutes.

A special screening of Mr. Miele’s documentary was followed by an after-party at the iconic department store. In popular culture, this lair of luxury goods and ladies-who-lunch has been a backdrop to many a movie scene and TV show; now it’s a story, and a movie, in itself. The 90-minute documentary paints a portrait of Bergdorf’s past, present and future, as Mr. Miele invites a collection of 175 of its directors, clients, employees, designers and wannabe designers to share their experiences and fondest memories of New York’s finest.

For designer Jason Wu, whom we caught up with pre-preview on the purple—not red—carpet, walking into the store is “an experience that can’t be replicated.”

As was, for us, the walk between the 58th Street theater, a haven for the city’s intellectual movie buffs, and Bergdorf’s, just around the corner on Fifth Avenue; we strolled tête-à-tête with Senior Vice President and Fashion Director Linda Fargo.

“The store isn’t just a store,” she said, “Every place has a story—it’s like a newspaper: a lot of paragraphs, a lot of voices, a lot of characters.”

Bergdorf’s rich tapestry of characters didn’t disappoint. Greeting us as we entered the store was doorman James, working his 17th year of magic at the 58th Street entrance and another memorable member of the film’s cast. And David Hoey, who before the screening modestly described himself as “the guy who does the windows,” was also prominently on display.

The windows played a starring role in the film. AndrewAndrew, regular DJs at the store—you may have spotted them there on Fashion’s Night Out—“loved the window show.” Designer Michael Kaye also observed that the whole film could have been about the spectacle from the sidewalk.

Mr. Miele has lifted the purple veil and exposed the secrets behind the glass display. The one caveat, voiced by supermodel Alva Chinn among others, was that it was “a wee bit long.” Perhaps the fashionistas’ endurance was by now conditioned by the brevity of the runway shows.

Although Fashion Week was coming to an end, the thumbs-up, thumbs-down urge continued: Best-dressed was a toss-up between stylist, socialite and model Michelle Harper, with her floor-length black and red gown and Marilyn-Monroe locks, and Michele Ouellet, muse to Libertine designer Johnson Hartig, whose multicolored coat—no it wasn’t Joseph’s—certainly turned some heads.

Mr. Miele himself confessed that he himself was “not a fashion guy at all.” He told us before the screening that his tie (appropriately purple) had been a gift from his wife. The cellphone conversation, he added later, went something like this: She said, “It’s two hundred dollars, is that too much to spend?” He said, “Where are you?” The answer? “I’m at Bergdorf’s!”

“If you can keep the evening stuff to a dull roar that would great! There are just so many events,” gripped Bergdorf Goodman’s Linda Fargo to a publicist at Naeem Khan’s Valentine’s Day show. [sigh] The fashion week life!

We’re content to note that she had little reason to complain after Mr. Khan presented his excellent collection of glitzy daywear and dramatic metallic gowns. “That’s perfect for Lady Obama!” pointed a transfixed assistant editor. The Observer agrees…

Ms. Obama first wore a stunning Naeem Khan gown to a state dinner for the prime minister of India, back in 2009. She went returned to the designer in 2011, to wear one of his frocks to make nice with German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Here are five outfits we want to dress Michelle Obama in, along with the matching occasion!

Aliza Avital.

Mr. Lieberman, who joined Eastern Consolidated in 2009, was bestowed the firm’s “Rising Star” merit last year, in part for his representation of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in its $20.1 million sale, at auction, of 114 West 86th Street, the sought-after prewar apartment asset featuring a stalking horse bid from Bernstein Real Estate.

Originally hailing from Israel, Ms. Avital, meanwhile, served in the Israeli army and speaks fluent Hebrew. A member of the Real Estate Board of New York, the 34-year-old broker has arranged more than 25 deals valued in excess of $650 million since she joined Eastern Consolidated in 2003. As a senior director, she will continue to focus on investor clients that include institutional and private buyers and sellers.

