No one could really tell or advise you how to handle Fashion’s Night Out in New York, especially since this was only the second year and radically different from last year’s inaugural celebration.

The event certainly dwarfed any of the fashion events I attended, including the Fashion & Design Festival in Montreal. Practically the entire city of New York, visitors and residence alike were decked out in their most fashionable outfits, high heels galore and people crowding the streets to attend more than 100 locations around the city.

My first stop was to go to Jil Sander’s new bridge line “Jil Sander Navy” with special guest appearance by French illustrator Garance Doré, who had shot the campaigns for the line. The Navy line will replace the one from Uniqlo in order to cater to middle class consumers. The collection mainly consisted of near pure CMYK intensity of Magenta, Cyan, White, and Bright Orange. This season’s collection was more sporty with a few shift dresses, and sports jackets with adjustable ties. Some of the white shorts had some interesting textures, thus not your typical run of the mill pieces, it was a nice breezy collection for spring. I loved the store layout at Jil Sander, with pure white walls and floors, and featureless white mannequins, they really made the clothes pop out.

When Garance finally arrived, with her fellow fashion beau – Scott Schuman, she was totally glammed up and was much more beautiful in person than I had anticipated. I was actually expecting that cool laid back French look, but was greeted with a more sleeked back look and stunning red lips. She’s friendly, girly and still is overwhelmed by the attention she gets for her work, so I find her to be very humble. When I asked her about how she approached the shoot for the campaign, she said that because she’s a newcomer to New York (having moved there recently), she was afraid of losing that sense of “lost in the city” approach and wanted to reflect that in her photos. No doubt her photos had a Sartorialist feel to them, the difference being she would catch people in a moment rather than have them pose for the photo.

Scott Schuman was another blogger I had anticipated in meeting, but his aura exhuded professionalism, and I was a little star struck, so I didn’t quite know what to ask him. So I asked something related to Garance, like how she got into photography and he said that he gave her her first camera. That was really sweet! He discussed the busy schedule they had ahead of them and expressed their interest to travel to smaller fashion weeks in other countries, since the bigger ones are sort of a “been there done that”. I found this to be kind of particular since it seems that when you’re a nobody, you want to be the superstar, but when you’re the superstar, you want to go back to being low key. Isn’t it strange?

Overall, I was glad to meet them, but at the same time they had other people to talk to, it wasn’t quite full at Jil Sander, but it was enough to make Garance feel like she did reach out to a few at least. Good for her.

While at Jil Sander I had chatted up with Jason, a fan of Jil Sander and Garance’s work. We had a good friendly chemistry for strangers and ended up hanging out together for the rest of the evening. It was one of those serendipitous New York moments, where a stranger can make you pass the time so much faster. I followed him to Ralph Lauren, where it was the total opposite of Jil Sander, packed halfway into the open street. Vogue’s Editor at Large, Andre Leon Talley made an appearance to introduce Grammy-nominated singer, Janelle Monae (a singer I’ve never heard of). Her opening song, “Sincerely Jane” blew me away. She was referenced by Andre as the “Marlene Dietrich” of our time, with a fitted tuxedo look, a look she said she paid tribute to her parents, people who put on a uniform for a living. Her performance though brief, was electrifying and her dance moves had the crowd going wild.

The party at Chanel in Soho was blocking traffic nearly in all directions, it was virtually impossible to go in. At Reiss, supermodel Coco Rocha posed in front of an English red telephone booth they installed inside the store (Rimmel London was a co-sponsor of the event).

By 10pm I was exhausted. I had been up since 4:30am that day and had been pretty much on the go non-stop. Being in New York gives you tons of energy but at the same time drains you twice as much.

Are store websites a little too boring to browse to your liking? Do you miss that editorial fashion fantasy that magazines thrive upon and yet website miss upon? Fear no more, there seems to be a new trend emerging on fashion websites.

I’ve been store surfing online looking at the latest holiday collections and came upon Barneys‘ site. Although I seldomly have browsed there, I did noticed that they’ve added a new shoppable editorial magazine. Most websites will have commercial photo shoots of a model wearing the item on sale, however the relationship between viewer and photo is sort of cold and generic in my opinion. Fashion editorials, on the other hand, are highly stylized with different accessories and contain more elaborate backgrounds. They weave a fantasy of eye candy that makes potential shoppers go “oooh…now that’s pretty, and I want it.”

This format of catalogue shopping through editorials is relatively new from what I’ve seen of store websites. Barneys has picked up on the idea and launched their version of it called “Designer Mailer“. This holiday season, Canadian model Coco Rocha is splashed across the catalogue on every page. Whether in Flash or HTML  version, users can mouseover certain items that can be directly purchased online. The slightly disadvantaging point is that most of the items sold are accessories like shoes, bracelets, necklaces and bags. Some of the big ticket items like an L’Wren Scott dress are not available online, and can only be found in certain stores. A shame because for me in an editorial, I’d want to have the chance to purchase everything that I see. Call it online boutique hotel-style shopping.

I’m not sure if many shoppers are like me, but my desire to purchase depends greatly on how great the mannequins or models are dressed. I like being in a store where there are styled mannequins. It’s enough to send me finding the exact thing I see. Montreal, alongside Tokyo, in general has very attractive mannequin displays, especially at Simons. I can be sold on a look in seconds, it really doesn’t take much.

Online beauty stores can also apply this method of shopping by allowing users to mouse over a model’s face and imagine buying the very products that they’re looking at. They usually give credits in magazines as to what exactly a model is wearing, but you’d have to dig through the end of the magazine for that. An online beauty store could ideally benefit from this ease of purchase.

Certainly this is an interesting approach from Barneys, but they would need to work on refining the editorial shop just to make it a little more user-friendly. One advantage over Net-a-porter is having real physical stores in several locations (unfortunately only across America). I think The Gap & co. could use this kind of online business model as they have several brands and they could need the boost. I expect to see similar editorial shops to pop up in the near future.

Image credit: Barneys’ website