It was like a scene out of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Cocooned inside the Ground Transport Module, we nosed downtown in West Side traffic that stuttered in frustration as bicyclists whizzed by, jaunty as you please. A perfect clusterclog—late rush hour constipating the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, preparations for the 9/11 commemoration, and the start of Fashion Week—joined forces with the usual urban paralysis to turn lower Manhattan into a clenched jaw. I was stuck in the slow motion version of Escape from New York.

Fashion Week was the impetus for my epic inchworm journey, but my destination wasn’t on the island, where most of the shows are set, but in the industrial side pocket of Brooklyn’s Red Hook, where H. P. Lovecraft once set a tale of horror. Rachel Comey was staging her Spring 2016 collection at Pioneer Works, a show proceeded by a cocktail reception, a sippy affair that I had already missed due to transport problems beyond the traffic inertia—point is, I was running late. Very late. And at the rate we were not going, I wouldn’t arrive in Red Hook until after dinner was served and the crew was tearing down the set, so to speak; not the start I wanted for my Fashion Week safari.

Fortunately, the fashion world, much like the rock-and-roll gladiatorship of yore, runs on its own clock, a Salvador Dali device of melted time and delayed gratification. As late as I was when I was finally ejected out of the pod door, the show hadn’t started yet and only the first course had been served. A fashion show that feeds its guests is a very civilized practice, and Comey is its pioneer. It fosters a chatty, relaxed, mingly ambiance that doesn’t make everyone feel as if they’re standing at sentry attention even while sitting down, watching and being watched, judging and being judged, viewing the scene through rifle-crosshair eyes.

The atmosphere, the arty-industrial setting, reminded me of the loft parties that literary magazines sometimes held in the 80s, in particular a party hosted by Open City—a flashback prompted perhaps by the presence of Parker Posey, who once upon a time dated the writer Tom Beller, co-founder of Open City. An even more potent reverie-jogger for me personally was the sight of Deborah Harry, lead singer of Blondie, whom I saw so many times at CBGB’s and remains buttercream luminous today while so many of her fellow and sister punkers have sprouted straw. Emily Mortimer was there, as was Downton Abbey’s distinguished roadkill Dan Stevens, whose crossdressing character in High Maintenance (whose stars and creators were also visible) has a preference for Rachel Comey outfits, which is just so, so, très, très Brooklyn. So there we all were, fashion writers, editors, celebrities, and devotees alike, so different in our funny little ways and yet one thing binding us on this most humid of late summer nights: we were all sticky. Though some less than others, since many celebrities seem to possess their own internal cooling systems, something science should look into.

As singer Justin Vivian Bond slowly built to an incantatory crescendo, out the models came, materializing from the sides and other points of distribution, taking their place on a riser, swaying from side to side once they were all assembled, as if they might be waiting their cue to break into an inspirational chorus of “We Are the World.” But, no, they dispersed one by one, or in tandem pairs, moving through and around the tables, managing to give the impression that they were migrating barefoot even though they were wearing clogs (one of Comey’s trademarks). Most of the models were not professionals but dancers and yoga teachers, following not the direct line of runway models with their precision march and assassin stare, but the floaty walk of Zen monks and mystic seers. Ecofeminism was the theme of the show, titled “The Circle Is Gathering,” and the harem pants, bare-midriff outfits, denim shorts and pants, asymmetrical drapings, bazaar-striped vests, and Western jackets had a spacious breathe (the bodies beneath seemed boneless, unhindered) and evoked a larger space of shifting sands and nomadic questings, a sense of passage. The last stately figure wafted by and the procession was done, disappearing into the mirage. All that work, effort, staging, catering, choreography, and rehearsal, and it’s over in the span of a dream, spending its afterlife on the Internet. Forks attacked the remains of dessert and some of the famous faces made their farewells to tuck themselves safely inside their waiting chariots.

On the looping ride through the Bronx across bridges and through tunnels, our car passed Yankee Stadium, which looked intergalactic with its stadium lights ablaze, and then into Manhattan, where the scowling faces on every uptown corner let me know I was home.