“Aliza and Lipa have distinguished themselves respectively during the past few years by having successfully closed several complex transactions in a recessionary real estate marketplace,” said Ms. Paris. “Both possess the drive, dedication and work ethic necessary to rapidly advance their careers, and we are pleased to recognize their achievements with these promotions.”

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Lipa Lieberman.

Cassidy Turley, the commercial real estate services provider with more than 60 offices nationwide, has hired Bruce Weinberg as an executive managing director.

Mr. Weinberg, a 25-year brokerage veteran who served as first vice president at CBRE and in a similar leadership position at the Ginsberg Organization, will be based out of Cassidy Turley’s New York office, where he will act as a tenant and agency rep. In his career, Mr. Weinberg has represented Mitsui & Company, Brooks Brothers and Bergdorf Goodman, as well as the owners of 380 Madison Avenue, 335 Madison Avenue and 192 Lexington Avenue, among other agency assignments.

“Bruce Weinberg is an exceptional addition to our New York brokerage services team,” said Peter Hennessy, the New York tristate regional president for Cassidy Turley. “As part of our strategic growth plan, Cassidy Turley continues to expand its talent-recruitment efforts of notable leadership, and Mr. Weinberg brings impressive New York market knowledge and strong business acumen to our firm.”

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Bruce Weinberg.

Brown Rudnick, an AMLaw 200 law firm with offices in the United State and Europe, has tapped attorney Mark Fawer to expand its real estate practice in New York City.

Mr. Fawer, the former deputy practice leader in Dickstein Shapiro’s corporate and finance group, will employ his wide range of legal experiences to better compete in the city’s real estate distressed market.

Previously, he has represented real estate developers, funds, real estate investment trusts and investors. He is also versed in financing, recapitalization, single-asset and portfolio sales and originations.

“Mark brings a marquee stable of funds clients to our real estate practice, which will integrate well with our firm’s focus,” said chief executive Joseph Ryan.

“A large and growing portion of Mark’s practice is working with nonbank lenders and others to both resolve their distressed legacy real estate and CMBS assets as well as to take advantage of distressed real estate investment opportunities, all of which will help us better position the firm to successfully compete in the real estate distressed market,” added Mr. Ryan. ”We welcome Mark to the firm.”

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Massey Knakal Realty Services has hired Justin Boruchov as a director of the firm’s capital services division, it was announced last week.

Mr. Boruchov, who comes to Massey Knakal with a financial industry background, most recently worked at Guardhill Financial Corp., where he began as a mortgage banking analyst and assistant to the firm’s chief executive before being promoted to vice president and loan originator at the company. During his six years at the firm, he managed more than $90 million annually in commercial and residential. In his new role, Mr. Boruchov will tap Massey Knakal’s connections with lenders to procure financing in the commercial real estate debt markets for assets throughout the New York metropolitan area. He will focus on the Upper West Side.

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Robert Rizzi.

Holliday Fenoglio Fowler, a commercial real estate and capital markets services provider that operates 20 offices across the country and that is more commonly known as HFF, has hired Robert Rizzi as a managing director at its New York office, it was announced last week.

Mr. Rizzi, who most recently served as a managing partner at Broad Street Advisors, will now focus on equity and joint venture capital as well as investment sales transactions throughout the New York metropolitan area. At Broad Street, which he cofounded in 2000, Mr. Rizzi closed more than $4 billion in sales transactions.

“Rob has a diverse background executing a wide range of investment sales, debt and equity transactions, not only in the New York metropolitan area but on a nationwide basis, and we are looking forward to having him as a member of the team,” said Michael Tepedino, a senior managing director at HFF.

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Cassidy Turley has hired Jones Lang LaSalle’s Theodora Livadiotis as an associate vice president in the real estate services firm’s New York office.

Ms. Livadiotis, who had also worked as a client relationship manager and valuer at Foxtons in the United Kingdom, will work in Cassidy Turley’s Brokerage Division. There, she will be focused in tenant representation and new business development, especially in cultivating new opportunities in the midtown south submarket, the firm said.

