Ms. Wolkoff in her Midtown office. (Emily Anne Epstein)

In the 31st-floor offices of SWW Creative, the walls are beige, the carpet is gray and the cabinets are standard-issue wood-grain. There’s no Eames armchair, no runway stills splashed across the walls, not even a lucite coffee table with a copy of Grace Coddington’s memoir. There’s not a flower in sight.

While fashion professionals are known to obsess over the color of their pens, SWW Creative’s offices are about as splashy as an insurance agency’s. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff is not concerned.

Ms. Wolkoff, who orchestrated Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week’s Lincoln Center expansion, isn’t in it for Smythson notebooks or a pair of Céline fur sandals. She is an executor first and a fashionist somewhere further down the line, finding more satisfaction in a spreadsheet than an Avedon. Though she’s a front-row fixture and a special-occasion catwalker, she doesn’t scour the runways for her own closet. Instead, Ms. Wolkoff, who stands a statuesque 6-foot-1, prefers the simplicity of a uniform—Ralph Lauren is her everyday.

“The outside world thinks that Fashion Week is so amazing and so glamorous and so over-the-top,” said Ms. Wolkoff, who has been overseeing the twice-annual event since 2009. “Is it important to have celebrities there? Great. Is it important to have the athletes in the front row? Super. But the truth is, this is a business.”

And yet, by acknowledging as much—and reimagining Fashion Week as populist and business-friendly—she has rankled fashion’s artistes, who feel that recent changes have given the event a noticeable odor of commerce. Under Ms. Wolkoff’s tenure, corporate sponsorships have taken center stage in a lobby concourse that more closely resembles the Javits Center than the heart of couture. Also, for the first time, there are events for the public, in the form of fashion-art collaborations with Lincoln Center’s performance groups. It’s gone from a tent to a circus.

“Lincoln Center is amazing—they have amazing facilities, they have everything you could possibly need,” said Stefan Golangco, the communications director of progressive menswear line Asher Levine. “But our brand is also about being underground and being off-schedule and being a little bit ... maybe less commercial. [Showing at Lincoln Center] doesn’t feel unique to your brand, especially if you’re a small label. You kind of get lost in the shuffle.”

While Fashion Week may be a few days longer now and may feel bigger (the tents certainly are), the number of shows in its main hub hasn’t grown materially since Ms. Wolkoff entered the mix. The total number of designers showing at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week itself has remained pretty much the same—the big explosion has been predominantly offsite. In 2007, when Fashion Week was still at Bryant Park, 90 designers showed at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week while 165 showed offsite. Last year, 91 designers showed at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Lincoln Center and 231 showed offsite, according to data from the Fashion Calendar, a fashion event scheduler, and IMG.

(Emily Anne Epstein)

Many of the designers opting to show offsite are looking for a particular sense of place; a mythology that matches their brand. “I always dreamed about being a part of Bryant Park, and when Fashion Week lost its location, I was really bummed about it. I lived for that moment,” said Nary Manivong, an emerging designer who has chosen to show his work offsite and off-schedule.

Of course, nobody can keep everyone happy, and Ms. Wolkoff is aware of that. She’s not interested in reclaiming defectors. She is interested in making sure the event goes off seamlessly.

“I stay in control of every little thing,” said the maestro of Post-it notes, corkboards and carefully stacked folders. “I want to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. If I could delegate a little better, I would be better off.”

She is well-known for indifference to the theatrics so often associated with fashion, calling herself an industry “Switzerland.” “There’s no drama,” Elle’s creative director, Joe Zee, told The Observer. “Whatever is happening behind the scenes, everything still feels very put together.”

Every detail is per Ms. Wolkoff’s design, said associates, one of whom likened her preparedness to that of a Boy Scout. “I don’t feel it’s appropriate to put my hands up in the air and say, ‘too bad,’ you know, or ‘It’s not my job,’” Ms. Wolkoff said. “There were times when I’d be sweeping the floor before an event if the floor was dirty. I wouldn’t wait for someone to come into the room and do it themselves.”

