Andy Cohen (Getty Images)

El Museo del Barrio is New York’s leading Latino museum and cultural institution. Its yearly gala is a who’s who of Spanish-speaking society figures, thanks to gala chairs like Valentin Hernández, Fe Fendi, Marie Unanue and Valentino D. Carlotti. This year’s black-tie 20th-anniversary bash honors Raúl Esparza, the Cuban-American stage actor, singer and Broadway star, with the Excellence in the Arts Award. Dinner music is by the staid Bob Hardwick Sound, and then DJ Honey Redmond pumps up the volume so guests can cha cha cha.

Bravo’s funnyman Andy Cohen and fashion plate Allison Sarofim, along with the Hetrick-Martin Institute, present the Hero Fund, a scholarship founded by Hunter Hill in honor of the late author and filmmaker Perry Moore (who wrote the book Hero). The host committee includes many of Mr. Moore’s friends, like Paper’s Mickey Boardman and Kim Hastreiter, Maura Egan, Julianne Moore, Oberon Sinclair and Mary Alice Stephenson. There will also be a special performance by Angela McClusky.

El Museo del Barrio gala, Cipriani 42nd Street, 110 East 42nd Street, (212) 557-5088, cocktails 7pm, dinner 8pm, tickets from $1,250. Hero Fund fund-raiser, 60 Thompson Hotel, 60 Thompson Street, (212) 431-0400, 8-10pm, $100.

Emily Mortimer.

Love Heals, which benefits The Alison Gertz Foundation for AIDS Education, is having a very fancy gala honoring Dana Auslander, Richard E. Farley and style siren Mary Alice Stephenson, with honorary celebrity chairs Alan Cumming, Julianna Margulies and Emily Mortimer. The committee is equally chichi: Dini von Mueffling, jeweler Alexis Bittar, Chris Burch, Ann Caruso, Armani’s Graziano de Boni, Rory Kennedy, supermodel and The Face TV star Karolina Kurkova, designer Rachel Roy, club queen Amy Sacco and Page Six editor Emily Smith—so refrain from hurling your drink, Real Housewives-style. The benefit includes dinner, drinks and a live auction at power player hub The Four Seasons. Friend tickets are $750, but if you really want to impress the crowd, go for a “Sweetheart Sponsor” table of 10 for $50,000, which gets your name on the step and repeat, meaning you’ll be a brand, all for a great cause.

The Four Seasons Restaurant, 99 East 52nd Street, (212) 529-7935, cocktails 6:30pm, dinner 7:30pm.

Euan Rellie.

Brit with wit Euan Rellie, Thom Browne bespoke-suit devotee and one of Manhattan’s most-wanted socials, is throwing a dinner for Paul Trible and Paul Watson (we just call then Paul Squared), the founders of Ledbury—a men’s brand with a focus on Savile Row-cut shirts that is based in an 1866 tobacco warehouse in Virginia. We’ll take a stogie with our slim-fit pink gingham shirt, please. Cocktails start at 7 p.m. and dinner is at 8 p.m. upstairs at Tribeca’s teensy hipster hangout Tiny’s, where stylish jock Sean Avery is a co-owner. Expect fashion’s elite like Gilt Man’s Tyler Thoreson, star stylist Mary Alice Stephenson and Mr. Rellie’s chic wife Lucy Sykes Rellie.

Tiny’s, 135 Broadway, cocktails 7pm, dinner 8pm, by invitation only.

As we near the end of Fashion Week, we’ve invited some friends and experts to join us in a lunchtime conversation about the origins  and current state of college fashion. We will be using the discussion tool Branch, and the conversation will begin in this post at noon.