“Theodora Livadiotis is an impressive addition to our New York brokerage services team,” said Peter Hennessy, New York Tri-State region president of Cassidy & Turley. “Given her international experience with Foxtons, Inc., and her expertise in tenant representation and negotiation, we’re thrilled to add this young talent to our growing team of New York market experts,” he added.

Ms. Livadiotis had most recently served as an associate in Jones Lang LaSalle’s New York Brokerage group.

During her time at Foxtons, Ms. Livadiotis managed and trained a team of fifteen negotiations servicing more than 70 clients. She also ranked first in the company on a 12-month average out of 118 negotiators in 2007, according to a release.

jsederstrom@observer.com

Aside from Walmart, Nordstrom is the store every retail broker in the city dreams of harpooning and reeling into a new home. One prominent broker familiar with the store, the amount of space it needs and the rents it would probably be willing to pay estimates that the commission for handling its lease would be around $10 million.

But like a leviathan lurking beneath the waves, the department store has offered only fleeting glimpses around the city, most notably at several development sites and a few existing assets with the capacity to accommodate its sprawling footprint.

The scuttlebutt nowadays: Nordstrom is contemplating one of two leases, one at the West Side rail yards with the Related Companies or another at the base of Extell Development’s soaring new residential tower now rising at 157 West 57th Street.

Illustration by Zack Nipper

According to brokers familiar with Nordstrom’s search, the options are emblematic of the dilemma that has kept the retailer bouncing around Manhattan for years. The department store is ideally searching for a roughly 250,000-square-foot box, a commodity so rare in the city that the only major department stores that have it—Macy’s and Saks among a short list of others—are ones that have been established in the city for decades and hence had a chance to address their real estate needs before the market became as expensive and supply-starved as it is now.

The solution, of course, has been for Nordstrom to accept a smaller space with a layout that is atypical for a traditional department store.  Many brokers say the template for this configuration is the Bloomingdale’s on Broadway in Soho, where the retailer had to greatly reduce the size of its store and tailor its clothing line and layout to appeal to the type of shoppers in that neighborhood.

A similar reshuffling of the Nordstrom concept would likely be necessary to bring the chain to Extell’s project, brokers told The Commercial Observer. The attractiveness of the rail yards stems from an assumption that the company could design a building from the ground up to meet all of its specifications.

But the rail yards are considered a new frontier in the city with little retail connecting the site to Midtown, making a deal there a gamble if the neighborhood takes longer than expected to develop into a popular destination for shoppers.

Extell’s development, though perhaps ill fitting for Nordstrom, would place it at the center of Midtown and near the Time Warner Center, a successful high-end retail mall in Columbus Circle that has helped designate the neighborhood as a retail hub.

Nordstrom has been linked to that area before. Last year, developer Stephen Ross bought the mortgage on the office building 3 Columbus Circle with the intent to foreclose on the property, raze it and erect a new tower with Nordstrom in the base. The deal fizzled when Joe Moinian, 3 Columbus’s landlord, held onto the property by recapitalizing the building with SL Green.

The trade-off between location and compatibility has been a conflict for the company for more than five years. Nordstrom almost had a deal to move into an office tower that was to be built by Stephen Ross and Harry Macklowe on the former site of the Drake Hotel at 57th Street and Park Avenue.  A person directly involved in those talks said that lease eventually crumbled because Nordstrom pushed the physical limits of the project, insisting on towering ceiling heights and other amenities.

“They wanted 18-foot ceilings,” the person said. “You could literally do two office floors for every floor that they wanted. They placed themselves out of the game by needing too much.”

The office building at 650 Madison Avenue, not far from the Drake site, has also been a location that Nordstrom has considered. According to brokers, the issues plaguing that property centered around the likelihood that nearby department stores like Saks, Bloomingdale’s, Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman would balk at or even bar its vendors from supplying Nordstrom with the brands that they sell, which would essentially prevent Nordstrom from being competitive.

“None of the existing department stores are going to roll over and give into Nordstrom without a fight,” the broker said, adding that he wasn’t “100 percent certain that they have given up on 650 Madison.”

