"This is a private event for the women of fashion and the men of finance," explained the woman with the clipboard. "And you are a woman who works in finance!" The rejected banker — who, though this should hardly matter, was young, attractive, and wearing a nice cocktail dress such as would have suited the Fashion Meets Finance crowd — stepped away from the velvet rope crestfallen.

I walked right in, even though I had no cocktail dress, and was not even wearing heels, because I am a woman who works in fashion.

The bar was crowded. Then it became more so. When the "tasting hour" designated by the gluten-free vodka sponsor ran out and I asked for a glass of water, the bartender said he could only sell me bottled water for $5. I protested, and he turned to the woman to my right, who had worn a cocktail dress and platform sandals, who desired a vodka cranberry. But while he was filling her glass with ice, he waved his gun over my empty tumbler and pressed 'water.' The noisy, tacky, tiki-themed environs of this particular East Midtown bar motivate one to appreciate even the smallest of mercies.

There's really no reason for me to go to such a thing as Fashion Meets Finance. I don't need to "meet" anyone, and even if I did, I have always specialized in dating men who earn in the multiple thousands of dollars. I'm sure, if the need arose, I would fall for another one of those in a trice. This assortment of Windsor knots and Harvard degrees and clicking high heels is not my crowd. I suppose I wanted to know for sure that Fashion Meets Finance — tagline: "Ladies, you don't need to worry that the cute guy at the bar works in advertising!" — actually exists, because it seems like the kind of thing that is too disappointing, or perhaps too wretched, a statement of human cravenness and of contemporary gender politics to be true. I suppose I was acting in the grand tradition of Jezebels who throw themselves on live New York dating grenades. But mainly, though, I never pass up an opportunity to use a good fake name. My friend who joined me agreed that was the evening's main selling point — she often passes herself off as Ellen Olenska, the population who actually reads Wharton being apparently small and not generally given to standing on street corners with a clipboard and an earpiece, the better to sneer at women with advanced degrees in economics.

As I was departing the mosh pit scene at the bar, a middle aged man with frizzy hair tapped me on the shoulder. "Do you work in fashion? Because i just finished reading an excellent book about the fashion industry. Called The Devil Wears Prada." He went on to explain that he had been to Fashion Meets Finance's several past events — this one was dubbed "The Recession Is Over!" — and always had a good time, because as "an outgoing person," he can always meet other outgoing people. I escaped, but not before he had told me that he had always wanted to go to the country where I grew up, New Zealand, and heartily advised me to see "a wonderful, funny movie about fashion," Brüno.

Then I talked to a Spaniard who worked for UBS but with whom I had difficulty communicating, between my accent and his. "I have heard New Zealand is very beautiful," he cooed, before adding, "maybe I go there some day if I can get the vacation time."

I trudged back to the bar for another surreptitious water. If there was one thing that was surprising about the crowd, it was that it seemed to lack a certain fashionable quality. While one would hardly expect freelance styling assistants for the European Vogues to journey up to E. 50th Street on a Thursday night, the "fashion" representatives all embodied a certain value of "good taste" that true fashion types, in my experience, put little stock in; everyone had on a tasteful dress, tasteful shoes, and small amounts of tasteful jewelry, and while everyone looked very nice, I began to wonder just how many of these people really worked in fashion. Where were the plain white tees styled just so? The Alexander Wang handbags? The ironic 90s floral prints? The scarf stolen from your mother? The vintage? The bar looked as if it had drawn an entirely typical bon-chic-bon-goût Murray Hill crowd and deposited it 10 blocks northward. Some of the men were imposters, too: one admitted to working in — gasp — real estate.

