Handlebar and all, Axl Rose preaches the rock gospel. (Paul Bruinooge/ PatrickMcMullan)

In celebration of the long desired end of Fashion Week, DeLeon Tequila and Nur Khan hosted what would be the last of their fabled Electric Sessions last night at the Hiro Ballroom (which, for the record, is still open) with Guns n’ Roses.

The Observer plays the waiting game.

• Doors at 9 p.m., we pop in around 10:30 hoping to dodge most of the wait for what was rumored to be an 11 p.m. start time. Seems like a decent idea, right?
• 11:15 hits and we bump into a few friends who had just left the temporary palatial penthouse home of Axl Rose at The SoHo Grand Hotel: “Yeah man, we were just over there and literally 10 minutes ago they ordered a ton of room service.” This did not bode well for a packed house hungry for high school rock.
• We spot a glowing Sienna Miller holding court with boyfriend and baby daddy Tom Sturridge, and can’t help but think that dude should lock it down.
• Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis host an impeccably attractive table in the slightly grungy Hiro.
• Even Jared Leto seemed a bit confused as to where the rock band was hiding.
• Checking in with Tyler Winklevoss. We both immediately realize how bratty we feel when we grumble about waiting around for a free GnR show.
• Wanting to get the real school, we shoot Nur a text, who is quick to inform The Observer that Axl is in fact slated to go on at 12:15, and relief washes over us like an awesome wave.

Damon and a homeless dude people were freaking out about. (Paul Bruinooge/ PatrickMcMullan)

A bit more mulling about, and we see Nur take the stage.

• “Yo, shit, that’s Nur dude! They’re totally about to come on!” remarks a hyper observant party-goer.
• In the corner of our eye we spot Justin Timberlake and Matt Damon stopping to strike a pose in front of the camera. Both card-carrying members of the way-more-famous-than-you club.
• Ok, wait. Something’s happening – the lights are dimming, cigarettes ritualistically lighting up, the slow rolling “unnnghhhhhhhhhh” of a bass guitar being flicked on.
• There he is. Axl Rose himself. Handlebar moustache in full effect: “How are you tonight, fucktards!?!” he asks politely before launching into his first song, ‘You’re Crazy.’
• We notice a tweet from a colleague a few hordes of people away: “Holy shit, Axl Rose still has it.” And he did, in fact, still have it.
• Warm up out of the way, Axl takes the microphone to his lips, stares deep into each and everyone’s soul, and posits the question: “Do you know where you are?” We were in the jungle, baby.

Gary Oldman. (Julie Cunnah Photography)

As we quietly chanted a self-affirming (however desperate) "you can do this" to ourselves while rocking back and forth in the fetal position, The Observer's phone lit up with a surprise last minute invite to something a little off the beaten path: A two-hour reserved-seating Q&A session with screen legend Gary Oldman. The invite washed over us like an awesome wave.

First stop: Lincoln Center's Walter Reed Theater

• Being fans of The Fifth Element is an understatement. Being in awe of Gary Oldman's career is an even greater understatement.
• Mr. Oldman was whispered to be in an undisclosed location somewhere at Lincoln center having his photo taken on what photographers John Reuter and Myrna Suarez dubbed "The Largest Polaroid In The World." We caught up with them as they approached the theater.
• As we cozy our way into the packed house, the screen lights up with scenes from Oldman's career: Blood gushing from the mouth as Sid Vicious, revolver discharging wildly in The Professional, a tattered Sirius Black in Harry Potter, the menacing intergalactic arms dealer from The Fifth Element.
• The lights go on, and Mr. Oldman bounds toward the stage, beaming. We are an even bigger fan of him in person.
• Turns out this guy studied the art of mime. Whoa.
• When asked by an intrepid audience member whether he listened to music in preparation of a role, Mr. Oldman snickered, "Of course I do! Music is like pornography, it's immediate, it's a supreme art form."
• A flask is a very important thing to bring to Lincoln Center.

Our sweet tooth for Oldman sated, it was time to get back to business: Nur Khan and Nima Yamini kicked off the Electric Room's concert series.