Perhaps out of necessity, the company has poked around downtown, reportedly checking out an anchor tenancy at the World Financial Center office complex as well as the retail being built at the World Trade Center. Here again, brokers said, Nordstrom has expressed a preference to be in Midtown.

dgeiger@observer.com

Stacey Bendet-Eisner, alice + olivia designer and wife of film producer Eric Eisner, is pregnant with her second child. [Page Six]

There is a giant leather cheeseburger displayed in the Fifth Avenue window of Bergdorf Goodman. [T Magazine blog]

According to Forbes, Michelle Obama is the most powerful woman in the world. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga came in at number seven, Carla Bruni at 35, and Anna Wintour at 56. [Vogue UK]

Front Row at Louis Vuitton yesterday: Daisy Lowe, Alexa Chung and Julia Restoin-Roitfeld. [WWD]

“I think it maybe won’t be so Upper East Side,” Mr. O'Brien told us this morning. “It will be more cosmopolitan.”

Mr. O'Brien will continue to write his column for Italian Vanity Fair and handle style questions as GQ's Style Guy, in addition to some work advertising and branding.

Mr. Gross, who caused a stir with his most recent book Rogues' Gallery: The Secrey History of the Moguls and Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum, told the Post that maybe he didn’t evolve Bergdof's magazine as fast as the company would have liked. "It's their toy, and I'm very grateful they let me play with it," he said.

Does that mean there's pressure on Mr. O'Brien to take the magazine in a new direction?

“I don’t feel any pressure at all – it’s a quarterly magazine. It’s mostly really nice fashion pictures and an interview and some essays,” he said. “I’m just looking at as kind of a fun thing.”

"I love seeing everyone again—it’s kind of a reunion of the clan, everyone comes back together again," said an enthusiastic Linda Fargo, Bergdorf Goodman's fashion director.

"I don’t think anyone’s really down," said the designer Dennis Basso, looking around at the attractive people holding Champagne flutes. (The guests, including Waris Ahluwalia and Interview's Glenn O'Brian, were given yellow pin-on buttons that read Chic Must Go On!) "The tents are packed with shows, there are new people showing. We have 175 more RSVPs than we had last year. That’s very exciting."

After his show on Feb. 17, Mr. Basso plans to travel to Switzerland to do some trunk shows and then, hopefully, take a trip somewhere with "a little bit of the sun," in March.

"In the past four years I have been developing ready-to-wear, so each year my ready-to-wear evolves further and further," Mr. Basso said of his upcoming collection. "This year I think you’re going to see a lot of evening wear and a lot of day wear that complements the furs and things that can be worn alone and or with fur."

Designer Elise Overland is showing early this year—her presentation is scheduled for Valentine's Day. But last night Ms. Overland seemed rather relaxed as she greeted friends and sat through the entire dinner.

"I’m glad I’m showing at the beginning of the week because then I can go to other people’s shows," she told the Daily Transom. "I hate to say that my show is a presentation because that has such a feeling of stagnant models standing on boxes. It’s more of an event. It will be three mini shows and the lights and the music will keep changing, so it will be a whole experience. And of course, a full open bar."

Mr. Overland said her collection always gets pulled together very last minute.

"What always happens is I get these last moment panics," she said. "Last season I just threw a skirt over the head of a model, like, 'Ooh! This is just like a turtleneck jacket!' And of course it was something that everyone wanted to buy and I had to say, 'I’m so sorry, it’s just a skirt!'"

Nearby, Ms. Fargo was still air-kissing her way through the crowded room. Was that a printed scheduled peering out of her black leather purse?

"How does that look to you?" she asked pulling a plastic-sleeve-encased, color-coded sheet of paper that seemed to have every hourly slot of the next week occupied. "And you know what, though? Every day when we reprint it, we take the day before off so that it looks like less and less. It's my technique."

Ms. Fargo admitted that there was a specific reason for her giddy mood that evening.

