Byrdie Bell at Charlotte Ronson's winter 2012/13 runway show. (Owen Hoffmann for Patrick McMullan)

You might catch her sipping a cocktail during Miami Art Basel or front row at Charlotte Ronson, but the girl works too! Miss Bell has been featured in several, well-received independent films—and her modeling career is nothing to scoff at either! That svelte physique and those jutting collar bones have been snapped in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, L'Official and V Magazine. The Observer just had to know what this blonde bombshell was up to for fashion week:

You’re surrounded by stylists, editors, celebs, publicists—the works! Who has your dream job this week?
The show DJs and music curators. Working with a designer to put together a seventeen-minute set that enhances the theme and atmosphere of the collection, seems like it would be a lot of fun!

Does it get exhausting? Do you have to bail on the fun sometimes?The energy surrounding fashion week is infectious and exciting. It can feel overwhelming, so I try not to look at it as an entire week. I make sure to take days off and do nothing fashion-related and avoid doing something at night if I have done something involved during the day.

What are your five must-have fashion week commodities?
SmartWater, sunglasses, Lumene 5 minute SOS Cream, my BlackBerry and ballet flats.

Now you’re still modeling, will you be working at all this week?
Everything in the industry seems to shut down in order to focus on the shows. I had a shoot scheduled for Thursday and one pending, but the first has been rescheduled and other postponed due to fashion week craziness.

I hear rumors about some fun nightlife plans? What will be the best after-party?
My agency ONE Management always throws the best parties. Tonight they are hosting one at Electric Room with Vs. magazine that I’m excited for.

If you could co-host a fantasy fashion week event, what would it be?
I’ve had dreams about designing a collection with the late Michael Jackson. There are so many creative avenues outside of music that I wish we had gotten to see him explore. Obviously he’d have to do a private show at the after party!

Forty-Five! That was the approximate tardiness of Prabal Gurung's runway show at the Gehry-designed IAC building. The Observer, having misread our schedule, arrived on time (that's a first). We even had a few moments to kiss-kiss Mary Alice Stephenson and compliment her Naeem Khan. Who to blame? Surely not front-of-house PR behemoth KCD, they have their shit together more than a Swiss bank.  Zoe Saldana, colorfully festooned in a phenomenal liquid Prabal paint suit took her seat relatively on time. Lily Rabe sat quietly en attente. Buyers are never late. Cross off Anna Wintour, style.com's Nicole Phelps, and Paper's Kim Hastrieter… hell they've never been late! Best-dressed contender, Kate Lanphear of ELLE magazine arrived with time to glare vacantly at her smart phone.

We couldn't tell why Michelle Harper was just shy of tears. The passing of H.R.H. Whitney Houston occurred after this fashion frenzy... perhaps she was suffering from a panic attack or mal au ventre in row one? Frankly not our business.

In the meantime, we decided to get social. Seated betwixt team WWD, we gave it a go gingerly... The Observer had the good fortunate to sit behind the poised Executive Editor, Bridget Foley. "Will you be going to Milan and Paris for the shows?" she sang. Mais oui! Paris! We chirped.  KCD founder and gentlemen, Ed Filipowski whisked over and assured the WWDs that the show would start soon! Sincere apologies. Foley's response was so graceful many churlish divas should have taken note.

Thankfully, he need not apologize, because the clothes made up for all the delay.

Patent leather and black black fur by day; add white tulle and gold embellishments for night. Signature Gurung color schemes and patterns, reminiscent of an iridescent oil spill, were wondrous. Brocade, techno fabrics, appliqué, volants: all there! Look number 28-- a hand-embroidered, black tulle gown with with Fabergé cutwork on Joan Smalls drew gasps. If it's edge, yet feminine elegance that starlets and statuesque first ladies want… look no further!

The clock had barely struck 1pm and our Burberry-clad feet hurt like hell! By the grace of God VPL was just across the way. Whew!

Later, the chaos and disarray at Dream Hotel's Electric Room (ROOM! Try complex) for Mr. Gurung's after party was indescribable. Praise Syndicate's Anuschka Senge, who ushered The Observer past the riff-raff at the door. Inside, we spotted Candice Swanepoel and Rose McGowan, whilst slurping up delicious Belevdere cocktails and dancing to DJ Mia Moretti's fab beats.

Illo: Andrew DeGraff

On one of the last busy evenings of Fashion Week, the suppertime clique that had turned up for the AnOther magazine dinner at the Fat Radish on Orchard was making the trek to the after-party. A breeze had split the night’s air. Most of the gang opted to walk, despite—or due to?—the hash brownies with which many, including The Observer, had topped off the meal.

