When I heard Leigh Lezark was hosting a party at the Tribeca Grand Hotel to hype her new Dossier magazine cover, I thought it would be a great opportunity to help rehab her frosty image. Leigh, as many of you know, is the Queen of the MisShapes, which for several years has been New York's most in-demand deejay trio. Gawker famously nicknamed her "Princess Coldstare," and has been pretty relentless in tweaking both Leigh's haughty 'tude and the MisShapes' coolest-kids-in-the-room status.

As I made my way to the Tribeca Grand on a drizzly Friday night, I wondered if Leigh had gotten a bum rap. Maybe she had become the target of so much mean-spirited internet bile because, well, she was kind of a big deal, and people were jealous. I imagined getting her to open up about what was really going on inside that pretty little head. We'd talk about music and fashion, love and life, and by the end of the night we'd be sharing iPod playlists, clinking Champagne flutes and perhaps even planning a nice, long vacation together. Preferably somewhere warm, and without an extradition treaty!

I was still considering all of this when I saw Leigh holding court at a table near the Tribeca Grand's crowded bar. She went outside to smoke with two pals, and well, I guess I needed one, too. I followed them outside and bummed a light from one of her friends. "Aren't you Leigh?" I asked. "Yeah," she said with a big smile. And then I dropped the rancid stink bomb that I was writing about Fashion Week parties for Gawker and wanted to do a quick interview that would make everyone love her.

"Nope. No thank you." she said, pulling up her jacket's hood and looking away from me, her cigarette hand trembling. I started explaining how I just wanted to talk to her for a minute, but it was too late. Her male friend, a delicate-looking man in a red sweater, hissed, "It's not going to happen." I rambled for a few more seconds. Then a brunette in a black dress, said, wearily, "She said no nicely, so...." Feeling like a pedophile who had just been turned away from a petting zoo, I apologized for bothering them and and finished my smoke on the other side of the crowd in front of the hotel.

Back inside I was nursing my bruised ego with a drink when I was approached by the party's publicist, Krista Freibaum. I said that Leigh had just shot me down. Krista offered to talk to Leigh and vouch for my good intentions. I thanked her, and watched her walk over to Leigh's table. Pretty soon, both women were arguing and gesturing wildly. Clearly, this wasn't going well.

"I told her you were a nice guy and you were trying to change the way she was represented on Gawker," Krista told me when she returned. "And she said, 'I don't care about Gawker. They're just gonna spin it in a way that makes me look bad.'"

I really couldn't argue with Leigh's reasoning, but I still wanted to talk to her. I saw one of her fellow MisShapes, Geordan Nichols, heading outside, and stopped him on the stairs. I asked if there was one song that embodied the ethos of Fashion Week right now.

"I think that's an idiotic question," he said. "There's no song of Fashion Week." Ok, well at least he was having some fun with me. He was explaining that, much like a snowflake, no MisShapes set was exactly the same, when Leigh walked by and snapped, "Geordon!" before stomping away.

"She won't talk to me," I said. "I know, she hates you," he said with a smile. I told him that I was nominating Lele's "Breakfast" as the official song of Fashion Week after I heard the MisShapes play it at a party at the Versace store. "It's a great song, we all love it," he said. I asked what Geordon thought the message of the wonderfully dirty dance jam was. "Breakfast, bitches, pussy....I don't know." Then he said he had to get his friends inside and handed me a drink ticket.

Skye Parrott, the co-founder of Dossier, the biannual arts and culture mag that was throwing the party, photographed Leigh for the cover. Besides having a cool name, Skye was nice enough not to call me idiotic or refuse to talk to me. She even said she was tickled when this website recently wrote about her rash of mentions in New York Times. "I get all my news from Gawker so I was very excited," she said. "The only thing I regret is that somebody told me before I got to see it myself. It's really the first site I check in the morning."

Well, it was nice to know that somebody there loved me. But the party was almost over and I was about ready to bolt. I looked over at Leigh's table and she was yelling into the ear of a tall rocker dude with a shag hairdo. He gave me a conciliatory head nod. Meanwhile, it was just as clear that I was talking about her with my friends. Seriously, this was getting embarrassing.