"Already today, we’ve snagged—well, I’m not going to tell you who or what—but we’ve already snagged someone very, very young, someone we’re very excited about," she said. "That kind of thing always creates a lot of energy. So we’re all emailing each other and getting jazzed up."

With such a busy schedule, we wondered whether Ms. Fargo, who's done the Fashion Week rounds more than a few times in her career, felt pressure to look elegant every day.

"You know, that’s the one thing I think I’ve become more relaxed about," she said. "I’ve become a little bit more uniform. It’s textures of black—matte to shiny and leathers and satin and fur. It’s simple and I have my red lipstick I carry in bag so that when it becomes nighttime I’ve got the thing that transforms me from day to night."

And what did Ms. Fargo think of the front row occupants who showcase over-the-top Fashion Week wardrobes?

"I love it. Because they are really subscribing to fashion," she said. "I wouldn’t want everyone to get into a uniform like me. You need people who really have the passion for fashion."

It was a Saturday night, and he was checking out the scene in the bar’s “back room,” which was, well, a room in the back. More later.

At a little after 2 a.m., the little room was packed. So was the bar. So was the dance floor.

Before Sept. 15, the day the economy was sort of officially declared dunzo, the bar’s location on Avenue B might have recommended itself to a trendy, starkly furnished Asian-fusion bar-resto for investment bankers with a little imagination or Queer Eye on permanent TiVo.

But walking in to the Hose was like walking into a time warp: an East Village gay bar from the last recession. Drinks were sloshing across the bar at breakneck speed; and there was nudity! And scattered smoking! (Though on one recent visit, a patron lighting a cigarette in the back room was told to put it out. “That’s so not sexy,” the bartender scolded.)

“A bunch of us noticed the same thing when we got together on Monday,” said Brian Moylan, the editor of Next Magazine, a gay nightlife guide in New York. “We came in, and we’re like, ‘I went to blah-blah-blah and everything was packed! And my colleague is like, ‘Oh my God! I went to so-and-so and it was packed! And we put it together. Everyone is fucking going out. It’s January—or February now! And the weather is cold. It’s not a time when clubs are full. And people are standing in lines in the cold! That’ll kill your party quicker than anything.”

“There’s something definitely happening out there,” he continued.

Meanwhile Mr. Cogan was continuing his proclamation.

“I’ll give up nothing!” he said. “You know what’s going to cure the world? It’s people going about their daily business!”

“It’s crazy here!” said Sean Bumgarner, a 34-year-old magazine art director, who is one of the creative talents behind Spank, a xeroxed gay art ’zine (remember those?) that was playing host to the night’s revelry. “We’re definitely in a downturn, and everyone is out.”

Outside these walls, all you hear about is the sagging economy and stimulus packages. Inside, things were … stimulated!

“Wait, is that guy naked?” asked Mark Damien, a 44-year-old writer, whose jaw dropped to the floor when he confirmed his first impression. “Uh, I guess things have loosened up a bit.”

The naked man was named Tony. When asked for two names, he offered, “Naked Tony.”

So, Tony, is the gay scene getting its edge back?

“There are pockets of it,” the 36-year-old murmured.

FORMIKA’S CABINET

Over the past few months, while the straight party scene has been left for dead, gay nights and venues look like they are surviving, with new ones sprouting up everywhere. And, in some cases, like this night at the Hose, they really are Events (not vodka promotions!) with Themes! There is buzz! Costumes! Sleaze! There is planning, for a whole week before, aimed at getting into the right place at the perfect time of the night.

“Given the news about the economy that came out of the late summer and fall, when we were in November, I was saying that all of us have to hope for a mild winter,” said Bob Pontarelli, the longtime co-owner of Chelsea gay bar Barracuda and of the very gay-friendly Elmo restaurant on Seventh Avenue. “I was anticipating a perfect storm of cold weather and the economy. And then we had a worse winter than we’ve had in five years. So it’s been very, very, very cold and add to that the recession. But you know what? We haven’t been affected by a percentage point. In some places, we’re doing better. What I was worried about actually hasn’t happened, and it hasn’t affected us.”