I soon found myself talking to a Jamaican who'd grown up in Crown Heights about that neighborhood's gentrification, and also the gentrification of Harlem and Fort Greene, a topic in which, as a white resident of Harlem, I am somewhat personally invested. "My friend who lives in Harlem called me the other day, said the neighborhood, it's gone," smiled the man. "He passed a white girl on the street at 2 a.m. and he said she didn't even look scared. That's when you know!" I could have pointed out that yesterday on my block seven squad cars chased and arrested a boy who looked to be about 12 years old, and then arrested his 15-year-old brother when the brother tried to calm their screaming mother, but I did not see the good in even indirectly reminding anyone who grew up in Crown Heights of the bad old days. The man started off in business running a tailor shop, so instead we discussed two-button vs. three-button suits, eventually finding common ground in double vents and natural fibers. I told him to Google Ozwald Boateng, and when I asked why he'd come to Fashion Meets Finance, he paused and said, "I guess I just wanted to know this is really there," which sounded wise enough.

Then I met an Indian man who said he'd recently corresponded with a woman from the New Zealand consulate, in the trade delegation, named Georgina, did I happen to know her?

The Countess Olenska and I decided to talk to a young group of clean-cut banker types who seemed especially secure; their ties were wider than anyone else's, they broadcast WASPish entitlement and lacrosse expertise and looked like they probably browsed porn on their daily commutes to Connecticut. Also one of them had just done that thing where he thumped his beer square on a friend/victim's bottle's neck and his beer fizzed all over the place, oh yeah brah. The countess and I walked over, looked at the men, looked at each other, then looked again, more awkwardly, at these laughing golden boys — and immediately I knew that all the liquid eyeliner and velvet ropes and jet planes in the world will not stop and have not stopped me from remaining the person I was in high school. There's a certain kind of popularity that, if you should be so lucky as to experience it at 15 or 16 or 17, deposits in its wake a sense of pure social mastery that never really leaves you. And there's a certain kind of awkwardness, bodily shame, and tongue-tied single-sex-high-school befuddledness in what I still think of as "mixed" social situations that precludes any kind of innate suavity and leaves one always at the mercy of frizzy-haired shoulder-tappers.

So we didn't talk to the boys.

Except, then, somehow one did peel off — tall, Princeton, hedge fund — and he told me about how he grew up in Kentucky, and this year got to see the Derby horses in their stables before the race. His trainer friend informed him that virtually all professional race horses are doped. "They call it 'medicine,'" he explained, "They say, 'This horse needs its medicine.'" I dreamed of cracked-out race horses with enlarged hearts when I fell asleep last night. I don't think I'll be going to Fashion Meets Finance again.

Fashion Meets Finance [FMF]

• Fran Drescher is launching a skincare line — called FranBrand — this fall on HSN. The products are organic and paraben-free, because, as Drescher puts it, "Women are schmearing stuff on their décolleté, wondering why we're all getting breast cancer..."

