How to Dress for New York Fashion Week

JSG's Annie at L.A. Fashion Week (a totally different animal than New York's), with Kristen from TotalBeauty.com, Tammy from A Mom in Red High Heels and Laurie from Beauty's SPOT.

Planning what to wear for fashion week is somewhat similar to packing for a trip. It’s the way we usually dress, but taken up a notch and we think about our outfits in advance. We always aspire to be in style, not just during the first week of September or in Miami or Vegas, but for FW we do add a layer here or a layer there and might wear an extra strand of pearls or a gold belt instead of our trusty black one. We fret about having the right bag, the right pair of shoes.
We can only hope our new Marc by Marc Jacobs Dr. Q Groovee bag that we ordered from Piperlime gets here in time (thanks to Hope for turning us on to purple) and we’re still obsessing about those damn Nanette Lepore shoes ($400 just seems like a lot for such a trendy pair, but you may spy us in them yet).

As for planning in advance, well, we know once we’re in the thick of things, getting home at midnight only to go to a 9 am show, if we’ve styled our whole outfit the week or day before, we’ll be in much better shape when it’s time to roll back in the tents.

We do try to wear a designer’s clothes to his or her show, which is always a nice nod to the designer. But in reality, we don’t have many designer pieces hanging in our closets for the shows we get invited to. This year, we’ll be able to do this at BCBG, Tracy Reese and Rebecca Taylor.

Full disclosure: While we’ve been going to Fashion Week for too many years to count now, we’re not really experts. We’ve never been invited to the Marc Jacobs’ show (the Holy Grail of FW) or had Bill Cunningham take our picture for the NYTimes, though a girl can always hope. But we do know a secret of dressing for FW: Just have fun and let your own style shine on through. That’s the point of true fashion in our book.

Update: We wrote this post on Monday, before our fabulous friend, Felissa (to whom we've promised our first born), at About.com's Celebrity Style channel invited us to the The Red Thread party Samsung is throwing in honor of Valentino tonight.

Since Valentino won’t be sending us over a dress to wear, we know we don’t stand a chance at being among the best dressed at the party. (We’re seriously hoping for a Tom and Katie sighting. She is in town for rehearsals for All My Sons, so it’s quite likely. Fingers crossed! Should we get close enough to talk, we definitely plan on complimenting Tom on his dancing in Tropic Thunder. He still has it!)

Needless to say, the invite threw us into a tizzy, especially as it states “Formal Dress.” We were unable to concentrate at our day job as we mentally dug threw our closet all afternoon and thought about when we could stop by Bergdorf's for an emergency pit stop that surely wouldn't be kind to the old Amex. Then, we remembered our own advice, just to have fun and let our own style shine through. What will we wear? Stay tuned. We’ll try to post pictures (and the dish on the party) tomorrow!

Photo of Valentino with models and actresses from http://www.worldtempus.com/ taken in 2007 in Cannes.