Joining us:

Richard E. Press, columnist at ivy-style.com, former CEO of J. Press, consultant at the FIT Museum
Amy Levin, founder/creative director of CollegeFashionista.com
Lawrence Schlossman, editor at Complex and co-writer of the forthcoming book Fuck Yeah Menswear
Scott Lipps, president of model agency One Management
Mary Alice Stephenson, style and beauty expert
Peter Davis, editor-in-chief of Scene magazine

http://branch.com/b/ivy-style-and-the-state-of-college-fashion

Joining us:
Peter Davis, editor-in-chief of Scene magazine
Scott Lipps, president of model agency One Management
Mary Alice Stephenson, style and beauty expert
Kelly Cutrone, of the fashion PR world and America's Next Top Model judge

So check it out here! Our lunchtime Branch conversation on Fashion Week Etiquette.

http://branch.com/b/fashion-week-etiquette

New York fashion week has finally come to a close. Amen! For those less-fortunate editors and fashion authorities (or perhaps we are the lucky ones) that have not jetted off to London or Milan, we finally get a moment to recover.

In retrospect, we relished the young talents of Prabal Gurung and Jason Wu. The Observer will never forget the spectacle and grandeur of Alexander Wang—or the impeccable quality of Simon Spurr’s suiting. With such a busy social schedule and so many shows, it’s hard to remember all the garments we evaluated with a careful eye.

We’re still a smidgen bitter about a few mishaps with Oscar de la Renta and PR Consulting… but we forgive easily… Oscar might possibly have been the best women’s collection in town! Best of luck obtaining the financial means to swing the $15,000 price tag...

One thing we do recall in our hazy fatigue, is the undeniable fact that fur is back. Yes, yes it never really left! But honestly!

"It's so glamorous and luxe!" proclaimed Joan Rivers about fur, backstage at Dennis Basso.

Perhaps Ms. Rivers is in the right. Has there ever been so much mink, chinchilla, fox, raccoon, coyote, goat, rabbit, astrakhan, Mongolian lamb, ermine and sable shown in New York? Probably… but let’s peruse The Oberserver’s favorites— shall we?

Images: GETTY and Patrick McMullan.

Outfit by Holy Tee, Skybox by American Express, posture by years of bad habits

I used to think Fashion Week was fun. This was years ago, when “the tents” referred to actual tents. Back in the day (it must have been, oh, 2008) my friends and I would try to talk our way into Tommy and Oscar shows and blog about the experience. It was surprising how often our feigned frustration—“What do you mean I’m not on the list? Please call Eric and let him know that we’re here”—would get us in.

I’m still not sure if there was an Eric, but somehow he always came through.

Now, older and wiser and having recently embarked on a journalistic mission to embed myself among the social elite, I have actual invites (22, to be exact), a fresh Anna bob and a mission, should I choose to accept it, to treat Fashion Week not like a joke, but like a job.

Which is a lot harder than it looks.

I began my odyssey by tagging along with The Observer’s resident fashion expert, Ben Le Hay, to a pair of showrooms—Archetype on Broadway and European designer mecca Agency V—where, get this, people just give you clothes. For free! All you have to do is pick out which ones you want, and hopefully get your picture taken wearing them.

The clothes on offer weren’t exactly my style, which is to say they were stylish, like the asymmetrical tiered gray miniskirt and fitted long- sleeve shirt from Holy Tee that made me look like a slutty ice skater. (It turned out to be a good choice, or so our fashion mentor, Mary Alice Stephenson, tweeted after we ran into each other at Doo.Ri.)

There were paint-splashed yoga pants that tapered into trousers from 5 Preview, and dresses that looked like muumuus made from fabric that felt like the scratchy cover of grandma’s couch.

As for accessories, writer Paula Froelich, formerly of Page Six, generously donated a giant Prada bag and a Chanel clutch to the cause. The upshot of which was that I was too scared to eat, drink or carry anything on my person for the entire week, lest I spill food down my front or have a pen leak in a bag worth more than my life.

Mr. Le Hay had made me a Xeroxed cheat sheet featuring pictures of every prominent socialite, designer and super-flack whom I might reasonably encounter. And though I tried to commit the faces to memory, I frequently found myself wondering, Was that Poppy DeLevigne, or a buyer from Neimans?

Sometimes I just took a guess.

