My iPod died the other day. I was heading up Sixth Avenue, fresh off the subway, on the coldest morning in New York in years. And as usual, when I venture into midtown from my Lower East Side digs, I was up there for a reason I’ve been a New Yorker long enough now, and a downtowner at that, that I no longer ascend past 23rd Street without some concrete motivation, like a business meeting or a sale on towels at Macy’s. About a minute before my iPod died, however, I had paused, freezing, to marvel at the tents going up in Bryant Park.

The raising of the tents is constantly amazing to me, because as soon as I see them I know that Fashion Week is around the corner, and it always seems to me that Fashion Week just ended. Time moves fast in New York City. Wasn’t it just yesterday, I was thinking as I shivered before the Bryant Park gates, that the Marc Jacobs after-party inaugurated the Gramercy Park Hotel bar as the city’s official hotspot? Now it’s the Waverly Inn, or the Beatrice Inn, or maybe, by the time you read this, someplace else. Wasn’t it just yesterday that editors were staggering around on their vertiginous Balenciagas? And that Mischa Barton was defying the laws of physics, seriously everywhere, wearing different clothes? This season, I imagine, the prize Balenciaga will be the robot pants, and I will be as curious to see how the dedicated pull those off as I was impressed, in September, to see them walking (barely) in mile-high platforms. And I’m guessing Sienna Miller will be the celeb cloning herself for the shows this timeshe’s in town as I write, making the club rounds with Diddy, which probably means she’ll be at Zac Posen’s show, and everyone will be chattering about how tiny she is in person almost Olsen twin tinyas they stare down the front row to see who’s managed to lay hands on the flats from Zac’s new shoe collection.

All of which is to say that, for me, the best part of Fashion Week, and the thing I remember fondly once all the clothes have blurred into a few mental notes on trends, is people-watching. And watching people people-watch. It’s at the parties, and in the lines to check into the shows, and during the inevitable half-hour wait for the lights to dim, that fashion travels through the echo chamber of the fashionable to become style. The dicta you see in fashion magazines, months later, are written a hundred yards from the runway in the chit-chat among people trying to hail a cab. “I’m calling in that dress” “Which one?” “The third-to-last, the Vionnet-looking” “Try and get it. Anna actually nodded.” “Sofia looked amazing…” “Was that vintage?” ‘I think it was Alaia” “TAXI!”

But I was talking about my iPod. The great, the amazing thing about wearing your iPod around town, a town like this where you spend your days passing through construction sites and cab horns and one-sided cellphone conversationsis that the music allows you your mental privacy. As much as the headphones filter in the soundtrack of your life, they filter out the flotsam jetsam of fast-moving New York City. And most of the time, I treasure that autonomy, treasure it literally and metaphorically. The city will bear down on you, tugging you toward this look, that bar, whatever’s new, newer, newest. But you may stand aside, and with a polite nod to the crowd, play your own mix.

Standing there before the half-strung tents, however, I was glad for a moment that my iPod balked. Sixth Avenue reasserted itself the guy at the falafel stand yelling his order, the bike messenger zig-zagging across lanes of traffic, the woman striding toward her office, sipping soup and flipping through the latest issue of US Weekly as she walked. It struck me then that autonomy is well and good, but everyone once in a while, and especially when Fashion Week rolls around, it’s also good to let the city in, and watch, and listen.

In honor of New York Fashion Week, BurdaStyle is celebrating all things Big Apple.

The only presidential candidate with 100% name recognition is in many ways a mystery in plain sight. Is Hillary Rodham Clinton the unreconstructed liberal of the right wing’s nightmares, the Wellesley College feminist who tried to shove universal health care down the throat of a recalcitrant nation? Is she the scheming politico who used the public’s sympathy, post-Monica, to propel herself to the Senate? Is she a centrist like her husband, forging pragmatic compromises across the aisle? Or is she a calculating perma-candidate who will say, do, endure and vote for anything that might help her become President? Is Hillary a harridan, a lesbian, a long-suffering wife? Did she kill Vincent Foster? Is she smarter than Bill?

