Longing In The Lunchroom: How Starrett Lehigh’s Food Hall Is Emblematic For The True Meaning Behind NYFW

As you take your daily hot girl walk along the Hudson and get a hankering for caffeine or a sweet treat by the time you reach 26th street, your only choice of sustenance nearby will be at the OllyOlly market in the Starrett Lehigh commercial building. If you stumble upon the food hall during a particular week in February or September, you’re in for much more than an oat matcha and an almond croissant.  

An unassuming fast paced cafeteria for all of the lunch meeting-ers who occupy West Chelsea’s commercial building catering to some of the fashion’s biggest names, transformed into an organic runway during NYFW F/W24. As Spring Studios has been removed as the epicenter for the NYFW shows, Starrett Lehigh has stepped up to take on the role. The eighteenth floor window clad industrial style showspace, however, is just one of the runways where New York showcases her most outrageous fashion. The other lies on the ground floor of the building among the casual kebab, pizza, thai curry, and coffee. 

What I’m referring to of course, is the melting pot of show guests who rush out the door at eight am with a protein bar in mouth as their sustenance for the near future, models who cannot bear to eat the craft service pre-show and see it cleared out post show to their dismay, and show crashers who are far too cold from standing outside in a tutu and a glittery headdress for three hours. They all seek refuge in coffee and a quick bite at the OllyOlly food hall. The result: a real life catwalk of perfectly manicured ensembles, model off-duty looks, and just a sprinkle of gaudy costumes… and of course barista aprons thrown into the mix. This sight is the very pinnacle of the multifaceted and interconnected system that New York Fashion week stirs up.

Twice a year I reach out to my previous fashion PR employer pleading to freelance for the company’s upcoming shows. As a rookie stylist and writer, with just a year of experience under my belt, I know better than to request to attend the season’s hottest shows. I’m confident enough to know that I will be a welcomed guest one day, and humble enough to know that that day is not today. So instead I work the door. Organizing seating cards, memorizing VIP face sheets, checking in 300-400 guests for hours pre-show, while enthralling for me, is all in effort to stand behind the speakers and get a glimpse of the newest collections that are sure to set the frontier for the following season’s fashion climate. The moment the models twirl down the runway in their long and assertive strides clad in intricately crafted ensembles, I am certain that I would check in a thousand names just to do it all over again. But oh- if I was only established enough to be invited. Enter: aspiration. 

I yearn to one day find success in fashion styling and journalism to be a sought after guest at NYFW (anyone in the industry who tells you they don’t care about that is lying to you and themselves) not to be ogled or photographed, but rather to be able to observe the fabrication of each collection without having to wear my glasses. I gasped at Helmut Lang’s F/W 24 utilitarian uniforms featuring cutouts and asymmetrical layering. It was not until I reviewed the collection on Vogue runway, however, that I even noticed the silk made bubble wrap garments that were intended to emanate a sense of “self protection.” I was blown away by Ludovic De Saint Sernin’s use of florals in an androgynous and commanding manner. It was upon my online rabbit hole that I learned how they were intricate appliques on his signature mesh fabrication. Oh how I desired to be a little bit closer to notice these things first hand! 

You see, what I’m getting at is that the cafeteria of the Starrett Lehigh building during NYFW houses diverse and eclectic individuals who all share one human condition: they are hungry. The guests are hungry to get their hands on the garments that they just observed so that they can sport or style them, I’m hungry to one day have the honor to be in close enough vicinity to actually perceive and analyze each designer’s collection, the crashers are hungry to one day gain that recognition and notoriety that the VIP’s prancing into the shows seem to possess so effortlessly, and the models? Well they actually might just be hungry. 

Fashion week encapsulates the magic love potion that the industry places upon its primary, secondary, and even tertiary stakeholders. The potion places an aspirational haze upon its audiences lasting about five to six months before the following season’s redose. The collections, the members, the parties, they all play a role in inciting a certain spell of mysticism and whimsicality in an otherwise mundane world. For about a week stylists who are sick of full look policies and LORs, writers who are sick of putting together shopping stories for advertisers, PR’s who are sick of sample trafficking, and crashers who are sick of hustling day and night to get a taste of the industry, are reminded why they do it all and left longing for more. 

I seem to have been administered a particularly heavy dose this season. Amidst concluding my senior thesis at Parsons School Of Design whilst working two jobs to stay afloat in the industry, sitting down to write is something that often ends up on the back burner. As I stood in the corner of each show that I worked, with the speaker’s base reverberating through my chest, designers like Peter Do, LDSS, and Piotrek Panszczyk Burke revived the flutter in my heart that imaginative fashion ignites. Now I am left with the aspirational haze that fashion week has mastered. It seems as though I have been left with no choice but to sit down and write, so here I am.