• "...Once you wake up and smell the coffee, it's hard to go back to sleep. So I'm sounding the alarm." Drescher, a survivor of uterine cancer, founded the organization Cancer Schmancer. (And she also taught us to love Loehmann's.) [The Cut]
• As we learned yesterday, London Fog confirmed Gisele Bundchen's pregnancy by the roundabout way of announcing it had airbrushed her 5-6 month belly out of its latest campaign "to protect her privacy." But the outerwear brand also released a behind-the-scenes video of the shoot, which includes footage of the raw, unretouched shots as they appear on the computer monitor. A side-by-side comparison reveals exactly what London Fog thought wouldn't move units this fall. [SassyBella]
• Bar Refaeli is allegedly seeing Israeli multi-millionaire Teddy Sagi. Sagi owns a company that makes software for Internet gambling sites, and the nicest thing the Daily Mail can say about him is that he "has a lovely smile." The supermodel's relationship with Leonardo Di Caprio ended earlier this year. [Daily Mail]
• Liya Kebede addressed the UN Secretary-General's Forum on the topic of maternal health. Writes the supermodel, "In times of economic crisis, it is tempting to turn inward, to ignore or postpone the problems of the outside world and focus on ourselves. But, if we hope to thrive once again, we must realize that there are no outside problems in today's interwoven, globalized world. Each mother who dies leaves behind a devastated family and weakened community that will eventually, somehow, affect each of us. Each mother who dies deepens the financial and social strain on our world and puts economic recovery further away. Mothers are our best stimulus package because they invest in their families and in our collective future." [HuffPo]
• SassyBella unearthed footage of Karen Mulder hosting an E! special in 1999. The Dutch model encounters a new girl, who, when she introduces herself, turns out to be an 18-year-old Adriana Lima. [SassyBella]
• The first pictures of Rad by Rad Hourani, the Canadian designer's diffusion line, are looking pretty good, at least for those who were already fans of Hourani's unisex, pared-down rocker aesthetic. "This is exactly the same thing," as his main line, Hourani confirmed. Only instead of costing thousands of dollars it costs hundreds. We need more of this. [WWD]
• The writer of the sometimes entertaining, sometimes savage, always fascinating fashion blog The Emperor's Old Clothes has revealed himself — as New York designer Eric Gaskins. Gaskins, after 22 years in business, was this week forced to close his doors because of the economy. [NYTimes]
• And in September, Daphne Guinness is releasing a signature scent with Comme des Garçons. Only unlike most celebrity perfumes lines, this is actually the distinctive fragrance Guinness has, herself, been mixing for years. "I'll be in airports or in a taxi and the driver will say, ‘What are you wearing?'" reports the heiress. [WWD]
• Designer Hussein Chalayan is "weirded out" by models with clothing lines, like Kate Moss, Amber Valetta, Erin Wasson, and Elle MacPherson: "If you have a really strong sense of style and people want to aspire to being like you, I can understand that. But if you really are doing it just because you think of yourself as a brand and you haven't had the training and you know nothing about clothes, it kind of demeans all the training that designers have had." Chalayan thought Kate Moss's line for Topshop was a poor effort. "I don't think it represented her, and I didn't think she worked hard enough. I even told her to her face." How did la Moss respond? "She said, ‘Oh, I'm just trying to do a light thing; I'm not trying to do anything serious.' But I said, ‘That's not the point.'" [WWD]
• In which case, add Jessica Stam to the list of models who've raised Chalayan's ire. The Canadian just announced a collaboration with Rag & Bone. [Style.com]
• Vogue's Lauren Santo Domingo, on being told her boss Anna Wintour had worn flats to a party in the Hamptons: "I wonder if that means we can wear flats to the office now?" [The Cut]
• Fashion blind item: "Which fantastical designer has a new man? She's ditched her long term fiance for an artist with prime real estate." We're with the commenters on this: signs point to Erin Fetherston, who hasn't been photographed in public with her longtime fiancé, Hedi Ferjani, since late April. [Fashionista]
• Ali Wise, the Dolce & Gabbana publicist who was arrested for hacking into the voicemail of a woman who was dating Wise's ex boyfriend, is no longer a Dolce & Gabbana employee. Which must seem like the least of her problems: Wise is facing felony charges of computer trespass and eavesdropping. [WWD]
• A well-written parsing of W magazine's cover story on model Lara Stone: "The fashion industry — and, in turn, the fashion media — have such a warped concept of slimness that a model like Lara Stone is so much larger than her contemporaries that they feel the need to explain her presence. If Stone's body is such an outlier, what does that say about the rest of us? Worse, the magazine saw fit to issue the disclaimer that Stone 'is, it should be noted, a very lithe five foot ten.' Why, yes, do note that! As if there's the slightest chance someone is going to look at these photos and think Stone needs to, like, slow down on the Cheetos." [GlossedOver]
• Lagardère, the French publishing company that owns Hachette Filipacchi Media, which owns the U.S. edition of Elle magazine, has denied that it is in talks to sell the title to rival Hearst, as had been reported in yesterday's New York Post. [WWD]
• Scott Nylund, Beyoncé's design director, comes from Owatonna, Minnesota. Which is where you can see an exhibit that spans his earliest childhood sketches of women in dresses, to his college fashion collection, to his creations for Beyoncé. [StarTrib]
• Freja Beha Erichsen says Karl Lagerfeld's house in Vermont — which recently served as the setting for the fall Chanel campaign she starred in with Heidi Mount — is a serious farm. With horses and chickens and — spitting llamas. Erichsen also praised Chanel for providing food backstage at its runway shows, which a lot of brands don't manage to do. [W]
• Fashion Meets Finance, the terrible event for douchebags and gold-diggers, is back. It's happening August 6th in — where else? — Murray Hill. [FMF]
• Will Ferrell has a Nike sneaker coming out in Japan. It's inspired by Anchorman's Ron Burgundy, that lovable asshole we met, uh, five years ago. [HighSnobiety]
• Timberland lost $19.2 million in the last quarter, a worse-than-expected result that came off the back of a 14% drop in sales, to $179.7 million. [WWD]
• Shiseido was even worse off — its profits declined 57.8%. [WWD]
• Likewise Hugo Boss, which lost $21.17 million in the last quarter. [WWD]
• Bare Escentuals profits also slid 20% in the same period. [WWD]
• Competitor Avon's profits fell 64.3% on revenues that shrank by 9.7%. Revlon's sales fell 12.2%, and its total profits declined to just $200,000, from $19.9 million one year earlier. [WWD]
• Bucking this downward trend is Tod's — the Italian leather brand reported a 3.4% increase in sales for this first six months of this year. [WWD]
• Ann Taylor wants to cut $30 to $40 million in costs by "right-sizing" its organization. No word yet on the number of people who will be laid off. [WWD]
• Three members of a multi-million-dollar New York counterfeiting ring received prison sentences, and a fourth was sentenced to probation by a federal judge. Michael Chu, the group's leader, was in 2005 ordered to pay $7 million in damages stemming from an unrelated counterfeiting case involving North Face jackets. This time, Chu, who imported fake Nike, Chanel and Burberry products, was sentenced to prison for just over 8 years. [WWD]