Whatever else she is, and America will have at least the next year to find out, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the ultimate New Yorker. For starters, she’s from somewhere else. And like everyone who arrives here suitcase in hand, Hillary came to New York on a mission. Dancers, designers, bankers, writers, restaurateurs, or social activists-what all New York transplants share with Hillary is ambition, lofty as the highest skyscraper. And like most of us, she’s run into some relationship trouble and gotten few bad haircuts on her way to the top. Her pantsuits don’t make her a fashion icon, but that gleam in Hillary’s eye, the one you can see even in her Wellesley yearbook photo, that gleam ought to inspire anyone who seeks to conquer the Empire State, and then the world.

There are those who would argue that each bi-annual fashion season begins with the couture, in Paris, and end with the prêt-a-porter, in Paris, and that everything in between Paris and Paris is just a lot of noise about clothes. But anyone who attends the shows knows that, as a habit of mind, fashion begins in New York. It’s with the New York City collections that the fashion week tempo is establishedthe rush from here to there and back again; the horror, overtaking you all of a sudden, that your outfit was only up to the last minute; the sensory overload that descends after a couple days navigating the scene on too little sleep and fashionably little food. It starts with the New York, and these days, the fashion season doesn’t end in Paristhe incorrigible go on to Sydney and Sao Paulo, Moscow and L.A., Miami and Toronto, and maybe even Stockholm, Mumbai, Jamaica, Beijing.

Frankly, I don’t know how they do it. The one season I attempted all four major fashion weeksNew York to London, London to Milan, Milan to ParisI arrived back home vaguely happy that soon, global warming would obviate the need for fashion, we would all run around naked and hot and be done with runways utterly and forever. For all the glamour, the flashbulbs and champagne, fashion is hard work. After a month of non-stop shows, I for one looked like I’d aged into the next season of clothes. This time, however, I’m taking preventive measures: I’m arming myself with skyn ICELAND’s STRESS DEFENSE CREAM. The whole skyn ICELAND range is designed to counteract stress I’m a particular fan of the line’s minty, foaming cleanser, which has a cooling effect on the skin and the mindbut the Stress Defense Cream was tailor-made for Fashion Week. Applied selectively, targeting the places on your face where the rictus sets in, it’s a bit like topical Botox. And over time, the cream works cumulatively to diminish the frown lines of fashion weeks past. I’ve never been so happy to look so last season.

Fashion is an industry that eats its young. This is generally to the goodfor the most part, the hacks and dilettantes fade away, while the visionaries become stars and the reliable churn out sportswear. And every season, the stylish place their bets on the Next Big Thing.

Rather than join in the anointing of untested talents, this season it seems appropriate to celebrate a few New York designers who’ve stuck around and come into their own.

Philip Lim already has one blockbuster brand to his creditDevelopment, the L.A.-based sportswear line he helped to launch then swiftly departed. 3.1. Philip Lim is better: Distinctive yet wearable, frothy but urbane, the line absolutely deserves the success it’s already had, and the wider audience it will no doubt be getting. Lim is going to the stratosphere this time.

Five years ago, Nicole Noselli and Daphne Gutierrez were the designers to watch: Their label, Bruce, had won them the coveted CFDA award for new talent, and even years later the clothes they made look cutting-edge. Then Bruce disappeared. But now Bruce is back, after an almost four-year hiatus. Together with the Katayone Adeli’s resurrection with KA7, and the resurgent Daryl K., the return of Bruce augurs the re-emergence of a particular kind of New York style, tough yet tailored, feminine but a touch punk, and made to be lived in.

Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra are no overnight success story: The two-time VOGUE/CFDA Award finalists had been honing their craft for a long time before the red carpet stylists came calling. But the past few seasons have seen the pair simultaneously broaden the scope of their line, Costello Tagliapietra, and sharpen its focus. The result: Pitch-perfect dresses in the classically American tradition of Norman Norell, Claire McCardell, Halston and Bonnie Cashin. More specifically, Costello Tag’s luxe, jersey-blend dresses emblemize go-anywhere, anytime New York City style: Uptown and down, from the East River to the Hudson, day in and night out, they are as easy to wear perfectly as they are perfectly sexy.

