>> A month after the Spring 2010 shows finished, plans are already under way for the upcoming seasons.  Estee Lauder group president John Demsey confirmed that MAC will continue to sponsor an alternative New York Fashion Week venue at Milk Studios for the next two years, Fashion's Night Out is in the works again for next Fall — some retailers are even pushing to make the September 9 date sales tax-free.

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, which will have its last hurrah at Bryant Park in February for the Fall 2010 season, is moving to Lincoln Center starting in September 2010.  Today, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who resigned from Vogue back in June, ostensibly to spend more time with her family, has joined Lincoln Center as director, fashion week. Winston Wolkoff was director of special events at Vogue and was widely credited with building the Costume Institute Gala into the event it is today; she starts in her new position Jan. 1.

>> Soon after Maybelline announced it would be be taking over from five-year Bryant Park cosmetics sponsor MAC, MAC — presumedly, as New York Times' Eric Wilson put it, tired of having to share "a rather circuslike stage with other sponsors who were competing for attention, sometimes including makers of doughnuts, cameras, toilets and Big Macs" — announced that it would be producing the tentatively-titled MAC and Milk Fashion Week with Milk Studios at the same time as the traditional New York Fashion Week.

The event can be seen as either a complement or a competitor to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, but on the record, anyway, there seem to be no hard feelings.  Milk Studios founder Mazdack Rassi says of the initiative: "This week is not an alternative show space, it's a way of cultivating designers and helping them come up with new ways of selling their clothes."  And Zach Eichman, a VP of IMG Fashion, which produces the shows at Bryant Park, told the New York Times last week the company welcomed the MAC and Milk event and that bus service between shows would be available when possible. “We can’t do every show in the tents. We hope they will be successful.”

Alexander Wang will be there, so will Preen »