Anyway, Jeremy is a 28-year-old University of Michigan grad who claims he makes $300,000 a year hosting such events as "Rich Guys & Hot Girls" — for which interested gentlemen submitted W-2s and women submitted five pictures. He claims his defining influence was the movie National Lampoon's Van Wilder. He drives a Segway. And he has an alterego, Richard Nouveau, who he claims is a "mockery of the white upper class." A mockery, eh? See if you can tell the Nouveau quotes from Jeremy's own, below!

1. "Society has taught us to not publicly acknowledge the obvious. Women want money in a man, men want beauty in a woman—this is a factual force of nature."

2. "It's sad and disgusting and it's superficial. [But] the only victims are the poor and the ugly."

3. "This genetic cleansing is how the wealthy stays beautiful."

4. "There are no more powerful things in our culture than wealth and sex. It's a female's best asset and a male's best asset."

5. "I started sleeping with a girl on the student council — not the most attractive girl, but she had an incredible libido."

6. "I lifted my dating embargo on Orientals. (I've decided to overlook the constant squinting.)"

7. "I'm here for the eye candy."

8. "I'm not looking for anything long-term, I don't think you'll find anything too high-caliber in fashion."

Confession: I added a quote from a 27-year-old investment banking intern attending Fashion Meets Finance, just for fun. Do you see the point? You wouldn't date a dude who said any one of these things, except maybe #7 in the context of escorting a nephew to a Magic The Gathering convention or something. Because nothing is more depressing than listening to the stillborn attempts at humor of people whose percentile in the ranks of relative social/educational/cultural/financial privilege is rivaled only by the score they got in "How Unexamined A Life Can I Lead." Well, nothing except the thoughts of a 20-year-old handbag designing attendee of "Fashion Meets Finance":

"You might ge a nice dinner out of it, so why not?"

But most importantly, how low do housing prices have to sink before these guys start mixing with, god forbid, female lawyers? And who will they hit up if it truly is the next Depression? Teach for America? God I love this country.

Fashion Meets Finance