OK, the trailer sucks. Like, Warhol must be twirling in his grave sucks. But who cares? Factory Girl is Fashion Week’s must-see movie. The biopic takes on Edie Sedgwick, one of the style community’s secular saints, and is set amid the Warhol Factory scene that many fashion influencers still consider the sine qua non of New York cool. Designers have taken advance inspiration from the film hence the color-blocking and A-line shifts in store for Springwhich means that even if you miss seeing Sienna play Edie on screen, you won’t be able to avoid the simalucra of Sienna-as-Edie on the street. How very Andy after all.

Playlist’s Best of the Rest, 100% film edition:

1. His Girl Friday. Rosalind Russell is a fast-talking dame who’s had it with the city. Super-suave Cary Grant is the ex-husband who won’t let her go. And together, with a little help from director Howard Hawks, they raise banter to an art form in a movie that’s as much a valentine to this crazy darn town as it is a love story about two cockeyed journalists made for each other, and for New York.
2. The Taking of Pelham 123. Ah, New York City in the ‘70s. Think, “The Bronx is burning.” Think, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Think, masked hoodlums to whom Tarantino owes a little something taking the subway hostage, with only seriously sardonic Walter Matthau able to stop that train. There are better movies about the Big Apple’s good old bad days, but there’s no movie more nitty-gritty New York.
3. Ghostbusters. Some might say that Oliver Stone’s Wall Street is the emblematic film of New York’s go-go ‘80s. But my vote for the greatest movie about the Reagan era city is Ghostbusters, which has it all: Bill Murray, aspirational real estate, a media circus, and as a kind of bonus, the villain is a guy from the EPA.
   

You have to want to love London. It’s not a city that reaches out for you it lacks the romance of Paris or Rome, the crazy dynamism of Tokyo or Hong Kong or New York, the grittiness of Berlin; coming to London as an American, speaking the language, there’s no edifying strangeness and no mistaking that the locals would just as soon do without you. I have friends, many of them, who visit London for the first or second or third time and return home befuddled by the fact that I love London as much as I do.

And I do. I love London because I always wanted to love London. I loved the idea of the city, an idea that’s now so hazy in memory, all I can remember about it is a stray line or so from Shakespeare this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden and the “Bittersweet Symphony” music video. My imagined England was in there, somewhere. But any city you love in advance is one you hope to find but never do. The London I love now is the one I made for myself by living there.

Britpop had peaked, but no one knew that yet. When my roommates and I signed the six-month lease on our Notting Hill flat, the neighborhood was still thick with untapped potential. We were four American girls, all just out of school and newly free, and looking back, I believe we all came to London to take the measure of our freedom by seeing how unlike ourselves we could become. A few months prior, I had been a student of Russian hunched over Dostoevsky. Upon arriving in London, I was a music journalist, a vocation I’d settled on partly because I loved music and partly because it seemed like the handiest way to meet cute and shaggy English boys. (Eventually, I’d meet plenty; more than enough.) By the time I left London a year later, I was convinced I was an actress. Anywhere else in the world, it is hard to credibly describe oneself as a music journalist/actress, but in London, at that time a great place for dabblers, it made sense. At a concert one night I met a director who needed an American girl for a scene in his film: These things just happened, the way it just happened that I found myself having lunch with Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker two weeks after moving, the way it just happened that one of my roommates became my best friend, the way it just happened that the owner of Coins, the scenester café where we’d camp out on weekend mornings, would hire me under the table now and then, when the money got tight. It felt normal to be lucky in London, as though all I’d needed to do to start the engine of my luck was book the flight, and show up.

Eventually, the luck ran outstarting with my visa. I did various things to put off the inevitable, up to and including a serious conversation about marriage with a Scot cinematographer who wanted a way to L.A. I suppose I could have just stayed, living cheap on freelance gigs and Coins, but by the time it became necessary to leave London, I was ready to go. The shine had worn off all the small things I’d treasured for a year pints at the pub down the street, Portobello market on Saturdays, openings at the Serpentine, the view of the city from Primrose Hill, parties at the Groucho and Soho House. London had ceased to be the place I’d come to, dreaming, and then it had ceased to be the place I’d despaired of making my own. It had become, prosaically, the place where I lived.