Abbey Lee Kershaw with Chain. (Balarama Heller Photography)

• The erstwhile "supermodel" Abbey Lee Kershaw's band Our Mountain would be on tap for the evening. Nobody in the room seemed to have any idea what to expect, but there was definitely a bike chain and a trashcan in the band's setup.
• Bombay Sapphire seemed to keep the throng at bay as we waited for what looked to be a freshly bejeweled Abbey and her band to take their place in front of the, er, fireplace.
• Ok. Here we go. Things are happening.
• 17 cameras fixated on Ms. Kershaw, our ears start sending signals to our brains. The signals were mainly, "Uh, what?"
• More than our fair share of shrieking, howling, gyrating and experimental clothing later, it was time for the bike chain to come out. Boy, oh boy...
• Wouldn't you know, this track isn't so bad!
• Nur got the sense as the band slowly descended into a low BPM haze, he very well might lose the crowd. Expert ringleader he is, Mr. Khan makes a quick nod to DJ's Todd Smolar and Mike Nouveau to take evasive action. The band finishes out their set, and we're back to life.
• Keep that gin coming, baby.

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.”

Every ballroom has a backdoor.

The hotel guests at Dream Downtown had suitcases, satchels and children piled up next to the check-in counter, waiting interminably for a chance at a room, and as they did swirls of fashionable men and women speed-walked by without a word or a look—they were headed to the last big event of the week, the after-party for Marc Jacobs and his spring and summer collection. The hotel guests ventured an occasional glace at the well-attired cohort with the mysterious wristbands, striding confidently toward the tucked-away area in the back, but mostly they slouched on pieces of luggage and scratched at purple eyes, unknowing of the scene unfolding out of sight.

They didn’t know that Madonna was around, that Mick Jagger was having a late dinner in a basement lounge, that Lindsay Lohan was bypassing checkpoints set up to prevent her entry.

Since its opening last May, the Dream Downtown has sprouted party spots so fast it’s hard to keep track of them. There is PHD—as in “Penthouse: Dream”—a skyborne glassy atrium with nooks for bottle service and a shrubbery-laden smoker’s deck. And there’s the beach, a sand-and-palm-tree stretch next to the pool. And because it’s not enough to put Malibu in Manhattan, there are two places you won’t find on the otherwise anything-but-inscrutable website: the pint-size, 100-capacity Electric Room and the Gallery at Dream. Mr. Jacobs, who closed this year’s Fashion Week with a Bob Fosse-inspired collection, was hosting the first-ever bash in the gallery space.

If you didn’t have a wristband you couldn’t come in, and a certain former actress couldn’t get one.

“Lindsay rolled in, and we had to tell all the security checkpoints that she’s not allowed into the Marc Jacobs party,” noted an employee working by the front door, as we stood having a cigarette.

“Because of last night?” we asked.

The evening before, Ms. Lohan had thrown a cocktail at a photographer at a party at the Boom Boom Room hosted by V magazine and noisily uprooted her large group—referred to as “The Family,” even if only her mother and brother were related—after a woman nearby stumbled into a table and gashed up her shoulder, bleeding all over the pristine leather couches.

“Yes,” the person at the door said.

Back at the party in the Gallery, Michael Pitt sat with Kim Gordon and Sofia Coppola, and Mr. Jacobs walked around introducing Dakota Fanning, the face of his campaign, to friends. Trays of Champagne whirled around us, and upon finishing one off a girl to our right let out a horrified shriek.

“We made eye contact and I was, I was ... O.M.G.!” the girl said between fluttering breaths.

She had made eye contact with Ms. Lohan, who had somehow slipped into the party undetected, and beelined toward the roped off area in the back.

“Major security scandal,” the person at the door texted The Observer. “Mischa Barton, too. Someone gave her a bracelet.”

It was over soon enough. In came the guards, and a peeved Ms. Lohan stomped out as a rapt crowd lifted iPhones and iPads into the air to grab a picture. Ms. Barton, another starlet not as in demand as she once was, also ducked through the crowd, and then quickly disappeared. Mr. Jacobs, too—he left his own party before nearly all of his guests.

Where did they go? There was word of an after-after-party in one of the hotel’s many, many liquor-stocked appendages. Another gathering would be a valiant attempt to keep the diversion of Fashion Week going just a little longer.

“I was told they got her,” the friend out front texted, when she got word of Ms. Lohan’s exit. “What a mess.”

Soon enough we located the next party. It was in Electric Room, a tiny, subterranean, blue-glowing box with so few couches that everybody is always sitting next to everybody. It had been just over a week since we first stepped into Nur Khan’s brand new Britannia-inspired space, and with five drop-ins since then, it had begun to seem smaller. We made quite a few sightings in that time—Adrien Grenier, Mary-Kate Olsen, Shaun White, Ms. Lohan, Ryan McGinley, the requisite smattering of models, the requisite crew of men who walk the models arm in arm, the others whose visages flash in a strobe light just as they had the night before—and marked them in our note pad, many names popping up again and again, as if the ink had bled through the pages.

