But while we didn't see the Fly Girl, we did catch Whitney Port, who, like Ms. Hoffman, is repped by Kelly Cutrone of People's Revolution. We also played out our America's Next Top Model bingo game when Nigel Barker and J. Alexander took their seats. Naturally, blogger/stylist June Ambrose was photographed an excessive amount, because as we are quickly learning, she is the most important person of Fashion Week. Louise Roe was the second most photographed.

Here is a secret that you won't get from The Daily: the best seat in the house isn't next to the celebs or editors: it's next to the family members. We admit to feeling initially out of place when Ms. Hoffman's sister asked her father quietly who we were—the only non-relation in the section—but Mr. Hoffman was more than gracious about whatever mixup had us placed with the designer's family from Buffalo.

While waiting for the show to begin--which featured flowery, asymmetrical tribal-pattern dresses and cloaks (yes, Native American and African-inspired), Mr. Hoffman regaled us with stories of Mara's youth: "I knew (she'd be a designer) from the time she was five. She'd show up at the top of the staircase in these outfits she had cut up and put together herself."

"But she wasn't sewing yet," said Mr. Hoffman's girlfriend of five years. "Right? She wasn't cutting anything up and sewing it at five."

We busied ourselves in our goodie bag whole various cousins and fashion family friends came over to kiss the ring.

We pulled out a small packet of what at first we thought was gum, but what were in actuality condoms from Planned Parenthood, designed by Mara Hoffman.

"What are those?" Mr. Hoffman's girlfriend asked us.

"Um." We replied.

"Oh gosh, condoms?" Mr. Hoffman had apparently looked into his own bag. It must have been an odd moment: the show hadn't even started and the designer had already given her father a preview of her latest line of prophylactic design wear.

"Well," Mr. Hoffman laughed. "I won't be needing these."

Daaaaads.

Ms. Cutrone

Tyra's got a new sidekick.

Kelly Cutrone will take over as the newest judge on The CW's America's Next Top Model, taking the place of André Leon Talley, the former Vogue editor-at-large.

The Observer received confirmation during a chat with the People's Revolution head honcho herself.

"I'm really excited," Ms. Cutrone told The Observer via speakerphone from her apartment. "I'll be in contact with the audience that I had from MTV. A lot of those young women who watch The Hills and The City also watch America's Next Top Model.  I think it's gonna be be fun."

The offer was a last-minute deal, she told The Observer, that left her without any time to meet with producers for discussion. ANTM will be her first priority, of course, but Ms. Cutrone will still be a featured guest on Dr. Phil. Also, we hear that her new project--a teens in the 'burbs show called Normal Gets You Nowhere--has been greenlit by MTV. Plus, she's got her fashion line, Electric Love Army, that's backed by Christopher Burch. And all the New York events she throws! Kelly, you've got a busy few months ahead of you.

Ms. Cutrone is no stranger to the small screen. The public relations queen first appeared on The Hills, as Lauren Conrad's boss, and carried that role over to MTV spinoff The City. Most recently, she starred in and produced Bravo's Kell On Earth, which focused on the inner workings of People's Revolution.

And will Lauren Conrad's boss be best buds with Tyra Banks?

"I haven't seen Tyra in a long time but she's incredible," Ms. Cutrone said. "She's made an amazing name for herself."

The seventeenth cycle of America's Next Top Model is currently on air.