“Oh, my god, Eric!” I exclaimed, sauntering over to a guy I could swear I recognized from the look book. “How are you?”

“I’m great, how are you girl?”

If Derek Blasberg noticed that (a) we had never met and (b) I didn’t know his name, he was polite enough not to show it. (This, I realized, was my trump card: All these other fancy people are clearly too well-mannered to acknowledge my own ill-manneredness.)

“Oh you know … this,” I said, gesturing toward the runway. “Sooo crazy. I can’t wait for the party tonight.” I was hoping the prompt would be enough for Mr. Blasberg to reveal the secret location of whatever party might be happening.

“Oh, yeah, maybe I’ll see you there!” he said with a smile, turning his attention back to Alexa Chung, who was being accosted by a woman asking her to sign a petition for the Model Alliance.

“We’re fighting for models’ rights,” the woman explained.

Ms. Chung looked confused. “I think I’d need to know a little more information before I sign this,” she said. “I’ve never heard of you before.”

Earlier, I got a quick lesson from former Vogue associate publisher Lottie Oakley on how the seating at the shows was arranged. We were looking down from the American Express Skybox, which she hosted all week. “Section A is your American editors, designers and magazine people,” she pointed out. “Across from them are the Europeans. See, there’s Amy Astley from Teen Vogue. She’s the blonde with the bangs.” I nodded, although everyone in Section A was blonde with bangs.

The middle section, Ms. Oakley told me, was for the buyers, while the chairs set up on the actual runway—literally, in the middle of the runway—were reserved for celebrities and fashion bloggers.

The SkyBox was also where Lucky editor Brandon Holley imparted some secret wisdom about how to snag a good seat: “Be a blogger! I was just sitting with the editors from Glamour,” she said. “And they had a seat reserved in the front row that everyone wanted. But they weren’t giving it up. they told us it belonged to a boy named Bryan. BryanBoy? He was a fashion blogger; he helped me use Twitter.”

We met Kelly Cutrone of People’s Revolution at Mara Hoffman’s show. (Ms. Cutrone had thoughtfully seated us in the front row, next to the designer’s father, Monte. Nice gentleman, and he didn’t bat an eye when he realized his daughter had designed the condoms included in her gift bags.)

When I let it slip to the author and TV fixture (who’s replacing Andre Leon Talley on the forthcoming season of America’s Next Top Model) that I was determined to make myself over, during the course of this column, into an “It” girl, she chided, “Don’t try to be an ‘It’ girl, be a ‘You’ girl.” She added that Fashion Week would be useless to me as a social hunting ground, “because no one really ‘meets’ during shows.” She suggested I work on “cultivating a persona” instead. “You can get noticed and build up some buzz just by being a little mysterious.”

The best way to be truly mysterious, of course, is to occupy a completely undeserved seat in the front row. Snagging one isn’t that hard, Ms. Cutrone told me: one need merely be overly gracious to those apple-cheeked interns wearing headsets, because they’ll be the ones frantically trying to fill up the gaps when showtime starts and someone important hasn’t arrived.

“Oh, if you need help filling A-1-13,” I cooed during Geoffery Mac’s show at Runway Exit, “I’d love to help you out.”

More challenging was gaining access to the VIP suites and parties. The former I managed via a combination of old-Drew shamelessness and new-Drew business cards. The Mercedes-Benz lounge featured skin-care stations, plush sofas and free Champagne. It was also the only place—outside the $10 sandwich corral next to the blogging pen—where I came across a few snacks that weren’t in bar form.

I spent half of Fashion Week in that lounge, where I met New York Giants wide receiver Ramses Barden and struck up a conversation with Emma Snowdon-Jones about the importance of delivering a sincere compliment. “You always want to say something nice about what someone is wearing,” the Dominican-born socialite told me. “But people can tell in your tone of voice if you are picking up on an item just to have something to say.”

As for the after-parties, I skipped most of them, because a girl has to eat and sleep and also pack all her belongings because she’s in the process of moving. Sometimes, a girl even has to try to put together a bed frame while subsisting on a diet of Fiber One bars, and ends up knocking over two lamps and shattering glass everywhere.