Well, not everyone: Daphne Guinness, in heels that lifted her 10 feet toward God, cabbed it.

The gang sauntered over to the Bowery and, upon taking a left, entered meandering streets that looped like a child’s doodles—endless ovals of turns, each leading to an alleyway, a familiar passage, a dead end. We were looking for Apotheke. Finding it without a smart phone? Forget it, Nate. It’s Chinatown.

But we did have one, and so made our way to the elbow of Doyers and the swanky mixological wonder surrounded by kids, some on skateboards, many feigning confusion at not being on the list.

Inside, one found the same gridlock at the bar, but something was off. Everyone who had been at the dinner, Dasha Zhukova and Olympia Scarry and AnOther editor Jefferson Hack … where had they gone? Did they skip out for some other bash? What were we missing?

“Should we check out the downstairs?” our friend said out of nowhere, in a whisper.

So that was it. In a few moments we had ducked behind the bar, wedged through a tiny entrance, dodged the hanging pots and pans lining a maze of storage tunnels, and found ourselves in a low-ceilinged but expansive lair. This was Pulqueria—a forbidden city of nightlife fever dreams. One of those hidden places you stumble upon one night and forever after wonder where exactly it was, or whether it existed at all. To judge by the faces of those who had made it inside, the joy, the hardly hidden smugness at their discovery, it might have well been El Dorado.

Pulqueria is just the most recent night spot to upgrade its original offerings with a tiny, “hush-hush” venue-within-a-venue. With space in Manhattan running out and community boards in a prudish state of mind, well, you might as well dig down on the space you’ve got rather than try to expand outward.

As if we didn’t have enough nighttime anxieties, what with all of those velvet ropes and stony faced doormen. At any given time, at any bar in the city, there may be somewhere directly beneath you—or above?—where people are having a better time than you. How can you enjoy yourself when the real party is likely elsewhere? Look left, then right—is something missing? Start asking around about the other place, you know, that place. You know, the place.

Each sneaky spot’s got its own variation on the theme, but the defining characteristics tend to stay the same. These places are dark. The ceilings are low and the drinks—sorry, the mixologist-curated creations—are priced sky-high. True, none of them are secret for long, thanks to Twitter, streetsmart blogs and, ahem, New York newspapers. But we all know that’s not the point. They feel secret once you’re there, and that’s often enough to seal the deal.

Pulqueria joins an impressive roster of places in Manhattan peddling booze on the down low. There’s PDT, on St. Marks Place, which made a bit of a splash when it opened inside the Crif Dogs weiner shop in 2007. The charm there comes from an entry ritual worthy of Clark Kent: you slide into the red phone booth in the corner of the greasy spoon, pick up the receiver, and ask if there’s a table available. Which brings up a nice irony: if you see a phone booth in Manhattan these days, you’ll have a better chance of finding a drink than a dial tone.

The contrast between boardwalk grub and high-end gin is key here, and other joints are determined to milk the same clash. The Back Room—a bit of a misnomer, given that it actually has no “front”—lies at the end of an alley and past a sign that reads “Lower East Side Toy Co.” Those seeking the boîte Second Floor on Clinton must brave the galloping herd of tequila fiends who frequent the decidedly rowdier Barramundi. Then, there are the periodical pop-ups: Simonez Wolf’s celebrated Madame Wong’s party has taken up semipermanent residence at Jobee and, now, Red Egg—anonymous Chinatown eateries by day, celeb-heavy hot spots at night.

Bathtub Gin, a recently opened 1920s-styled watering hole, is accessed through an innocuous-looking place called Stone Street Coffee Company. Walk past the line of French presses (they actually serve coffee!) and push the wall. A red glow spills through the cracks. There is actually a battub inside. “The whole point was people come to have coffee during the day not knowing what’s behind there, and you open the door to a whole new world,” Dave Oz, the manager and owner, told The Observer.

Not that these two-faced venues are anything new. The Prohibition-era speakeasy begat the gay bar back room, and in the disco days, clubgoers sought out small spaces in clubs in which do things in private. Bathrooms always work, of course, but there were other, more comfortable locales, namely dead area behind walls, and P.V.C.-laden industrial corners. Rather than policing every forgotten pocket, the thinking went, why not stick a few bottles of liquor and a bartender down there, sweep up the soot, throw out the warped two-by-fours, and make things official?

For example: the Strategic Tao Group at the Dream Downtown hired Nur Khan to take the storage space beneath the ground floor and whip up a super tiny, super exclusive spot. This became Electric Room, the toast of last month’s Fashion Week, despite the fact that guests have to brave a steep and entirely unglamorous truck ramp that tunnels beneath the building. On its first night serving booze, Adrien Grenier christened the walkway by being the first person to trip.