Ms. Wolkoff is known in the industry as “General Winston”—a name bestowed on her by Anna Wintour, a career-long mentor who tapped her to become Lincoln Center’s director of fashion when Fashion Week was pushed out of Bryant Park by an ice-skating rink. Ms. Wolkoff, who had previously headed the Vogue-hosted Costume Institute Benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is credited with helping elevate it from an East Coast event to a star-studded couture pageant.

She is one of the many New York fashion success stories who owe their rise in large part to Ms. Wintour’s mentorship. Ms. Wolkoff was a client services manager at Sotheby’s when Ms. Wintour hired her to do PR for Vogue, despite her lack of fashion experience. Raised amid acres of farmland in the Catskill Mountains, the black-belt preferred working on her jump kick to reading magazines. “Fashion was not something that I knew about,” she said. “It just wasn’t really particularly interesting.”

But what Ms. Wolkoff did have was an intensely disciplined work ethic, which was solidified playing power forward for Fordham University’s Division 1 basketball team. The diligence of waking up for predawn practice drills developed a personal drive that became impossible to turn off. (To this day, she calibrates her schedule to the minute, opting to have a manicurist come in to do her nails at her desk so she doesn’t have to cut into family or work time.)

(Emily Anne Epstein)

And she looks the part. Described by an associate as “the first person you see when you walk into a room,” Ms. Wolkoff came equipped with Vogue-worthy family associations: her stepfather is Bruce Winston, jeweler Harry Winston’s son.

“I didn’t have quite the understanding of the difference between Vogue, Elle, Harper’s and the rest of the world,” Ms. Wolkoff said, recalling her interview at the magazine. She was hired the same day. “I knew Anna Wintour was the editor in chief of Vogue, I just didn’t understand what it meant to wait around to meet with Anna Wintour. I didn’t lie that I read Vogue every day or that I grew up loving fashion, but I did know how to roll up my sleeves and do whatever it took to learn it.”

In the cosa nostra of fashion, Ms. Wintour’s blessing is likened to being “made” by a mafia boss. The wheels are slicked, critics are silenced and success is imminent. Accordingly, Ms. Wolkoff’s ascent at Vogue was rapid; she jumped from PR manager to special events manager to the head of the Costume Institute Benefit.

“The Costume Institute Benefit became my baby. It was something that I lived, breathed, day and night,” she said. “It was all about excellence. It was all about never taking ‘no’ for an answer from anyone in order to achieve the ultimate goal.”

At Lincoln Center, Ms. Wolkoff expanded on the foundations laid by Fern Mallis, the founder of Fashion Week, whose efforts put American designers on the global fashion map.

“We wanted to compete with Paris and Milan and other world capitals. There was very limited international business coming to New York, because we weren’t organized,” Ms. Mallis told The Observer. One of the initiatives she pursued was corporate sponsorships that would help offset the costs of the runway productions.

(Emily Anne Epstein)

Ms. Wolkoff nurtured those relationships, creating events that were open to the public rather than only buyers and editors, prying open the former fashion fortress and transforming it into a sprawling campus. “My goal was to put fashion on par with all the other cultural institutions that were at Lincoln Center,” Ms. Wolkoff said. “I always wanted to somehow democratize Fashion Week in a way that hadn’t been done before. I wanted to create a place where editors, models and designers could rub elbows with the everyday person.”

Some designers have balked at the new venue and the new vision, opting to take their shows elsewhere. Marquee New York brands like Proenza Schouler, Marc Jacobs and Alexander Wang have all decided to sidestep Lincoln Center. “The feedback I’ve gotten is that it’s way more commercial out there. But at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about,” Ms. Mallis said. “I certainly miss Bryant Park.”

Mr. Zee says that Ms. Wolkoff’s innovations have “matured” the biannual event. A self-proclaimed “fashion dinosaur,” he has been to shows at every fashion week, since long before they ever found a home at Bryant Park.

“I kind of love Lincoln Center,” he said. “She’s really made it into a true event. It’s not about going to a fashion show and leaving—she makes it into a true experience. It’s like growing up: Bryant Park was the teenage years, and now you grow up and you migrate uptown. It’s bigger, more glamorous ... it’s more what it is.”

At the end of the day, the models need to walk, the buyers need to shop, the editors need to see the season’s best and the designers need to sell their handiwork. It’s a trade show.