Anna Sui has designed a T-shirt that says "Save the Garment District" with e-mails and names of New York officials on the back to raise awareness about the struggle of companies to stay in business in the neighborhood. [Vogue UK]

Patrick Robinson has brought khaki back to The Gap. [NY Times]

Gemma Ward is not retiring to pursue a full-time acting career as was recently reported. According to Ms. Ward herself, she's only 20, for God's sake! [The Cut]

Steve and Barry's, which carries lines by Sarah Jessica Parker, Venus Williams and Amanda Bynes, was bought by Bay Harbour Management for $168 million. [WWD]

Jane Birkin will join guest designers like Carine Roitfeld, Kirsten Dunst and Sofia Coppola for luxury knitwear line Lutz & Patmos. [Nylon]

Peter Som loves the way you wear his clothes. [Vogue UK]

DKNY is working with food rescue program City Harvest to paint the company's trucks in the label's fall 2008 colors of apple green, teal, purple and cobalt. The label will also design a special necklace that will be featured in its stores, the proceeds from which will go to the nonprofit. [WWD]

The viewers of MTV’s wildly popular kind-of reality show The Hills, which will begin airing its fourth season in August, first glimpsed fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone in season one, when series star Lauren Conrad was dispatched by her boss at Teen Vogue to procure 11th-hour tickets to a fashion show being produced by Ms. Cutrone’s company, People’s Revolution.

“They said, ‘Don’t make it hard, but don’t make it easy,’” recalled Ms. Cutrone, 42, on a recent evening, sipping cabernet and working her way through a three-tiered antipasti platter at the Soho Grand (where, as the hotel’s former publicist, she eats for free).

Ms. Conrad, who appears easily flummoxed and favors headbands, found Ms. Cutrone backstage at the fashion show, but couldn’t name the Vogue editors who would be using the extra tickets. “You’re going to need to move a lot quicker than this if you’re going to work in the fashion business,” Ms. Cutrone snapped on camera.

“Which I meant, because she was slow,” recalled the older woman, back at the Soho Grand munching prosciutto.

Ms. Cutrone was an immediate hit with the show’s producers and fans, and became a regular midway through the third season when Whitney Port, Ms. Conrad’s coworker at Teen Vogue, left the magazine to work for the L.A. office of People’s Revolution. In recent weeks, Ms. Port has been in New York filming the show’s fourth season, which will feature Ms. Cutrone even more prominently. Ms. Cutrone calls herself the series’ “antagonist.”

She also functions as a kind of antidote to the series’ dreamy plasticity, portraying fashion as an actual job where one works, rather than an excuse to rustle through racks of clothes while discussing your roommate issues. And, bitchy or not, as a powerful female whose authority is never questioned or mocked, she is a near-anomaly on television. She boasts a what-the-fuck attitude that betrays punk-rockish roots. Any scene in with her in it is more interesting: it’s actual drama.

In person, Ms. Cutrone looked more polished and rested than she ever has on The Hills. She wore Prada heels and head-to-toe black. She has jet-black hair and wears no visible makeup atop her startlingly pale skin, which gives her the look of Wednesday Addams 30 years later. On The Hills, she is drawn and demanding, an East Coast Queen of the Night to Ms. Port and Ms. Conrad’s ditzy blond Californian Princesses.

So far, her increasing notoriety has not hurt her business. “Your clients, they don’t want you to be more famous than them,” she said. “But at the same time, they want to have a powerful publicist.” People’s Revolution currently reps 46 clients, including Longchamp, Yigal Azrouel, Vivienne Westwood and Sass & Bide.

Ms. Cutrone is brash both onscreen and off, but The Hills has edited her into a “power bitch,” as she says, focusing on incidents like a public scolding of West Coast People’s Revolution publicist Jessica Trent, who was subsequently fired. (“If you think about Donald Trump on TV, like, ‘You’re fired,’ everybody’s like, ‘Yeah!’” said Ms. Cutrone, disagreeing that her behavior was at all unwarranted. “It’s like, do you understand what the job is?”) But ambivalence about her Hills portrayal is minimal. “I’ve been called [a power bitch] so many times that it’s like an inner-slang situation,” she said. “People are gonna look at you and project onto you what it is they want. Power bitch is a generational thing.