According to some of his patrons, the downturn has, if anything, redirected their budgets to Going Out.

“I mean, we’ll skip going out to dinner and go out for drinks instead now,” said Christian, a 27-year-old in fashion PR, to his 27-year-old friend Jon at Barracuda on Friday night.

They both agreed, emphatically, that giving up on their night on the Crawl, whether it be on Eighth Avenue or Avenue A, was not an option.

Michael Formika Jones has been promoting gay-themed parties and nightclub evenings for 18 years in New York, but has found himself without much to do over the last three years.

“Oh I’m loving the recession!” he said. “I’m jumping on this recession bandwagon. I haven’t done a big party. Period. In three years.”

But in the next eight weeks, he’s booked three big events. One of them is at 55 Gansevoort, a two-floor restaurant and a loft apartment above it, as well as a basement bar. It’s always been one of those straight, bottle-service type clubs on weekends before.

“Buh-bye to that!” Mr. Jones chirped. “No more $15 drinks!”

He’ll be opening it up for a Saturday party.

“My take on all of this is after the crackdown with the Giuliani era, it affected the way nightlife was run. A lot of venues had to take the bridge-and-tunnel tourist dollar on Saturday night,” he said. “Now in recession big venues are losing weekend business, so they’re opening up their weekend business to promoters for stuff that wasn’t open to the gays before.”

“Hey, remember, a recession is a gay man’s vacation.”

BREAKFAST AT BERGDORF’S

“The bar scene hasn’t been affected at all,” said Andrew Suarez, a 25-year-old waiter and Marymount student whom we found shopping at Bergdorf Goodman Men’s on Monday afternoon who was telling us about his weekend of drinking in Hell’s Kitchen. “I was just partying this weekend for my birthday? And it was absolutely, completely, you-couldn’t-walk-through-it packed.”

Nor, he said, have he or his friends stopped shopping.

“I definitely still have to shop” he said. “It’s got to be done. We can’t let it affect the way we live. I’m a shopper, and most of my gay friends are.”

“I haven’t bought a full-priced piece of merchandise in the last two months because there are so many sales,” said trim 28-year-old Ken Gillett, who was shopping at Bloomingdale’s on Monday afternoon, where we heard a hyped-up remix of Madonna’s “Give it 2 Me” blasting over the store’s speakers. “I’ve actually been shopping more, I think!”

“It’s a better time to shop,” said John Traynor, a 42-year-old human relations recruiter who lives on the Upper West Side. “You might as well buy stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to buy.”

And the sales are everywhere: 40 percent off a John Varvatos white button-down listed at $225; 50 percent off a black Polo sports coat for $1,195; 40 percent off a Marc by Marc Jacobs $198 blue V-neck sweater; 40 percent off a $395 Michael Kors zip-up turtleneck sweater. And for the investment-minded, deep discounts on the coveted embroidered and individually numbered Vilebrequin seashell swim trunks at Barneys!

At the Bergdorf Goodman Men’s store on Fifth Avenue, sales associates in the building said the second floor, which is the Wall Street man’s floor of choice—full of trousers and suits and ties—has been a ghost town since the recession began. Meanwhile, the building’s third floor, which features labels like Alexander McQueen and Thom Browne—a salesman described the floor as being “owned” by the gays—has been bustling the same as ever.

“I just spent $2,000, but I’d like to keep that to once a month now,” said Paul Vinci, a 43-year-old insurance man from Chelsea who was shopping for himself and his partner. “It used to be $10,000 a month, so we’ve scaled back.”

Items included in his shopping spree: two black beaded bracelets for $750; a Jil Sander sweater; a Dolce & Gabanna sweater; a pair of slacks; and shoes.

RECESSIONOMICS FOR GAYS

The day Lehman Brothers fell, the downtown-demimonde nightlife promoter Chi Chi Valenti, the genius behind such New York legends as Night of a Thousand Stevies and Click+Drag, wrote a note to her message board.

