New York City's style mavens are in their element. The Devil Wears Prada, the best-selling book-turned-movie centred loosely on the Manhattan-based fashion magazine Vogue, is doing well at the box office. Reality-TV fashion shows, which are usually filmed here, seem to be gaining popularity. And supermodel Naomi Campbell showed last week that it doesn't matter how much trouble you're in; dressing well is always a top priority. She sashayed into court wearing a tight black minidress and spiked heels, in a case in which she allegedly assaulted her maid with a mobile phone.
High fashion is setting the pace. And yet, New York's fashion scene isn't really all about Blahnik stiletto heels, Yves Saint-Laurent and Donna Karan dresses, or Marc Jacobs handbags. As the most diversified city in the world, its cultural tolerance extends not only to music, entertainment and behaviour, but fashion as well.
Take the popular styles of recent summers. A city-wide power blackout in 2003 brought Chinese-style slippers into the limelight. The plastic shoes - decorated with shiny beads and sold for US$10 a pair in Chinatown - had long been ignored by anyone with taste. But when the subways stopped, many women had to walk home from the office. Those in high heels were jealous of others who pulled the little slippers from their bags - and a phenomenon was born.
Even some of the wealthiest in New York seem to have abandoned the idea of dressing up. The new multi-billionaires in the hedge-fund industry, for example, prefer casual clothes to suits and ties - you don't need to bundle yourself in an inconvenient business uniform when you're that rich.
Mind you, theirs isn't the jeans-and-T-shirts 'office-casual' style of last decade's dotcom boom - though it might look the same to the uninitiated. No, we are talking about US$300 casual Armani shirts, US$400 designer wool trousers and US$400 shoes.
My favourite fashion bible is the weekly New York Observer newspaper. In May, it reported that head-to-toe white clothes were in, with white jeans being a staple in the wardrobe. No matter that many women dread the impact of dirty subways and streets - white was how it had to be, the paper decreed.