A certain name only appeared once. “Clear the tables, clear the tables!” a security guard bellowed suddenly. He was enormous and accompanied by six colleagues, forming a circle. In the center was a wiry man with full lips and a feline gait, a phenomenal power-feline gait. He was small but he walked like a god. He was Mick Jagger, and when he took his seat on a couch, the few dozen men and women in the room were stricken with fear, or awe.

What’s there to say to Mick Jagger? Nothing. To us, his presence alone trumped the entire spectacle that had unfolded all week—the fierce swagger of the runways, the string of late, late nights, the endless celebrity antics, all waved away like a cloud of cigarette smoke by the arrival of the man who, for us, seemed to have invented and destroyed it all long ago.

And he was surrounded by quite the entourage, giving the room almost a salon feel, or maybe a peek at the energy of Mick’s table at Studio 54 a few decades prior. They would have made quite a band, all of them. Directly next to him sat Daphne Guinness and her shock of white hair and shoes like Malaysian skyscrapers. And Courtney Love. And Owen Wilson (bongos?). And Ellen Barkin (tambourine?). And of course Ms. Lohan, who was sitting a bench over from Mr. Jagger—she was in that same seat the night before, when she recognized us as a writer, pointed at our heart and shouted “You!”

We thought to chat with Mr. Jagger, imagined what we might say, but there was to be “no satisfaction.” When Mick and his crew left, we did soon after, heading to the bar at Tom & Jerry’s to meet a friend. The bartender brought over our Budweiser, and pointed to our arm.

“What’s that silly wristband you got on you?” he asked.

nfreeman@observer.com // @nfreeman1234

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.

The basement does have quite the low ceiling.

In the last hours before the Senate passed the agreement to raise the debt ceiling, thus avoiding a crippling loan default, the Transom went to Kenmare—the only hotspot awake at the 3 a.m. dark night of the soul—to talk to a few experts about the potential credit cataclysm.

“We’re not gay,” said a man smoking outside.

No, we said, let’s talk about—“Yes we are gay!” another yelled—the debt ceiling legislation, do you think it’ll get passed tomorrow?

“I just got back to America, wait, what the fuck is going on?” the first man, who also had a mustache, said.

Their female companion, a brunette with a neat bob cut, chimed in.

“The debt crisis, it’s … you know what? This is a little rough. We’ve been drinking.”

The dance floor would provide more insightful commentary. Paul Sevigny had assumed his perch behind the bar, snug up in front of the liquor bottles, his feet dangling above the ground.

We yelled at him, his words were engulfed in noise. We said hello to Kenmare owner Nur Khan and impresario/restaurateur Angelo Bianchi (once feared for keeping the masses out of the Beatrice). But then, the Ramones came on and no one seemed to want to talk about the potential end of borrowing authority.

“Go for it! I want to see the fuckin’ economy crash,” said a man in a yellow T-shirt once we reached the sidewalk. “I hope it happens but it won’t.”

“Wait, what’s gonna happen?” a girl on his arm asked.

“Oh, we’ll get our credit downgraded and blah blah blah. Who gives a fuck? I don’t work in finance, I work in film, man.”

“I feel like it’s kind of a shitty thing to do, to default on loans,” said another kid outside.

“We’re all in this together man,” he mustered. “Somebody has to do something.”

Riding this glimmer of optimism, we approached a group of tall, very attractive women.

“Oh, I don’t know anything about that, I don’t live here,” one said. “We’re Australian,” she laughed.

“andre est a paris … !” the man said, on Twitter, April 21.

“Je suis a paris!” read another tweet, from May 28.

And then, on June 9: “very hot in N Y … !”

The Transom confirmed his stateside presence on that sweltering Thursday when we ran into him at the Boom Boom Room. Samantha Ronson was on the decks (it’s been noted that Mr. Saraiva is dating the D.J.’s younger sister, Annabelle Dexter-Jones), and the Baron Andre sat windowside with a spread of Standard Hotel fries and Champagne. As the party waned, many of the attendees followed their Cognac buzzes from the meatpacking to Nolita, where, until Le Baron opens, Kenmare will suffice.

We stayed late. Around 4 in the morning the Transom was wedged in a booth next to Ms. Dexter-Jones, in a slipover jersey sweater and tiny hot-pink shorts, as we waited for Mr. Saraiva and Nur Khan, the owner, to finish up talking. Ms. Dexter-Jones happened to mention, not casually, the recent article on her boyfriend that had run last month in BlackBook.