I went outside for a final cigarette of the night with my friend George before we split for the Tribeca Tavern. I saw Leigh smoking near the scene of my earlier humiliation. She's looking over at me and I'm looking over at her. "Go talk to her, dude," George said. "She wants to talk to you. Give her one last chance."

Then I made my move. I walked over to Leigh and said, "Look, you don't have to be nervous. I'm writing about you and I'm writing about this party, and I just want to find out where your head's at tonight." A male friend of Leigh's urged her to give in and talk to me. "He's a cool guy," he said.

She accompanied me to a empty pocket near the hotel entrance. She is very small and strikingly pretty up close. She wore a black Chanel dress and black Chanel shoes, and her fingernails were painted blue. I turned on my tape recorder.

So how do you stay sane doing these events every night?

"I'm used to it. I've been doing this since I was 17. I'm good to go."

Are you nervous?

"I'm busy, honey! This is work."

Are you sure you're not nervous?

"I'm not nervous. You're saying that I'm nervous. I am not nervous."

I tell her that I'm nervous.

"Good, you should be. You're writing for Gawker."

I say that I've been made fun of by Gawker too. I understand why she was leery.

"Then why are you writing for them?"

Because they asked me. And because I felt like doing something different.

"Do that, then." She points to a short bald guy with devil horns on his head.

Do you think they're permanent or just for the party?

"I hope that they're permanent, but I doubt it. They look like Ricky's stick-on horns"

She starts to relax a little bit. I ask if she has any post-Fashion Week plans. "It's Fashion Month for me. I go to London on the 17th, and then Milan and Paris, and after that I go to Turkey, and then do a whole Asian tour, and then a whole South American tour. I'll be back in New York in the New Year."

Wow, that's like going on a world tour with a band. Do you have groupies?

"I don't know, define a groupie. We have people that will drive pretty far for it, yes. People have come to parties in New York from all over the world. I don't really know about the other countries, they just come."

I mean do you have obsessed male fans that send you, like, a Leigh Lezark diorama, or anything that has really weirded you out?

"I'm not going to tell you."

I'd love for you to tell me!

"I'm not telling you so long as that thing has a blinking red light."

Just then a European guy with frizzy blonde hair asks her to pose for a picture with him. He definitely looks like he has made a Leigh Lezark diorama or two. He's the the first of a stream of fans, both men and women, who approach her during our chat.

"I don't have any stalkers," she says. "I'm a normal person just like you. I'm trying to make a living. I'm trying to have fun."

OK, what do you think about the whole Princess Coldstare thing?

"I love it. Why not? It was silly at the time and still is silly."

So all those Gawker items written about you don't annoy you?

"It doesn't bother me. Its just silly and why would I involve myself in something that I find completely ridiculous."

Well, that's a good attitude, I guess.

"That's the only reason why I told you that I didn't want to talk to you."

What would you be doing if you weren't doing this deejay/model/downtown style icon stuff?

"I'd probably be a doctor. I always liked blood and gore, why not? I love to fix people."

I told her I was nominating "Breakfast" by Lele as the song of Fashion Week.

"I don't agree with you. That's just a fun, funny song that people don't expect to hear."

She wouldn't name her Fashion Week song, but said everyone should download "Animal" by Miike Snow.

"They're three producers from Sweden," she said. "They're good."

A woman kisses her cheek. "We're wrapping it up," she tells me as she heads back inside. And then she was gone. Well, it was fun while at lasted! Actually, not so much. But I truly did appreciate her taking the time to talk to me. Thanks, Leigh.

Now it's up to you to decide which song is better to listen to while fiercely dry-humping Fashion Week!

"Breakfast" by LeLe

"Animal" by Miike Snow

That's all for now. If you need me, I'll be making a diorama. Top photo of Leigh was taken by Skye Parrott for Dossier magazine. Here are the rest.