“If you look at who’s involved in fashion, there’s glamour, and smoke and mirrors, but it is a true business,” Vanessa von Bismarck, co-founder of fashion PR firm BPCM, told The Observer. “[Ms. Wolkoff] is someone with a business mind and [she] knows how the business works.”

(Mario Zucca)

In June of last year, Ms. Wolkoff stepped down as Lincoln Center’s director of fashion to take charge of her own company, SWW Creative. She still oversees the event, but now IMG and Lincoln Center are her clients, along with a number of other companies, including the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Penske Media Corporation and Kapture, an iPhone photo-sharing app.

Setting up shop privately enabled Ms. Wolkoff to dictate her own terms, which include being able to pick her three kids up from school and get home for dinner with her husband, real estate developer David Wolkoff. “I didn’t have children not to be with them,” she said. And even though her daughter Alexi has made the occasional runway appearance, she’s not an aspiring Tavi. “My children do not know the difference between Tar-jay and any other designer brand,” Ms. Wolkoff said proudly.

After bedtime, she typically dives back into work. “I go to sleep once I’ve put my third child to sleep, and I will wake up around 1 o’clock in the morning and work for a couple of hours, and then go back to bed,” she said, pointing to the 1,777 emails that had accrued in the past hour.

Once left alone, Ms. Wolkoff settled back into her seat and began riffling through the stacks of paper spread across her desk. She checked her iPhone and called out to her assistant. It was clear: she may be the first person you see when you enter a room, but she’s also the last to leave.

eepstein@observer.com

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

This trend of high-brow and low-burp can be dated back to last November, when South Park featured a tiny, tattooed Marc Jacobs as "Muscle Man Marc." Check out all the cartoons in our slideshow and consider how lucky Ms. Chanel was to not have been born as a Demospongiae Porifera.

Coddington.

Grace Coddington, the creative director of Vogue who won hearts in the documentary The September Issue and stole the limelight from Anna Wintour, has sold her memoir to Susan Kamil at Random House for a rumored $1.2 million. The book will reportedly be co-written with Michael Roberts, a Vogue writer. Ms. Coddington was represented by the literary agent Elyse Cheney.

The news is contrary to a recent assertion by Page Six that Ms. Coddington had "put the project aside" and indicates that rumors that it was Ms. Wintour who was shopping a memoir were misplaced.

Random House had no comment, but Ms. Coddington reportedly began planning this book back in 2010. Back then, WWD reported that it would cover "her modeling days in Sixties London, the car accident that changed her career path and her ascendancy through fashion’s ranks as a stylist and editor at British Vogue and, later, its American counterpart."

Band of Outsiders' designer Scott Sternberg has always shunned runway shows, opting instead for theatrically staged happening type displays of the next season's designs, so for his inaugural show the designer created a unique catwalk experience in the concrete floored event space on West 37th Street. There were, in effect, three runways bordered by three back to back rows of aluminum benches better suited to second string high school football players than Linda Fargo. This ensured that almost everyone got a front row seat, though demanded a more rigorous workout for models who were forced to snake through the three aisles.

Donald Glover arrived to find his seat, and cookie, next to Anna Wintour. However minutes later the Community star was asked to scoot down the bench when Tavi Gevinson, wearing a leopard print coat and a Cosby sweater that looked like a box of crayons exploded, was escorted to the seat directly next to Ms. Wintour. Ms. Gevinson put her hand up and smiled meekly at Ms. Wintour before being seated and then when smoothing her skirt once seated Ms. Wintour turned to the 15 year-old and said with non-commital obligation and little joy, "Hi, how are you? Nice to see you again."

Across the aisle Stefano Tonchi munched on his cookie pensively as Aziz Ansari, seated next to Mr. Tonchi, gesticulated while talking to his neighbor. Kanye West, Simon Doonan and Kid Cudi were also in attendance though not sighted by The Observer.