“You know, none of that is true,” the 24-year-old Ms. Dexter-Jones told the Transom. She was referring to the bit that equated the sound of the couple’s shower sex—overheard by the BlackBook editor in question—to “someone strangling a crocodile.”

We never believed that, Annabelle, we said. Never even thought about it.

Then Mr. Saraiva returned to our wing of the booth.

“I don’t know when Le Baron will open,” he told the Transom. “Maybe it will never open!”

We pleaded with him to go ahead with his plans. Then, knowing his transatlantic tendencies, we asked where his travels will take him in the next months.

“Well,” he said, plucking out his English words as if from an ill-stocked, cluttered bag. “I have to be New York, to watch over the construction of Le Baron.”

So it will open!

“I don’t know,” he said. “But when it does, you will know.”

But unlike the other chilly men and women outside Kenmare, The Observer had stepped out for a cigarette, and in three drags’ time we would open the doors, bypass the hangers-on at the trifling second-tier bar and with a nod descend the silver-lined stairwell into the mass of fur and sharp jaw lines below.

We had come up to talk to Ms. Ronney, tall in a puffy jacket, with a knit ski cap barely hiding a shock of blond beneath. She and the rest of the staff have been at Kenmare nearly a year. The opening during last February’s Fashion Week was pretty smash-and-bang. It’s still being decided whether this year’s festivities will end up at Kenmare, but owner Nur Khan says it will be as big as 12 months ago.

“Everyone will wind up there anyway if I happen to have one or not,” he said in a text to The Observer Monday.

Judging by last Saturday, this is no empty boast. Mr. Khan, who owns the bar with Paul Sevigny, arrived with photographer Sante D’Orazio, famed for filling his exhibitions with big pictures of gorgeous women naked and, say, rolling in a blob of silk. It was Mr. D’Orazio’s birthday and the crew took over a back room, a guard in front waiting for the nod from Mr. Khan if someone wanted to enter. We took our French 75—gin and lemon juice shaken, slid into a flute and topped generously with Champagne—to the little exclusive party, and he introduced the others sitting around as “family.”

Then we left that corner room. At Kenmare you move in circles, bending around the center pillars, and it’s like a whirlpool, dizzying at times, with centrifugal force pulling you into one of the adjoining “caverns”—the staff’s official term—that line the right side of the room, and then it spits you out again. The sloped walls and roofs of these caverns operate so that there’s ample protection to get away with, well, anything. And for that reason they are in fact nothing like the church catacombs that they resemble.

We waited until near 4 in the morning, the party at full thrust, to talk to the unwithered smattering of those having too much fun to brave the cold in skinny dresses.

What is it with this place, Kenmare?

“You can be among your friends,” a boy who works in fashion said over the Hot Chip. “A lot of fashion is here, a lot of entertainment is here—a lot of a lot is here. It feels like home.”

His friend, also in fashion, agreed.

“Every time I come here is a fucking blast, man,” said a man who works for something called the Sartorial Collective. “New York is dying, and this is a place that’s still alive.”

“It’s French,” said a boy in from France.

“I run into the people I know,” said a woman who was liberal with the eyeliner. “It’s all the same circle, the same places we’re going, like, from Boom Boom to Kenmare.”

“I like Boom Boom better,” said her friend.

“It’s artistic, underground,” said a girl standing in a booth with DJ Todd Smolar.

And then when it got sufficiently late, with the Rolling Stones still blasting and that whiplash-inducing floor still flinging dancing bodies from one cavern to the next, or some other force herding the kids to the anything-goes bathroom stalls made up like black mirror boxes, we retrieved our coats and my friend picked up his records (he’d been by Dope Jams earlier that day, and when he checked the vinyl, no one gave pause).

The last girl we talked to sat perched on a ledge in the tunnel that leads to the dug-out coat check. She was thin and clutching her knees and claimed to be a native New Yorker.

“I’ve had my days when I liked it, and I’ve had my days when I hated it,” she said of Kenmare. “I hated the pretentiousness. A lot of people come here to act like they’re cool kids because they got in—‘Omigod, I got in, look at me, I’m a cool kid.’ But it’s so fake. I’m used to the real kids.”

Then she paused to take a drink under that carved-out window that peers into one of the caverns, full of people doing whatever they wanted to do.

