Welcome back, suckers! Now that you succeeded in blowing all your summer resolutions like bald tires on hot asphalt (Lose weight? SPLAT! Stay reasonably sober? SPLAT! Dump smug mate? SPLAT! Be nice to the unpredictable old lady in 4G? SPLAT!) here comes fall, opening beneath you like an aching abyss of unmet need and bone-crunching despair. The subways are slow-cookers, the streets couldn’t smell worse if we emptied the sewers of Delhi onto them, and just when we thought we might get a rejuvenating whiff of autumnal sanity and good taste, here comes Fashion Week, where all the girls are hungry and all the boys are bitchy. Tonight everyone wishing to remind you that they matter has scheduled a party for themselves. First up, the indefatigable Tim Gunn fetes his TV show, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style, at the Soho Grand, with Natasha Bedingfield performing and a mosh of models in attendance. “I’m not a fashion svengali,” Mr. Gunn told us. “I think of myself as a fashion therapist.” Not to be outdone, New York’s other most fabulous fashion reality TV star, Elle’s frisky Nina Garcia, celebrates her book, The Little Black Book of Style (Bonus dirty excerpt! “My father was incredibly charming and incredibly handsome. He had the power to make me think that white linen was the only fabric a man should wear”), at a party hosted by Diane von Furstenberg at the exhaustingly cool Socialista. Oh, it is on! Ms. Garcia’s party promises to attract a horde of puffed-up and pimped-out designers and socialites (Hilfiger, de la Renta, Mortimer, Creel, Gugelman and Gubelman), a MisShape or two (where’s Miss Isosceles?), and Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia. (Not that we’re keeping track, but didn’t Yugoslavia cease to exist a few years back? Which makes Dimitri the proud prince of bupkes, we suppose.) Nearby, Deborah Needleman, editrix of our favorite porn publication, Domino, toasts the magazine’s fashion issue with design personalities such as Lisa Perry and Alberta Ferretti at a demure gathering at hostess Allison Sarofim’s Bank Street townhouse (don’t get lost in there!). Finally (phew!), Calvin Klein tucks in to the 25th anniversary of Calvin Klein Underwear at a party hosted by newly christened underwear model Djimon Hounsou and sinewy actress Hilary Swank, and attended by former Calvin models like Antonio Sabato Jr. (didn’t he run for governor once?) And if fashion isn’t really your thing—in which case, we suggest you head to West Virginia for the week—you do have one alternative: In the Shadow of the Moon, a David Sington documentary about—well, the moon. So as not to be confused with models for the Tommy Hilfiger show, the astronauts will congregate at the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History. Sneak down the hall and peek at the spooky dioramas!
[Entertainment Weekly and Bravo celebrate Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style, Lawn of the Soho Grand, 310 West Broadway, 7:30 p.m.; ELLE and Diane von Furstenberg celebrate Nina Garcia’s The Little Black Book of Style, Socialista, 505 West Street, 7 p.m.; Domino celebrates The Fashion Issue, 66 Bank Street, 8 p.m.; Calvin Klein 25th Anniversary Party, 205 West 39th Street, 9 p.m.; In the Shadow of the Moon premiere, Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, 15 West 81st Street and Central Park West, 7:15 p.m.]
