Fashion week frenzy hits New York

PART trade show, part social event and part marketing blitz, New York’s Fashion Week is up and strutting.

With an eye toward people rather than clothes, reporters and photographers spent a day poking around the tents at Bryant Park, navigating the backstage thicket of blow-dryer-wielding stylists, pole-like models and headset-wearing publicists and sizing up the scene along the catwalks.

Betsey Johnson is to Carolina Herrera what a misfit is to a debutante when it comes to the designers' clothes, personal aesthetics and, as a tour of the shows revealed, behind-the-curtain shenanigans.