There are many pressing issues to discuss during the Spring 2009 Fashion Week -- who of the presidential candidates has better color sense, the mortgage crisis' affect on the Armory and if Marc (Jacobs) will show there next season, does Favre look better in green and yellow or green and white, if Ike hits this weekend will you have boots to match your skirt...and so on. But there's one problem that has plagued Fashion Week for years and has been overlooked until now: as you can see by the accompanying photo, there is a monumental waste of space on the press riser.
If the best we can do is fit 75 photographers into a 75 square foot space, then we need to get our priorities straight. More photographers means more publicity for the designers, more publicity means more sales, more sales means more blow at next season's after-party - it's a no-brainer.
Many ideas have been tossed around: stacking photographers like Jenga, allowing only those with 29 inch waists and under onto the platform, robot photographers, or even hiring David Blaine as a consultant. Yet the ability to count confirmed members of the press and properly corral and stack them in the photographers' pen seems to escape fashion publicists. Thus I've taken it upon myself to develop a mathematical equation to determine how many photographers to expect at your show and, at the same time, tips on how to attract more.
What you do is take the couture quotient (more expensive, more press), multiply it by the LiLo factor (gay Lindsay in front row = Page Six guarantee) divided by time of day (photographers don't like to get up early) minus the Gas factor (no one scares press away like the Gastineau sisters) multiply it by the number of backstage sponsors (nothing attracts the press like free beer!) take all of that and subtract the square root of Anna Wintour. That's a rough idea of how many photographers you can expect.
In brief: P = ($ x LiLo )/ (TOD - Gas) x Beer - √ Win
Of course, this is not a flawless equation and there are other variables that could possibly affect the outcome, such as who holds the White House (we all know how Republicans feel about foreign press), if the F train is somehow running on time, or if B & H is having a Passover sale.