Fashion's Night Out is on Thursday, September 10 — Anna mentioned it on the Late Show — and it is an evening to fight one of the great ills of society: people not buying enough clothes! Yes, go out and buy things or else fashion will die and we will have to dress in sack cloth and Ed Hardy T's for the rest of our lives!

The FNO website describes:

In a global initiative to promote retail, restore consumer confidence, and celebrate fashion, U.S. and international editions of Vogue are coordinating evening extravaganzas in their respective world fashion capitals.

Even though they're trying to sell it like one (and even asking for volunteers) it is not a charity. That's right, it's bunch of store parties across the five boroughs. In Manhattan just about every fashion emporium is participating from Balenciaga to Banana Republic and Narcisco Rodriguez to Nine West. If you live in the Bronx, you're stuck with only Macy's and Lane Bryant. Sorry.

What exactly will be going on? Some highlights:

• The Misshapes will be spinning at Versace.
• Tom Ford is having a cocktail party (Tom Ford not included)
• Our Hero Grace Coddington will be "telling a visual story" in the SoHo Prada store.
• Cindy Crawford will appear at the much maligned JCPenney in Herald Square.
• Oscar de la Renta will be singing at the Carlyle Hotel. Vogue editor Hamish Bowles will be singing at Juicy Couture. How that is helping humankind, we have no idea.
• Carolina Herrera herself throws a party for photog Larry Fink at her boutique.
• Anna Wintour told Letterman that she'll be at Macy's in Queens, but she didn't say which one. We are determined to track her down and get a photo.
• Bergdorf Goodman seems to be the most fun of all, with windows by Zac Posen, a celebrity designer cook-off judged by Padma Lakshmi, the Olsen twins tending bar, and André Leon Talley hosting some sort of game show.

The plan seems to be to spend a lot of money getting people in the stores to spend a lot of money. The one thing we haven't heard anything about is discounts. Just because Catherine Malandrino is converting her Meatpacking showplace into a French cafe for the evening doesn't mean that suddenly more people will be able to afford one of her cocktail dresses. Also, none of the money made will go to charity, it will go right into the pockets of retailers, where it belongs. Most participating locations will have stations for visitor's to donate used clothes for charity, but it seems a bit like bringing a canned good to get access to an open bar.

So, just why is Anna doing this? Of course if all the brands go out of business, so will Vogue. But times of crisis are also the best times to consolidate power. Who knows if this one-night shopping event will save New York's fashion industry (it won't) but it already has people talking about Anna as if she's the one and only person who can save the fashion world from crumbling. Also, Condé Nast is sure to give her another 5-year contract (and, we hear that the deal is already done). Well played, Anna. Well played.

(Warning: I would say this story signifies Nothing, but it probably signifies Nothing-1!)

Once upon the early aughts I lived in Philadelphia with two other soon to-to-be bloggers and a sad young literary journal editor.* When we lived in Philadelphia we were gainfully employed but also bored, so we — well, chiefly Pressler, who had a "gossip" column in the local alternative newsweekly, but also the other three of us, who committed various acts of "journalism" — unconsciously went to work constructing our own memory palace of microcelebrities, proving that a microcelebrity economy can exist even in a city with a crippling five percent wage tax and a severe (SEVEEERE) case of "brain drain"! The key was simply to 1. Zero in on someone trying to get attention and 2. Write about them in such a way that captures/wryly acknowledges/satirizes the absurdity of their endeavor to get your attention. Among them were:

1. A party promoter who was sort of like our Julia Allison named Rachel Furman. Pressler liked to call her "Hotel heiress Rachel Furman" but she eventually started a business not promoting parties but just showing up to them and the business, and eventually she, were called "Rachel Inc."
2. Restaurateur Stephen Starr, who owned all the restaurants in town and dated a much younger woman named January, and another restaurateur Neil Stein, who was a huge cokehead and pillhead and owned nothing but he used to write Pressler from prison, where he had to go on charges of tax evasion and being a big pillhead I think. I believe we pretended they had a "feud" although Neil Stein was too much of a drug addict to really feud with people and Stephen Starr's actual feud was with Jeffrey Chodorow, but Chodorow did not live in Philadelphia so we acted like he did not exist, even though he was actually important.
3. A crew of ambitious publicists who traveled in packs, stole one anothers' clients and marketed themselves by dressing like Julia Allison and sending out Christmas cards with pictures of themselves in Sex & The City poses. At the time we thought they were kind of pathetically trashy but at that time The Hills did not exist, much less The Real Housewives of New York. They all feuded all the time! Then we found out one of them was bisexual and had an "open relationship" with her husband and that was fun too.
4. And speaking of Christmas cards: a prodigiously obnoxious "blueberry heir" named Anthony DiMeo who became a sort of John Fitzgerald Page-cum-Tucker Max sort of character for us. Girls in his apartment building emailed us constantly to attest to his terrible woeful obnoxiousness. Pressler scanned his Christmas card for one of her columns, and DiMeo sued her. Fun times!
5. Gervase. Of Survivor I fame. (Obviously!)
6. A state senator named Vince Fumo who supposedly bought fake tits for his bartender girlfriend and had really amazing hair transplants.
7. An assortment of deejays, because hipsters were very important back then, the most — oh who am I kidding with the "most" -0 notable of whom was Diplo.*

See, it was not too unlike Gawker! Except we sort of hated Gawker in those days, because we read it and assumed the people it covered were somehow less pathetic and more special than the people we covered, which was actually not true. (Also this guy named A.J. who was from Philly but living the awesome New York used to try and get us to move because Philly was so pathetic.) But somehow Jessica convinced everyone that Philadelphia was the "Sixth Borough" and around that time Gawker even noticed us! Then somehow Doree and I ended up working here and Jessica meanwhile got a job working with former Gawker editor Jessica Coen at New York's Daily Intel. And A.J. — following a stint back in Philadelphia! — is also working for Gawker Media. And last I heard:

1. Rachel Furman had some sort of existential crisis wherein she went off the internet and drove cross country to get a nose job.
2. Stephen Starr owns a bunch of restaurants in New York now and he no longer returns our flirtatious text messages.
3. One of those publicist girls told everyone she was a millionaire.
4. Some guys made the TV show we always wished we had made about the whole scene but, who are we kidding, we don't know how to do that.
5. Diplo stopped dating M.I.A. and is still nowhere near as annoying as any of the Misshapes!
6. Vince Fumo was charged in a 139-count, 267-page corruption indictment. (I guess we could have paid attention to that!)
7. Anthony DiMeo sued Tucker Max.***

Anyway, today the same shit keeps happening with a whole new cast of new people! Every time we sit down to devote ourselves to trying to write something a little more pointful, it's…Mary Rambin! Raffaelo Follieri! Tao Lin! Jared Paul St…ill?! See, but it never lets up! Eventually "our Gessen" — he lives here now too! — wrote a highly thoughtful think piece on the subject for the Times Magazine. Perhaps we might direct you to the line:

This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

And trust us, "out there" does not only mean New York. It is like Staphylococcus Aureus…it's actually everywhere, but it's not going to emerge as the bombastic plague of pointlessness until you start cultivating it in the ego-advancing agar of your wholly unwarranted attention!! (It's the microbiology of microcelebrity, doncha know!) (I know! It doesn't ever stop though.) And to that end I will leave you with two quotes from a seventeenth century philosopher I learned about from this N+1 guy:

If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.

It's universal! But… this

To establish oneself in the world, one has to do all one can to appear established.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and establish! Perhaps I can interest you in Tumbling your endeavors? We'll be most gracious followers.

*One was former Gawker editor Doree Shafrir, another was New York magazine Daily Intel blogger Jessica Pressler, and the literary journal editor — "our Gessen," as Doree calls him fondly — was a guy named Matt "Mattathias" Schwartz. (Everyone was intimidated/repelled by Schwartz's highminded seriousness at first! But I ended up dating him and he turned out to be high-mindedly serious in a good way.
**Philadelphia deejays have a long history of local prominence: we often found ourselves writing about the antics of this one, who is now 67 years old.
***Though alas, Tucker Max won the great douche-off.

