WWD inferred the worst from Marc Jacobs' decision not to throw one of his typical post-show megabashes, as well as the fact that Zac Posen, Calvin Klein, and Alexander Wang were among those who similarly cancelled their party plans. This week, even the New York Times couldn't seem to resist the convenience of the party-over metaphor, casting a vernissage at the new Diesel store as a gathering of lost souls. Welcome to the brave new fashion, where frivolity is out and celebs don't pack the Beatrice Inn. Except it didn't happen that way.

I'm no gadfly compared to some, but I go to the occasional night spot, and I can't say I've noticed any appreciable difference in the quality or tone of revelry on offer this season. Maybe I wasn't going to the echelon of party that was canceled to begin with. But this week it seemed like there was the same familiar mixture of people in day-glo accessories, fedoras, Derek Blasberg, your boyfriend's also-a-model ex, and cash bars as ever. Perhaps I've always sensed a ticking heart of melancholia at the center of these kinds of gatherings, where the dance floor has air quotes and everyone puts up the tiresome pretense of not mugging for the party photographer, even back when the economy was gaining ground as opposed to ceding it. (But that probably has always said more about me than about my surroundings.)

Earlier this week I actually saw Lara Stone in person, and I couldn't help but unabashedly stare at her while I stood waiting to pay $18 for a martini that proved to taste like it had been mixed inside an empty orange juice carton. I also saw a man dressed in chain mail and a guy who had light-up rods, actual spiny, glowing bones, sewn onto the outside of his black gloves, like an extra from Blade Runner. Alexander Wang was being congratulated on the stairs, and someone wanted to go to the Purple party, but someone else was like, "When is Olivier Zahm ever not at the Beatrice?" and frankly it all felt very September '08, which is to say it felt very much like any other fashion week. It was sniffy noses and ironic flannel and heavy eyeliner. It was Blackberries and coats that looked like muppets killed for a good cause and testing your clout by lighting that cigarette inside. The other night someone who looked about 19 asked Patrick McMullan who he was shooting for. "I would've recognized your son, I think," she said, semi-apologetically.

Every story this season is about how fashion has become such a terrible, morose End Times-y affair. The narrative is that before, shows were always buoyed by the rising tide of economic good fortune and front-row bold-face names and the parties, they were always terribly glamorous and fun. Now shows are always things you sneak into out of the drudgery of obligation, and when you're caught in the act, you give mealy quotes to the press about how sorry you are, how inconsequential even you recognize it all to be, and how attendance at this particular temple of Baal is unfortunately mandated by your job at this little magazine that covers fashion. And the parties that follow the shows, well, nobody who recognizes the seriousness of Our Straitened Circumstances could possibly acknowledge any interest in such frothy frivolity.

Thing is, you could have written that kind of story last season, or any other season for that matter. Models were getting paid in trade last season too, and a great many seasons before. Editors have always been people aware enough to acknowledge some self-doubt on the question of the actual relative importance of this season's heel or bag; the fashion set is not dumb. But nobody in the media would have thought to cast any previous season in any such light. The before/after is a constructed narrative, and it's one I'm just getting a little sick of reading. This industry, which I love, is troubled — nearly 20,000 jobs were lost in textile and apparel manufacturing and retail in the month of January, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and many designers and stores are struggling across the spectrum of price points — but all the deckchairs on the Titanic rhetoric seems like unwarranted melodrama, simultaneously too dire and not serious enough. (The last recession, in the early 1990s, gave us Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Marc Jacobs.) It's too early to write fashion off; and it is, dare I say it, frivolous to do so because of some party that was or wasn't thrown.

As The Economy Goes, So Do The Parties [WWD]
Despite Happy Meals, There Are Troubling Signs Around Fashion Week [NY Times]
At Fashion Week, Everyone Looks Sullen, Not Just The Models [NY Times]

Earlier: Chloé Sevigny Party Made Me Hate Fashion Week, Life
I Think I Hate Fashion Week

OK, so the party was super fun and the crowd was totally feeling some T.I. "What You Know?" The Beatrice Inn is typically a celeb-heavy environment — apparently, it's Mary-Kate Olsen's jam — but last night, it was a little more intimate than that, and was mainly comprised of friends of the MOB crew. There were a few celebs on hand, however, like these two super skinny models whose names I don't know (and didn't feel like looking up), the dude from Blonde Redhead, and Steve Aoki, if you think he counts. But at least one girl thinks he counts.

