Tony Tigers.(Brief Article)

Every September, New York celebrates the fashion industry with Fashion Week, but the other 51 weeks are fashion weeks too. New York has the four elements necessary to harbor both a fashion industry and a fashion- attentive culture.

The first is exposure. There are eccentric New Yorkers who hole up in their apartments, sustained by a placenta of old newspapers and dirt. But normally eccentric New Yorkers must be out and about many times a day, simply to live. You are on view, and viewing others, on the subway to work, mailing a package, or picking up at one o'clock in the morning the carton of orange juice that you need for breakfast but forgot to get on the way home. In all these exposed activities, you'd better look decent. Lacking this short-range mobility, the suburbs follow fashion, never lead it.

The second element is money, for threads cost money, and threading them costs even more. New York's prosperity trickles down to all levels of society, above those who live in boxes. The relatively poor are intensely concerned with fashion, and often bequeath their whims and obsessions to the rest of us. After one epochal rise of hemlines, I read in the papers that the designers had taken their cue from the short denim skirts of Puerto Rican schoolgirls. Those sturdy young hams led a revolution.

Third on the list is lack of muck. A fashion center must be paved; when it rains, the water must vanish down drains. If you're a weekend gardener, a Christmas-tree farmer, a builder of decks, or a bow hunter, you cannot think too much about the clothes that will inevitably become soiled. Designers will think about you, and plunder elements of your lifestyle for their lines and their photo-shoots. Some designers have taken to pre-fading and even pre-ripping their clothes, to make them more evocative of the salt of the earth. But the dirt of the earth and fashion cannot coexist.

Last, and most important, is the snowball effect, so necessary to any creative community. George Balanchine famously said, build it and they (meaning, the proper audience) will come. That is the credo of the genius. But for a community of effort, the reverse is true: First they come, then they build. Once someone makes a foothold for a calling like fashion, then kindred souls flock from the hinterlands like swallows to be near the pioneer, and each other. The late Bill Blass was born in Indiana, but he did not stay there. The nesting instinct exerts its pull across generations.

One of the few designers my wife likes is Eskandar, a young Anglo-Iranian. He opened an enlarged boutique at Bergdorf Goodman after Fashion Week, and we went.

My sensitivity to women's fashion is as limited as a mole rat's to light. Whenever I go to Bergdorf's I can understand little more than the accessories on the first floor: jewelry-alligators and toads in cowboy boots, made of platinum-and purses-penguins, koalas, and frogs, made of crystals. What I like ...