“I think that people hate women,” she added. “And I don’t think they like powerful women, and I think it really goes back to Salem, I really do. I think it really goes back to this concept of, you know, hysterical coming from uterus. …”

Ms. Cutrone leaned forward on the couch, where she was perched before her spread of proteins, rolling up thinly sliced bites of meat and popping them in her mouth between rapid-fire points. She seemed to be trying to outdo each statement with the next.

“I think that people really have to look back to Egypt, and this concept of women being in power is not a new thought. With the advent of religion, you saw the demise of the female in the godhead. In Christianity, Mary gets pregnant on her own, she doesn’t even get fucked.”

PEOPLE'S REVOLUTION EMPLOYS 24 people, most of whom, unsurprisingly, are women in their 20s. The company occupies three floors of a building on Grand Street in Soho, and Ms. Cutrone lives in a spacious loft in the same building with her 6-year-old daughter, Ava, and an Argentinian male model named Demian, whom she met while casting a fashion show in Mexico City and brought back to New York on a visitor’s visa to shoot an ad campaign for a client with the photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Ava’s godmother. Ms. Cutrone later introduced Demian to photographer Bruce Weber’s booker, a friend, and he was soon posing for L’Uomo Vogue and V magazine spreads. (Mr. Weber, auteur of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, is a noted discoverer of international-caliber pectorals.)

Since February, Ms. Cutrone has also housed and schooled a 7-year-old Native-American girl from a reservation in South Dakota, the granddaughter of John Trudell, a Native-American activist and former boyfriend who happened to be dating Angelina Jolie’s mother at the time of her death (Ms. Bertrand left him $100,000 in her will). Ms. Jolie produced a documentary on Mr. Trudell.

But though she lives with two schoolgirls and a male model, Ms. Cutrone has been dating music producer Jimmy Boyle, 40, who lives in Los Angeles, for several years, and she also remains close to her first husband, pop artist and Warhol affiliate Ronnie Cutrone, 60, to whom she was married briefly in her early 20s and who still crashes on her couch. (Ava’s father was an Italian she met in Paris and left three months into her pregnancy, shortly after leaving her second husband, an actor.) Another presence at le château Cutrone is Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s filmmaker and the former manager of the Velvet Underground, whom she met though Mr. Cutrone years ago, has reconnected with, and now considers an “uncle.” (It has been reported he is making a film about Demian.)

If your head isn’t spinning yet, get this: Ms. Cutrone is trying to set up Demian with Whitney Port. “I was like, ‘Paul, if I get Whitney to marry Demian, will you come and direct an episode of The Hills?’ That would be the ultimate Warhol thing, right? To get fucking Paul to do an episode of The Hills would be amaaaaazing!”

“I’ve been very impressed with how
she’s doing,” allowed Mr. Morrissey the other day, reached at home in New York. “I’ve seen one episode of The Hills and she’s as natural as they come. That’s what she’s like in real life.” Said Ms. Cutrone: “Paul and I laugh, ’cause we were all kind of freaks in the Warhol family, and Demian’s, like, the next generation of these people who are kind of hooked into this thing.”

Ms. Cutrone likes to say she has lived her life backward: marriage, then kid, then all-white furniture in her apartment. But there is also an element of déjà vu to her present situation: She owned her first PR firm when she was in her 20s, after stints as PR doyenne Susan Blond’s assistant and, later, as Bob Guccione’s rep at Spin.

The story of how this happened is the stuff of New York myth. Just weeks after moving to New York at age 21 from Syracuse, where she was raised, she met writer and bon vivant Anthony Haden-Guest at a garden party. She moved into his apartment, she explained casually, after being evicted from her own, on Avenue C. He thought she needed a job, and introduced her to über-publicist Ms. Blond. (Ronnie Cutrone also takes credit for this introduction, saying he figured she’d be a great publicist because “she was always on the telephone, nonstop!”) She got hired.