“But not always,” she added. “There are times when I come here, and it seems really cool.”

nfreeman@observer.com

We took to the raised sitting area above the bar — a welcome reprieve from the madness of the mob below — where we found ourselves surrounded by tubs of complimentary Red Bull. But we could only keep out of the fray for so long, and when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who were hosted by frequent partner DeLeon tequila, took the stage we braved the heart of the now-muggy stage area. The show was unsurprisingly spectacular, highlighted by Nick Zinner's guitar acrobatics during a spirited bashing-through of the classic "Maps." 

Afterwards, we started talking to Kelly Osbourne about the artwork on the walls. She particularly liked one of Johnny Depp getting into a car — "Soooo hot" — and of course this led to a conversation about getting behind the wheel naked. Is it something you'd ever do, Kelly?

"Hell to the fucking no!" she told us. "I don't have that kind of confidence."

The night ended for us around 3:00 a.m., with chamomile fan Waris Ahluwalia walking around with a girl on his arm and the remaining kids mouthing the words to New Order's "Age of Consent." Ah, yes — after just four nights here, it already feels like home.

Later that evening, after hopping around the packed Soho streets for Fashion's Night Out, we found ourselves in an even more aggressive mob scene: the line of people desperate to join us at the Pop magazine party at Don Hill's. Dubbed the party of the week before it even happened, the bash at the new venture from nightlife barons Nur Khan and Paul Sevigny attracted the evening's biggest names. As Iggy Pop rocked on the stage, Gwen Stefani sat perched on a ledge cradled by husband Gavin Rossdale; Mary-Kate Olsen stood on a bench to make up for her height; and Nicky Hilton chatted to the woman of the hour, Pop editor in chief Dasha Zhukova, girlfriend of one of the world's richest men, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

Of course, Chloë Sevigny wouldn't miss out. She had on a T-shirt and jean skirt befitting the gritty Don Hill's feel, and told The Observer that her brother's place would be the city's new hot spot. "It's what it was like at the Beatrice, and it's probably been missing since the Beatrice," she said. (What she didn't say, of course, was that the Beatrice Inn was closed in 2008 for overcrowding and "inadequate means of egress"--problems that hopefully will not plague Don Hills.)

On Saturday night, at the after-party for Charlotte Ronson's spring collection, Ms. Ronson, wearing a fitted, frilly blue dress, told us she was feeling good after her show, and said the rest of her week will be filled with "meetings--hopefully positive ones!" Her twin sister, Samantha, explained the personal significance of her final musical selection from the show, Lisa Loeb's "Stay": "That was an ode to one of my sister's and my best friends from when we were kids. She died a few years ago, and that was like our song together." Rashida Jones, on the other hand, wasn't feeling chatty, but she was clearly thirsty, as we witnessed her pour a hefty amount of vodka straight from the bottle into a empty coconut-water carton.

More action at Alexander Wang's party. The young designer topped his gas station soiree from last year's Fashion Week with a full carnival, built from scratch in a parking lot at 18th Street and 10th Avenue. Dree Hemingway, Terry Richardson and Agyness Deyn all turned up for the pulled pork sandwiches and skee ball.

The wildly enthusiastic Mr. Wang talked to us for a few moments, but didn't have time to stay put. "Will you walk with me to the bar?" he said as we dodged the cameras and flashbulbs. "We need alcohol! We need alcohol! Sorry!"

We asked Mr. Wang, who had on a black T-shirt, black shorts and black sneakers, about the theme for his over-the-top party. "The carnival is the new performance. Everyone can be a performer now."

We asked him to elaborate. "I just want people to have fun," he said. "Just get drunk, have fun, have a good time."

Our fashion crawl came to a close on Sunday night at the Tommy Hilfiger 25th Anniversary after-party, where we got a little literary with Mad Men's Christina Hendricks. "I just finished The Way the Crow Flies, which I absolutely loved," she said. Next on her night stand is One Hundred Years of Solitude, which she's started three times but never made it past the first chapter. "I know it's going to be worth it if I just go for it. ... I know the payoff will be there," Ms. Hendricks said. We also ran into Kelly Osbourne, who told us she was looking forward to hearing the evening's musical performers, the Strokes, play for the first time in New York since 2006. "Before there was the Strokes, I really liked *NSYNC and, like, really big pop music. And then the Strokes came out and they are what made me change my taste, I guess you could say. In my generation, I think that happened with a lot of people."

Asked what his favorite moment of the party was, Mr. Hilfiger said, "Having all of my friends there, including Jennifer Lopez, Bradley Cooper, Rebecca Romijn, Jason Lewis, Lenny Kravitz, to celebrate with me, and the Strokes' performance. It was one of the best nights of my life."

editorial@observer.com