My Fashion Week burnout happened five days into the process. While sitting at Diane von Furstenberg’s show fiddling with a long necklace generously lent by Lia Sophia, I think: I’ve finally made it. I’m at one of the most high-profile shows at Fashion Week, surrounded by the likes of Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter and Carine Roitfeld. I’m not just at Fashion Week … I’m fashionable!

That’s when I looked down to check the chain on my necklace and realized that, yes, the black shirt that looked fine in my lampless bedroom that morning had revealed itself to be 100 percent transparent. Fortunately, the circling photographers were too bent on getting a shot of Anderson Cooper to notice.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful to be a nobody in my life.

dgrant@observer.com

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.

Wu…) It was a scene! KCD danced around St. John's Center with their iPads ensuring that everyone was seated appropriately. Bryan Boy that means row two for you! Next to Princess Keltner de Valle… Starlets were refreshingly missing this season, but we had plenty of downtown fixtures and editor-in-chiefs to satiate our chic palate: Amy Fine Collins, Brad Goreski (irresistibly cute if he hadn't cried on that dreadful Rachel Zoe show… get some balls darlin'!), model Coco Rocha, Gagosian's babe Shala Monroque, LRP, Poppy, a ravishing Joanna Cole, Bazaar's Glenda Bailey, and Lincoln Center powerhouse Stephanie Winston Wilkoff. W magazine's Italiani, Tonchi and Battaglia, beamed inexplicably… Do you have Edward Enninful locked in a closet? We have yet to see him!

Alas, Michelle Obama remained in D.C. (or elsewhere…) If Americans weren't so cheap, she could feel free to grace our peacock parade and bestow admiration on the designers she rightfully adores, like Bruni-Sarkozy at Dior. Humph!

Now for the clothes: Thundering music commenced, followed by a hiss of smoke-- we love drama-- before Wu's fortress-like red doors opened to his Forbidden City. Chinese glamour, Marlene Dietrich (à la Peter Som! She lives on!), and the Qing Dynasty received inspirational credit. Wu's feminine warriors marched intensely through the fog in such exquisitely constructed and decadent couture that we actually noticed the clothes! Militant green quilted fox-embellished wool vests, black/gold Qing brocade, and an amazing cascading red Shantung fan lace drape dress, were highlights.

"I thought this Wu Warrior was very glamoress--sexy, edgy… There was a masculine side to the collection, which was interesting for Jason, because usually Jason is girly and feminine. I though there was a lot of power. Red is a power color. Maybe he was inspired by Lady Obama wearing his clothes! I am women! I am powerful! I am sexy. I think it was a very sellable collection…The fur on the arm is gorgeous!" commented sweetie Mary Alice Stephenson. So true...

Doo.Ri's Fashion Week show (Getty Images)

"Who are all these people?" We whispered to the woman sitting next to me as we scanned the front row in the giant Eyebeam studio on the West Side Highway. We were waiting for the Doo.Ri show to begin.
"They're bloggers, mostly," whispered our seatmate, Kristin Booker, who was herself a blogger for Fashion Style Beauty. She pointed out that most of the editors of the fashion magazines were placed far away from each other in different sections of the front, "to promote competition."

Meanwhile, photographers snapped pictures of smiling young people with blue hair who we didn't recognize, or teenage women who looked like they hadn't showered in a week. These were the new Fashion Week celebrities.
"This street style blogger thing is almost at its crescendo," Ms. Booker told us. "It'll reach a tipping point when you see a blogger on the front page of a magazine." We told her that The New York Observer had in fact, put BryanBoy on the cover of this week's issue.

"No, I mean like Lucky, or a huge magazine," she replied. "Actually, it will probably be Lucky." We agreed, especially since Lucky's editor Brandon Holley had been introduced to none other than BryanBoy yesterday.

(Note: These photos are not from the show itself. But imagine they are!)