New York Fashion Week Weekend Edition Part I:Fashion Overload Already? Adam, Spurr & Loden Dager

Saturday morning seems like so long ago.
Here in sensory overload FashionWeekLand, it takes a few days to pace ourselves, and we have already started skipping shows that are too far away or or too late. After all, we do need to leave ourselves some time to write...and sleep.
So Saturday started late for The Shophound at ADAM by Adam Lippes. We have always found his shows particularly enjoyable, and worth going out of our way for. This time we didn't have to do that, since Adam has bucked the trend and moved his show to Bryant Park. With everyone scaling back, it is heartening to see a designer make his show bigger. Lippes has taken the men's line off the runway, and for Fall, his unique sense of color made for an upbeat, collection that was enthusiastically received by the dramatically enlarged crowd. The only drawback here was the absence of pre-show cocktails that we enjoyed at Adam's off-site shows, but we suppose everything is a trade off in one way or another.

Later, we were off to Chelsea for Simon SPURR's menswear presentation at Milk Studios. Again, the advantage here was speed. We can get in and out of a presentation within five minutes, and we would have left directly after our perusal of the sleek collection, but we suddenly found ourselves in close proximity to Dutch model of the moment Lara Stone in a bathrobe. She was elaborately made up with a geometric hairpiece, for a photo shoot elsewhere at Milk, apparently, and had stopped by to take advantage of the bar, more than likely. When presentations serve cocktails on a Saturday afternoon, they run the risk of guests hanging around for an extra while longer, which was what happened at Spurr. Add a budding Supermodel in a bathrobe, and you've got quite an afternoon party.
On to LODEN DAGER, whose designers Oliver Helden, Paul Marlow and Alex Galan have been known for carefully choosing venues with a particular atmosphere. This time it was the library at The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen on West 44^th Street. There we had a nice chat with RACKED's Leslie Price, comparing notes on the shows so far. "There's a lot of facial hair here," she remarked, and it was true the crowd had a high hipster mustache quotient. It was a relaxed atmosphere, especially compared with the tent frenzy a couple of blocks downtown, and low key enough that Laura Dern and her husband Ben Harper could take their seats early, and without fuss instead of being ushered in from backstage amidst a papparazzi eruption, and graciously posing a picture if asked.
The show was concise and a nice evolution of the label's signature classical sportswear with quirks. There were even a few Loden Dager Ladies in the mix, but the women's line may take a few more seasons of refinement to find its voice.
Next, and last we skipped back to the tents for something called MONARCHY at the Promenade tent. It turned out to be the kind of L.A. based contemporary line that will style up their line to  make an entertaining show. Here we found a capacity crowd that appeared to include a lot of people there purely for entertainment rather than work. It as Saturday night after all. We found ourselves sitting next two a couple of charming gentlemen who may have arrive there via a bridge or a tunnel. Still, they were well behaved, though clearly a bit out of their element. When we say "L.A. based" we mean the collection is basically rooted in jeans with pockets and stitching that are just a bit too large paired with jackets featuring lots of trench and motorcycle details in combination. This was all barely hidden by the British equestrian styling (it's called Monarchy...get it?). It was all slickly produced featuring the requisite celebrities (New 90210's Anna Lynne McCord and our second Jennifer Love Hewitt sighting) but overall, like at Samantha Ronson, there was no real news there..

Details after the jump

THE RUNDOWNS:

ADAM BY ADAM LIPPES
MODELS: We're holding back on the Diversity Quotient for now because there are clearly a lot more black models working the runways in New York this season. We just don't have time to do the math to prove what is plain to see. Here, Georgie and Tao, a new Asian model were featured.
CELEBRITIES: Jenifer Love Hewitt and Actress Roweena King
GIFT BAG: There was a special gift bag for the front row, but every chair had one of Adam's famous T-shirts printed with "Love Is Blind" in a clever eye chart pattern, carefully arranged so that men's shirts were on seats assigned to men and women's shirts were on women's seats. They will be for sale to benefit the Sandra F. Lippes Cancer Research Fund

SPURR
MODELS: You can see evary on above. We are always amused to see Chris Jones, third from left, who wisely escaped the inanity of The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency TV show to become an actual working model.
GIFT BAG: An open bar was the gift bag here, and plenty of folks partook enthusiastically.

LODEN DAGER
MODELS: Again, all picrtured in the top photo. The team thankfully went for fresh faced and preppy instead of the skinny male waif hipster one might have expected.
CELEBRITIES: The aforementioned Ms. Dern & Mr. Harper were plenty of celebrity for this small show.
GIFT BAG: Free Kett lip balm with kind of a coconut flavor

MONARCHY
CELEBRITIES: 90210's Anna Lynne Mc Cord, Jenifer Love Hewitt & Twilight's Kellan Lutz.