I left the party to make my way to another party across town, and looked around for Nikola; I found him outside talking to a girl who was crying pretty hard. Nikola turned to me and said, "She's in love with Steve Aoki." Initially I was like, "Christ, did he not call her back after he fucked her or something?" But then she explained to us that she never even met him before. She came into the city from (I believe) Long Island, is "in love" with Steve, and heard he was gonna be at the party. (Nikola spotted him inside, but I must've missed him.) She was devastated that the doorman wouldn't let her in. Either she left her ID at home, or she wasn't 21 yet...something like that, I don't know. Anyway, she was acting like her life was over.

I was like, "Girl, I thought you were crying 'cause you were pregnant with his baby or something. He is nothing to cry over, trust."

She looked at me in awe, with tears streaming down her face and was like, "You know him. Like in real life?"

"Yeah, so don't cry about it. For real." Then I hailed a cab for myself and Nikola. We had this running thing all night about trying to gross each other out with stories. Hearing about Steve reminded me of probably one of the grossest stories ever, which I of course had to tell Nikola, and don't mind sharing with you right now.

One time I fucked this guy and the condom got stuck up inside me and I didn't know. Then the next night I fucked this other guy, still unaware of that lost condom already there. Two days later, I felt a strange sensation as if there was chewing gum between my legs, and finally the condom tumbled out of me in the bathroom of my old job. I was freaked out but got over it. Anyway, onto Steve.

We'd banged like a month or two before and he was back in town (like over three years ago), so he stayed over. We had some sex in the pitch-black dark in my bedroom and I squirted a bit, so I knew my sheets would be a little messy. The next morning when we woke up, it looked like a murder scene. I didn't have my period, but there was brownish blood that came out from whatever trauma was caused by that lost condom. Steve was totally freaked out and uncomfortable and said that he had to scrub really hard to clean up all the dried blood caked on his cuticles and under his nails. I was like, "Whatever."

The best though was that there was a perfect bloody imprint of his hand on my ass cheek, as well as my bedroom wall. The one on my bedroom wall stayed there for kind of a long time because I'm way lazy.

I know I'm not the first to say this, but I just hate how Fashion Week seems designed to make a lot of people feel bad about themselves—you're not thin enough, rich enough, important enough—in order to stroke the egos of a precious few. Ugh!

So basically, having to wait in line in the rain for an hour made me so salty I'm surprised I didn't melt right there from the moisture. What exacerbated the problem were the girls behind me. One of them kept talking about her pole dancing class over and over and over, as though it were the most novel and hilarious thing that nobody had ever heard of before she had the guts and spunk to go and sign herself up. I so badly wanted to be like, "Bitch, that shit was on season two of Celebrity Fit Club! When overweight has-beens beat you to the punch on something that was already long played out, you should just keep it to yourself."

But instead I just clenched my fists and scowled. Here are some quotes of theirs I furiously typed into my phone:

"What? What does 'accosted' mean?"
"I took the 'How Shallow Are You' test on Facebook. I got a 95%."
"He's not cute and I'm not into him, but he has all this money. Like a lot of money. And a cool apartment. So whatever."
"I don't know what 'neuter' means. What is that? 'Neuter'?"

A wadded up mound of TP with a giant, still wet, period stain. I wondered if that fell out by accident or if someone was just as pissed as I was about the door policy and pulled a Donita Sparks by throwing their makeshift pad on the ground. I like that second idea best.

I went up to the bar and waited roughly 15 or 20 minutes for the bartender to even look at me. Then when I heard her charge the person next to me $6 for a domestic beer, I realized that it was, in fact, not an open bar, even though the invite mentioned a vodka sponsor. I was like, fuck this, and went up to the balcony to check out the crowd from above. That's when my friend Alex spotted Natasha Lyonne. I tried to take a picture, but my camera is like a 3 megapixel piece of crap, so this is the best I could do.

She didn't look her best, but she also didn't look her crackiest, so that was an improvement from the last time I saw her, when she was wearing filthy clothes five sizes too big, picking at sores on her face while fighting with a bodega owner about how she didn't want to have to pay for her Marlboro Reds.

Other celebs I saw were Karen O, Richie Rich, Three as Four, Sophia Lamar, Ben Cho, Leo Fitzpatrick, and I'm pretty sure I saw Margherita Missoni. The Slits took the stage at like 12:30 or something. I realized, looking around, that instead of a "party" this was merely a free concert. The one thing I actually really liked was seeing Chloë down in front of the stage, singing along and jumping up in down. It was cool to know she was having a really great time in the crowd with the peons, instead of sitting in the V.I.P. area with the idiot assholes.