Bonfire of Inanities [Eye Weekly]

10.Last Night's Party. Missbehavin photo #2893: I wish this photo wasn't cut off at the bottom, because I would really love to know what, exactly, this dickstick is "2 Cool For."

9.The Cobrasnake. End of an Era photo #2833: What this fashion accessory lacks in practicality it more than makes up for in utter fucking stupidity.

8. The Cobrasnake. Grande Finale photo #2612: Looks like we got ourselves a visit from the Ghost of Misshapes Future!

7. The Cobrasnake. End of an Era photo #2963: Say what you will about Misshapes, but if these people didn't have each other, just what would they have? (Other than HPV.)

6. The Cobrasnake. Grand Finale photo #2403: This dude looked pretty fucking punk rock to begin with, but the blush and eye make-up pushes him into a realm of nihilistic badassitude never before thought possible.

5. Last Night's Party. Anti photo #1178: Something seems somehow out of place in this picture, but I just can't quite put my finger on what...

4. Last Night's Party. Anti photo #1175: I'm not sure what that blue wizard potion is, but it seems to turn whoever drinks it into a sexually ambigious cheetah rapper.

3. The Cobrasnake. Grand Finale photo #2457: So this guy was getting ready to go out for the night, trying to pick out an outfit, and he somehow managed to arrive at the thought, "What if The Crow cried tears of glitter?"

2. Last Night's Party. Mermen photo #3015: It looks like a magical peacock farted jewels onto a tranny's face.

1. Last Night's Party. Mermen photo #3069: "Hey Donny, you think we should put on our psychedelic court jester hazmat suits tonight?" "You read my mind, Francine. But let's have another absinthe enema first, shall we?!"

Previously: Deleted Scenesters

Hipster spokesmen the MisShapes want you to stop stereotyping their people. "If you're wearing black pants and shaggy hair you're automatically a 'hipster,'" MisShape member Leigh Lazark complains to Daily Intel. "I think it's just as offensive as calling somebody 'bridge and tunnel,'" adds Geordon Nicol.

MisShapes to World: End Hipster Profiling [NYM]

As we circled the room, we ran into professional muse and Look Book victim Andre J, who called Gawker fierce before his friend told us Andre himself is the epitome of fierce. "Fierce," we replied, fiercely. Under a beautifully carved threshold, we met Kristian Laliberte's nemesis, Micah Jesse.

A red blazered and clearly tipsy Aldon James, the National Arts Club president, seemed happy as a clam to be surrounded by young guylinered gays. Some other members huddled in the back of the room, or attached like barnacles to the settees, seemed a little more timid in their embrace. Hadn't they ever seen the Dark Crystal? They were the Skekis and they needed these Gelflings to survive.

You can even vote on which "hipster" touchstones are still "cool." We'd encourage you to go over there and make sure that Gawker continues to fall into the "played out" category. We'd consider it an honor to be lumped in with "Murder Mystery Parties" (wtf?) and "Cocaine (the drug)." Also, have you heard of this new hot neighborhood called Greenpoint?

MisShapes at Condo Opening [Metro]
Photo via

I was walking west on Spring Street on Saturday night and as I was walking by Don Hill's, I noticed a dude passed out laying on the sidewalk with his head propped against the side of the building. It was freezing and nobody was outside and he was in a t-shirt. I also noticed a guy trying to revive/argue with him. I noticed the dude on the ground was one of the MisShapes and so was the guy leaning over him. No idea which was which, because they look like twin muppets.

Misstep for Misshapes [DBTH]

[Image via Mick Rock]

The MisShapes Are Coming! [losanjealous]
Our MisShapes problem
[Image: Patrick McMullan]

Looks like there's room in there for The Other Guy and Leotard Fantastic, too. Maybe even Jackson Pollis, if they squeeze.

My Fashion: Leigh Lezark's Album [NYM]