Several seats down from Ms. Wintour and Ms. Gevinson, Derek Blasberg and architect Rafael Cardenas, seated next to each other, were back to back with Kirsten Dunst, a longtime Band of Outsiders fan and the new face of the brand, and Opening Ceremony's dynamic duo Humberto Leon and Carol Lim. Mr. Blasberg swiveled his torso to chat with Ms. Lim and Mr. Leon confiding his appepite for a certain men's leopard print cardigan which is part of Chloe Sevigny's most recent collection for Opening Ceremony. The lights finally dimmed and Mr. Blasberg had to swivel back around. The show began, and quite a show it was.

-Chloe Malle

It was your average celebrity-packed night at the Waverly Inn, and inside Graydon Carter's West Village restaurant sat fellow member of the Conde Nast cognoscenti, Vogue's Grace Coddington. We know from our runway-side interactions with Team Anna that Grace can be quite the intimidating person to encounter, perhaps the scariest of the editrix's entourage. But if you're Piers Morgan, and you're sitting in Graydon's restaurant just tables away, it's only customary to go and introduce yourself. "Vogue did a big feature on me in October," Piers must have thought to himself. "Grace will be happy to meet me."

But, as a witness told Page Six, things didn't go quite as smooth as the soon-to-be CNN yapper could have imagined. He approached her, gushed about how she was his idol -- "I loved your documentary!" -- and got nothing from Grace but a cold blank stare.

"You had me in your magazine, remember?" Piers Morgan pleaded.

Another stare.

"Then she remembered," Morgan told Page Six. "Or pretended to."

Graydon! Don't you give out seating charts for these situations? C'mon, you don't want discord at the Waverly.

But Piers' night was saved by a guy who's pretty experienced at saving foreign dignitaries: Kiefer Sutherland, in full-on "24" mode.

"Kiefer Sutherland came over and said he'd come on the show," Morgan said. "He gave me the Jack Bauer line, 'Go kill it, Piers.' "

Click for Scandal Report: With Natalie and Mila in Town, New York Goes Swan-Crazy

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

So when The Observer saw Anna Wintour and her cohorts — André Leon Talley and Grace Coddington, of course — we stopped by for some U.S. Open repartee with Anna, an avowed Roger Federer fan and close friend of the tennis great. 

Anna, we said leaning in, do you have a moment for a question?

"Maybe."

Success! We asked her about Novak Djokovic's stunning upset of her buddy Roger. She seemed sort of recovered!

"There will always be another tennis match," she told us. 

With Federer out, who is Ms. Wintour rooting for in the final? 

"It's rained out."

But, we said, there will be a men's final. It is going to happen.

"It's rained out," she repeated, playing coy.

Nadal? 

"It's rained out."

That's all she would give us. Is the Vogue editor too ashamed to admit she's rooting for someone so Na-Dull? If she knew that Lil' Wayne was pulling for the Spaniard, perhaps she would be swayed. 

The cavalcade of models — including familiar face Agyness Deyn — all had white paint heaped on their hair, and walked in airy looks that came in waves according to color. 

"The colors were so beautiful," Mr. McGinley told The Observer after the show. He agreed with us about the sci-fi feel of some of the clothes, which was set up by the foreboding balloon structure. "There were some pieces that kind of reminded me of Blade Runner that I liked."

But perhaps the accentuating detail that made the strongest impression was the music: a churning series of start-stop blippy and booming dub that would attack over and over again. Memorable, to be sure, though polarizing may be the better way to describe it. So we talked to M.I.A., sonic provocateur par excellence, about what she thought of the soundtrack.

"It just seemed like a Die Antwoord CD on repeat, yeah, with a bit of dubstep thrown in," Maya told us in her thick English accent. "But it was interesting. It's definitely juxtaposed with what the style of the clothing was. It was a good contradiction, I thought."

Suffice it to say that Alexander Wang makes sure the music at his show — much like the show itself — brings something different to the table. 

So, if Stefano is the new Anna, who will be the Grace Coddington of the film? Will it be Lynn Hirschberg? More importantly, will anyone be the W equivalent of the tennis playing, Louis Vuitton-wearing André Leon Talley?

New York spoke to Cutler about the project:

"We think it's going to be a big animated feature film about Grace Coddington's feline family," he revealed. Would Coddington provide voice-over? "We'll see what happens," he replied. "That's not the plan."

Coddington appeared last month on Martha Stewart's "first-ever Cat Show," where she discussed "what makes cats great pets."