“If there’s one part of this week’s economic implosion that sure smells like a silver lining from here, it is the prospect of we New Yorkers finally getting a few of our clubs and downtown streets back,” she wrote. “Some of New York’s most enduring clubs have been born in dark financial times indeed, from the Mudd Club during New York City’s near-bankrupcy [sic] to our own Jackie 60 during the LAST Bush Presidency/Recession. High commercial rents were among the prime villains that drove creative clubs and nights virtually OUT of Manhattan in the last five years, and hopefully a poorer city government will no longer have the resources to spend on venue harassment. Throw in almost certain Cabaret Law reform, and a sense of impending doom. Can a new Golden Age in clubs be far behind?”

During better times, Michael Formika Jones said, “they’ll fine you for everything. Booty on the bar. Having candles lit. Being overcapacity by 10 people. Not having paper towels behind the bars. If you’re a busy gay club, you’re getting fined for every little thing so should shut you down. But they’ve got other things to worry about. This is good times for us!”

We checked in with John D’Emilio, professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and author of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, to see if Ms. Valenti might be proven right.

“In the ’70s, for the first time in New York, investing in gay businesses such as a bar or a disco or a bathhouse could actually be a profitable and an attractive investment for gay men because they’re not dealing with either the police or organized crime,” he said. “In New York, there were more gay bars opening and gay bathhouses and the disco scene develops by ’73 or ’74. The city was in economic crisis, but gay male society was thriving.”

And in Chicago and San Francisco, he’s studied surges in gay venues and drag performances during the real Great Depression. So, now?

“I’d say it’s intriguing, but I don’t know if you can draw a big conclusion about it.”

But outside of the strict historiographical constraints observed by Mr. D’Emilio, other parts of academe were giving us a little more love.

“During a recession, there’s a greater emphasis on tangibility,” said Richard Goldstein, a pop culture professor at Hunter and the former executive editor at The Village Voice. “When there’s money in the economy, you’ll take more chances and you’ll invest in things that are speculative. But everyone speculated! That’s why the banks crashed.”

To Mr. Goldstein, profiles on singles Web sites like Manhunt are a form of Internet speculation—that is, it’s virtual, it’s risky, you can’t really ever size up if that picture is really what that guy looks like. You know, like E-Trade, with the emphasis on trade.

“Now, there’s a need for things you can touch and see in front of you and whose value you gauge with your eyes and, you know, through the vibe one person gives to another which is physical, which you can’t get when it’s virtual,” he continued. “There have been too many thrills in the last decade, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the style of cruising is less virtual and more tangible.”

So, off the Internet and into the bars?

On Saturday night, a bit after midnight, two boys were testing out this theory at Cake Shop, a cafe on Ludlow Street that converts its basement into a gay punk party named Queers, Beers and Rears once a month. The two boys temporarily broke off a make-out session in order to chat.

“I think I go out more now!” said 24-year-old Josh Dull, who was wearing a Ghostbusters II trucker hat, a tight T-shirt and red suspenders fastened to skinny jeans. “I grew up poor, and this doesn’t bother me. Now everyone feels how I’ve felt my entire life.”

Around this time, the people running the door at Cake Shop wouldn’t allow any more people in—the basement had reached capacity. Near the bathroom, 24-year-old Max Steele, a hipster with a mop of red curly hair who was stripped down to nothing but a pair of black briefs, was waiting in an impossible line.

“Gays love a recession because we hate the capitalist economy that’s found in the hetero-normative patriarchy anyways,” said the young man, a law-firm drone by day and a performer and go-go dancer by night. “I say burn the motherfucker down! Right? Fuck Prop 8! Who gives a fuck? We should burn down Wall Street and take over New York.”

He took a sobering breath.

“Gays are the only people with dispensable money—dispensable income or whatever?” he said, telling us he was a Sarah Lawrence grad. “Well, not for me personally.”

So we wondered what he was doing out.

“I’m like $60,000 in debt from school,” he said. “I’m fucked anyway.”

jkoblin@observer.com

Additional reporting by Joe Pompeo