“She was an accident waiting to happen,” recalled Mr. Cutrone. The couple first met at a club called Carmelita, in a former whorehouse. “She was wild, ambitious, volatile, sexual. Sex and the City looks like a ridiculous joke compared to what Kelly was! Plfffffft!” Early in their courtship, Mr. Cutrone found a gram of coke in a jacket Ms. Cutrone had borrowed. He himself was clean at the time, he said. “I’m like, what the hell! Kelly tracked me down at my building and woke up two gay guys, looking for the coke or me, and then eventually she did find us, but there it was—sex and drugs in one pretty picture.” (“I was out that night,” admitted Ms. Cutrone.) They soon moved in together, and got married. She was 22.

“We’d go to dinners with people, and we’d go home and I’d say, ‘That man was nice, who is he?’ And Ronnie would be like, ‘That’s Tim Leary,’” recalled Ms. Cutrone. “It was an amazing time in New York.”

After her stints with Ms. Blond and at Spin, she formed her own company, Cutrone & Weinberg, with a former Susan Blond intern named Jason Weinberg, now a prominent talent manager in L.A. They represented Eartha Kitt; Mark Ronson and his first band, Whole Earth Mamas, which also included Sean Lennon; and the Smithereens. But Ms. Cutrone was miserable.

“I owned a successful PR company—sound familiar?” she said. “And I just really felt like I was part of that ‘Don’t you know who I am,’ kind of club, and I bought into this world and I had this money and I had this kind of thing going on. I was using drugs to keep up with my life.”

Later in her 20s, she sold Mr. Weinberg her half of the company and became a tarot card reader on Venice Beach. Right on the beach. By the Hare Krishnas. She stayed for a year and a half. Her mother was concerned, but she was happy. “I was just doing full-on meditation all the time,” she said. “A lot of people that get out of PR do very bizarre things.”

But PR called her back. She began repping the Wasteland, a used-clothing store in L.A. The Sunset Marquis soon followed.

“She came to the hotel, I interviewed her,” recalled Rod Gruendyke, the hotel’s general manager. “She had her head shaved. I thought this was kind of interesting. A few weeks later, I had her come back, and this time she had blue dreadlocks. About three weeks went by and I called her again, and she showed up this time in an Armani suit, and I hired her on the spot.”

Ms. Cutrone moved her company back to New York in 1999, keeping a satellite office in L.A.

“I wouldn’t want 80 percent of [powerhouse fashion firm] KCD’s roster,” she insisted. “I would never rep Versace, I can’t stand her, I think she makes disgusting clothes. Calvin [Klein] is like, snore! Who wears Calvin Klein? I’m not dissing him. I think he’s built an amazing, respectable business, but I would never want to work for Calvin Klein, ever.” Her own stable of clients is heavy on up-and-comers and not the most high-end in the business, but she said it was consciously curated based on whom she thought deserved “a voice.”

A FEW DAYS AFTER dinner at the Soho Grand, Us Weekly reported that Whitney Port was about to get her own Hills spinoff, in which she’d go bicoastal, work for People’s Revolution in New York (which sounds strangely like the official description of The Hills’ season four) and befriend New York socialites like Olivia Palermo (for whom Ms. Cutrone worked briefly last year when the young woman was suffering a spate of bad publicity). That afternoon, armed with a huge C.O. Bigelow bag, Ms. Cutrone rushed into her office, which is manned by two assistants who sit directly across from her at a massive white recycled table-desk. Behind her seat hung an enormous black-and-white portrait of Ava, shot by Ms. Mark.

“This thing just broke on Perez Hilton; my fucking cell phone is ringing off the hook,” Ms. Cutrone said. “Obviously, I’m not too busy to buy face cream! I’m at the age when people try to be helpful, but they’re mean.”

Us Weekly sat open beside her Mac laptop, open to the relevant page.

She pulled up Perez Hilton on her computer and studied the screen. “I guess that thing ran and I’m everybody’s best friend now,” she mused. “Let’s get [Radar writer] Neel Shah on the phone.” One of her assistants sprung into action.