And deep under Don Hill’s, a now-closed west Soho rock joint Mr. Khan reopened with Paul Sevigny in September 2010, an even tinier place, unknown to most everybody dancing to the Misshapes upstairs. If you got past the security personnel standing conspicuously in a nook by the raised V.I.P. lounge, a rickety staircase would take you to a cement cavern lined occasionally with metal racks. It was a space reserved for bands pre- and postperformance, and also a super exclusive spot for those fed up with the body-on-body scrum of the dance floor.

Venturing beyond that, the truly adventurous enter what appeared to be a mix between a boiler room and Turkish bath—just a box, really, the size of a tiny Manhattan bedroom. The last time The Observer ventured in was just a few weeks before Don Hill’s shut its doors for good, and we chain-smoked as a young man who claimed to be a doctor described the intricacies of open heart surgery. Good times.

Two of the city’s most conventional secret rooms lie directly adjacent to each other at the juncture of Kenmare and Lafayette: Cafe Select and La Esquina. The former’s already small enough that an even more minuscule hidden space within would seem unnecessary, but have no doubt. Make a right at the boiler room, and there you are.

Then there’s the backroom at La Esquina, hidden beneath a taco joint that came to the block already dinged up, as if it had been there for years.

“It’s almost the hardest place to work,” said a former employee, “because people think they’ve already made it in, and then you have to turn them away.”

The first night of Electric Room.

Electric Room, Nur Khan's tiny nook of a space beneath the new porthole-clad Meatpacking District monolith that is the Dream Downtown, is accessed through a storage ramp, the steel innards of the hotel exposed overhead. Like most ramps this one is big, as it needs to fit massive trucks, but the overflow from the ONE Management party still managed to fill it side-to-side, and soon the crowd spilled into the street. Electric Room was hosting the after party and, yes, the line is long, but surely the reported 100-person capacity was a slight exaggeration, no?

That number turned out to be pretty accurate. When The Observer pushed back the sheets of velvet on the door and entered Electric Room we found ourselves in a square windowless parlor just slightly bigger than a barber shop, soft blues washing over the walls. There were not more than two dozen people present, and at its peak the place could not have surpassed that magic number of one hundred by more than a few.

It's a nice space, lit in a way that even a Banksy-ish painting of Sid Vicious didn't distract anyone too much. The same can be said for a blue neon sign, which spelled "all things evil" in nimble cursive. It will undoubtedly get more crowded on other nights, but the couches are well-placed for close conversation, and the high ceiling offers some suggestion of class. The low-ceilinged Kenmare and Don Hills -- past places from Mr. Khan -- were more involved in suggesting crass.

Both approaches to a night out have their uses, though. To have a place as intimate as Electric Room has clear advantages -- The Observer stood next to Adrien Grenier as he chatted up Courtney Love,  for instance, before watching as Mr. Grenier engaged in conversation with every model in a five-foot radius (there were many).

Toward the end of the night we ourselves sat next to Ms. Love, who had just finished playing a somewhat impromptu set at Hiro Ballroom. The singer recognized us from a recent interview regarding the talked-about pictures of her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.

"I was so proud of Hedi [Slimane] for taking the pictures down," Ms. Love said. "She's 19, you know?"

Then Ms. Love looked up at the bevy of ONE models dancing with each other, all tall and skinny, standing in a nook where there was a painting -- another Banksy homage -- of a young couple locked in a kiss.

"Frances just wanted people to think she's pretty," she said.

Dream Downtown.

Somewhere beneath the streets of the Meatpacking District, near the new Dream Downtown hotel, there's a new tiny space that will attract more attention than any other Fashion Week after party locale. It's called Electric Room. And with a capacity supposedly maxed at 100 people, well, good luck getting in.

Designed by Nur Khan, the nightlife king who teamed with Paul Sevigny for the erstwhile Iggy Pop-hosting hotspot Don Hill's and Nolita's Kenmare, Electric Room will make its awaited debut tonight, following the party at Hiro Ballroom for ONE Management, the modeling firm. It's their 10th birthday. Mazel!

Also, Courtney Love will perform, or is expected to. We can't believe it's already been a year since she took the stage at Don Hill's -- very, very late. She covered "Bad Romance," though!

OK, so what do we know about this Electric Room? Like we said, it's small. Thus, a tight door can be expected. Other details? We're short on them for now.

But we'll keep you posted -- it looks like we'll be there for much of Fashion Week.