So I moved to New York. And every time I return to London, a little more of my city is gone. A person moved, a shop closed, a band broken up, a neighborhood changed. But I always find time to get lost at least once while I’m there and it’s then, staring around at unfamiliar streets, looking for landmarks, and realizing at last that I know where to go because I know where I am, that I discover my London all over again. It’s a great city for finding yourself.

This week, Burdastyle rocks London-style.

Sometimes I wonder why anyone bothers to pretend that we have fashion icons other than Kate Moss. Years from now, people will cite hers as the look of our time a look that’s hard to pin down, in fact, except by flipping through pictures of Kate and taking note of the changing ways she mixes high and low, old and new, sweet and slutty, slouchy and sharp, always to her own unerring whim. If she weren’t the one true supermodel, Kate would be the most in-demand stylist in the business and she remains the one true supermodel because now, because of her, fashion can’t exist without the approval of style. It used to be the other way around.

So what on earth is Kate Moss doing with Pete Doherty? The man in whom the cognoscenti have misplaced, and misplaced again, their hopes for rock’s future, Doherty is an almost-but-not-quite star with nothing, seemingly, to offer his legendary girlfriend. People compare them to Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards, the impossibly cool car crash couple of a few generations ago, but the analogy falls apart once you consider that, in this instance, the musician is the model’s groupie. Anyway, there’s Pete in photo after photo, one hand curled into Kate’s while the other dangles somewhere close to his self-destruct button. The romance’s enduranceafter breakups, scandals, stints in jailis mysterious, and therefore captivating. Kate is an icon all by herself, and Doherty, I suppose, is approaching iconic if only as another cautionary tale about talent wasted by addiction. Together, Kate and Pete are something else, the only public couple with everything to lose by being together, and nothing to gain beside each other. They must really be in love.

Jemma Kidd is the kind of woman you want to hate. Ex-model, married to some kind of prince or aristocrat, it girl, mom, entrepreneur. Vomit. For real. She makes it all seem effortless. But give Kidd credit for letting the hoi polloi peek behind the curtain: Her make up school in London aims to educate women on effortless beauty, while Kidd’s Make Up School cosmetics line, launched Stateside last year, tidies up all those tricks into a few key products. One palette takes care of color for the whole face, a lipstick comes with balm attached, and minimalists can rid themselves of clumpy mascara for good by means of Kidd’s cult Eyelash Tint.

But Jemma Kidd Make Up School has plenty for the maximalist, too stuff like the Crushed Jewel Jel Eyeliner, which confers some instant rock chick glamour on she who dabs it. The silvery-white hearkens back to Swinging London mod, the purpleish shimmer, more subtle than it seems, hints at New Wave cool, and basic black gives a bad girl smoky eye some welcome sparkle. Best of all: The liners are a breeze to use and instructions are included. It’s effortlessness for the rest of us.

London was slumping for a while. McCartney, McQueen, Galliano and the rest of the Cool Britannia crew decamped for Paris a long time ago, urged on by high-profile gigs at storied houses, and the back bench of young talent that London had always nurtured seemed to disappear, en masse, only to turn up in New York. But the tide is turning: Marc Jacobs is celebrating the opening of his UK flagship by presenting his Marc by Marc line in London this season, English designer Sophia Kokosalaki has taken up the challenge of relaunching Vionnet, and Nathan Jenden, the man behind Diane von Furstenburg’s line, is moving his eponymous collection to London after several seasons fighting the crowds in New York. And in the meantime, a whole new generation of designers is making London a mandatory fashion stop once again. Here are a few of the best.

Erdem Moralioglu is half-Turkish, was raised in Canada, and earned his fashion stripes at Diane von Furstenburg. On the other hand, he’s also half-English, a graduate of England’s Royal College of Art and the winner of the British Fashion Fringe award in 2005, so London is as natural a home base for his Erdem line as anywhere else. What makes Erdem intuitively English, however, is its aesthetic an urbane mix of English dandy, English punk, English eccentric, English gentry and English tailoring.