“Is there anything you need?” she asked Mr. Shah with unconcealed glee before stressing that the news was “not confirmed, it’s leaked.” (“I’m signed to a very tight NDA with MTV,” she said later, adding: “I know for a fact [Olivia] has yet to sign a deal with them.”)

Ms. Cutrone is a micromanager and compulsive phone-caller who still dials press contacts herself to pitch her clients (almost unheard of in her business among top executives) and directs seating at her company’s fashion shows from the runways like an air traffic controller, often looking like she’s rolled out of bed only moments before. She works until 1 or 2 a.m. during fashion week, midnight many other months, and she doesn’t allow her two assistants to leave before she does.

“Why do people want to be part of a group, anyway?” she suddenly sighed, referring to the Council of Fashion Designers of America applications she had spent the morning organizing on behalf of three cl
ients, going so far as to solicit a letter from Sofia Coppola on behalf of designer Araks and arranging for her to e-mail it directly to Steven Kolb, head of the CFDA.

Designer Norma Kamali was suddenly on the phone about a CFDA recommendation she wrote for Andrew Buckler, a client of Ms. Cutrone’s. “Norma, I sent it to your publicist two weeks ago,” Ms. Cutrone was saying. “No, I understand that, but it’s really … Well, you know they close at 5. No, I’m not saying that Norma. O.K., O.K. Could you just send it to Steven Kolb?”

Ms. Cutrone suddenly blared “Rapper’s Delight” from her laptop and lit a cigarette at her desk. “Sometimes I do nothing for a moment,” she said, adding that she uses brief, deafening musical interludes as “a management tool.”

“I’m not just doing it ’cause you’re here,” she added. Her preternaturally calm assistants nodded vociferously.

Then: “Fuck, Norma Kamali’s e-mailing me again!”

Ms. Cutrone quieted things down and called Paper editor Kim Hastreiter, a longtime friend, to inform her that one of her assistants was Jordanian and could help arrange the paperwork for Paper’s September shoot in Dubai.

“You’re so pretty,” said Ms. Cutrone softly to a 19-year old intern who walked in with a phone message. “What’s your major?” Her name was Taryn, and she was at community college in L.A., where she had seen Nicky Hilton leaving People’s Revolution’s West Coast offices, which inspired her to apply for the internship.

“Why do you want to go to college for PR?” crowed Ms. Cutrone. “We have people with a bachelor’s degree who can’t take a frickin’ phone message! I would ask your family what they think of you not going to college for a few years and exploring a work opportunity.”

“Just be careful, because you’re pretty and look like a party girl,” she cautioned. “Are you a party girl?”

By that time, Ms. Cutrone’s star intern, Joe, had also popped in (she retains several interns at all times). “Who has been the nicest to you of all the senior people?” she said loudly.

“Kelly Cutrone!” said Joe.

Ms. Cutrone meditates every day and consults every Saturday at midnight with a yogi named Mikael Spector, an American who lives in India, whom she met after her tarot card days when she had a short-lived record deal at Atlantic based on a demo of her chanting over a friend’s band’s “groove.” “He doesn’t need me to do PR for him. I guess he’s like the perfect father, husband, brother,” she said of Mr. Spector, to whom she refers as “my teacher in India” and whom she has visited on the subcontinent. “He’s a very evolved being. I have all these amazing guys that all make up the one perfect man.”

It helps her to be mellow about the fact that, even though she is not necessarily experiencing the spiritual angst of her first go-round as a PR girl in Manhattan, she still needs to bring in $200,000 a month just to break even, all on fees which top off around $22,000 per client.

“I love a lot of the people I work with, but at the end of the day, if my business tanks, I’m the one who’s going to have to leave the country, because I’m oversigned and overleased and I have a gazillion things in my name,” she said. “If anything ever happened to People’s, I’d have to, like, bolt.”

“You’re never done in this job,” she said. “You’re never done. So you just have to figure out when can you stop.”

mbryan@observer.com