Fashion Plates: Activities Related to Dress, Clothing & Style

By Troy Segal

New York Fashion Week (Sept. 4-11) is almost upon us — as the flurry of tent-building at Lincoln Center attests — and your runway show invitations still haven’t arrived. So annoying. Well, whether you make it to that hectic scene or not, there are plenty of delicious style-oriented symposia, special events, and exhibits in New York City over the next month.

The Joe Eula-designed poster for 1968’s “Bacall and the Boys” TV special.

Let the late Lauren Bacall introduce you to four legendary couturiers (Yves St. Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro, and Christian Dior’s Marc Bohan), in this documentary from 1968 on the Paris autumn collections, being screened at the Paley Center Aug. 30 & 31.

Bill Cunningham’s GM Building, New York City (1970s). New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Photographer Bill Cunningham, whose “on the street” shots of well-dressed folk have graced The New York Times for three decades, is on view himself Sept. 3 at the 92nd Street Y, chatting with clothing authority Fern Mallis (best known as the creator of what became NYC’s Fashion Week, back in the 1990s).

Learn which way the fashion winds are blowing at this symposium, “180 Degrees of Style” headed by Keanan Duffty, Senior Director of Fashion Merchandising, Academy of Art University — a renowned San Francisco trade school, whose student designers have a show at New York Fashion Week each year — at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Sept. 6.

What was modish in medieval times? “Fashion in the Middle Ages”, a lecture at The Cloisters on Sept. 13, describes what au courant lords and ladies wore, way back when — and what the cut of one’s gown symbolized.

Left: Evening Dress, 1946. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection; right: “Clover Leaf” Evening Dress, 1953. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

On Sept. 18, Homer Layne — assistant to designer Charles James — appears at The Museum at FIT, chatting with a professor for fashion design about his life with the couturier, and demonstrating the famously intricate draping technique that gave James’ dresses their libidinous lines.

If anyone knows how the clothing biz works, it’s Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour. She describes its often unwieldy mix of art and industry with another style-conscious femme, ex-CNN fashion correspondent Alina Cho, at the 92nd Street Y, Oct. 22.