Christopher Kane didn’t pull any punches for his debut collection: The super-tight, super-mini dresses the 25 year-old designer sent down the runway last season served notice of a talent on the march. Though the Kane look owes something to ‘80s-era Versace and the banded Leger dresses now making a comeback, he made the references serve him, and not the other way around, by means of an LSD-trip palette and a penchant for idiosyncratic vintage detail.

London’s Fashion East show generally has one standout, and last season, Danielle Scutt was it. Like her fellow Central Saint Martins grad Christopher Kane, Scutt does body-conscious dressing with an exclamation pointbut her collection’s real drama was in its playful sense of proportion, pattern and shine.

Another Fashion East alumnus, Austrian-Greek designer Marios Schwab has a more subdued take on sexy than most of his peers. The clothes he showed last season were all in muted, Armani-esque colors, and hearkened back to the master, Alaia, in their precise and inventive cuts. But make no mistake Schwab’s glamazons could go toe-to-toe with any jetset vamp. With stealth on his side, Schwab made Spring ‘07’s most convincing case for bringing sexy back.

I once spent an hour alone in a bedroom with Damon Albarn. That’s not as racy as it soundsit was a motel in a gray suburb of London near the BBC studios, and I was interviewing him about the Blur album 13 while his publicist waited just outside the door. Damon himself was in a bit of a state, curled up on the bed with his fists clenched, rehashing the bad breakup that had inspired the record. I felt like his therapist. I felt like a therapist who’d been in love with her patient from afar and who now found herself alone with him, letting the tape run on the conversation while her mind played a loop of I am alone in a bedroom with Damon Albarn, I am alone in a bedroom with Damon Albarn, I am alone in a bedroom with Damon Albarn. I’d been in proximity to him before, seen him making his way down Portobello with his parka hood over his head, then at a party for some band, then downing pints with a few friends after a Chelsea match, but I’d never had the chance to observe that he was slighter and older than I’d pictured him, and watchful, and that he had a mole over one brow. He didn’t like making eye contact much, but all of a sudden, he did. Damon sat up on the bed, leaned toward me, and took my tape recorder in his hands. “I’m shutting this off,” he said.

Dear Reader, I’ll be frank: He’d made himself vulnerable to me, the 22 year-old American journo who’d found a way of getting people to talk by pretending to be incompetent at it, and though I was principled about these things in general I wanted, badly, to take advantage of his vulnerability. Damon turned off the tape and I pulled my chair close to the bed and for the first time in that quiet room, we locked eyes. He told me then that the girlfriend no one knew he had was pregnant. He’d just found out, and it felt absurd to him to be playing the part of the damaged boy on the album. I seemed nice, so he told me. Then he turned the tape on again, and we resumed our performance. Maybe that confession was part of the show be intimate, off the record; get the girl on your side. It occurred to me at the time. But the moment felt true, and the ploy worked regardless. I can’t review Damon Albarn’s music anymore Blur, Gorillaz, new band The Good, The Bad & The Queen because all of it brings me back to the strange ritual of that interview, the two of us fakers locked in a room with our private designs, making scripted conversation and connecting, for a minute only, to acknowledge the sham. I happen to love The Good, The Bad & The Queen. But you shouldn’t take my word for it.

Playlist’s Best of the Rest, London Edition:

1. Withnail & I. A description of its plot can’t do justice to Withnail & I. Suffice to say that this film about two actors taking a nutty trip to the country is about what you’d get by putting Hamlet, “I Am The Walrus” and all of Monty Python into a blender. U.K. kids know the dialogue by heart.
2. The NME. The nation that gave us the Beatles, Bowie and the Stones has an altogether appropriate case of music fever. Rock rag NME takes the scene’s temperature weekly, and always finds it scorching hot.
3. Slang. Cliché has it that the United Kingdom and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. Website www.peevish.co.uk/slang offers a handy guide for translating the native patois. Know your gits from your skints before you go.