6:00 p.m. I, along with about 100 of my most fashionable friends who I don’t know yet, am admitted into the W hotel’s Great Room which, according to the W website, is the perfect place to hold an event that is “amplified.”

6:01 p.m. I pick my way through a dense crowd of photographers, poshly dressed children, and incredible-smelling women embracing so enthusiastically I can only assume they are enemies.

6:02 p.m. I come face-to-navel with the focal point of the room: a collection of 20 models, arranged class-portrait-style on a tiered platform draped in beige sheets. (The inspiration for Erin Fetherston’s Autumn/Winter 2014 collection, according to the Erin Fetherston Autumn/Winter 2014 collection printed press release: Manhattan’s famously sororal Barbizon Hotel for glamorous, ill-fated ladies.)

6:03 p.m. I canvass the perimeter of the platform, to better understand how the women are arranged. Most of them stand, though a lucky few are permitted to sit in chairs holding peculiar poses.

6:04 p.m. One, who looks like the actress Rose Byrne, only less surprised, is arranged artfully above the fray on a ladder. Another balances nervously on a stool. All wear 4-inch Manolo Blahnik pumps.

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6:05 p.m. Somehow–I guess, because so many things in life take about 15 minutes–I get it into my head that the presentation will take about 15 minutes. I marvel that the models are still able to keep so still five minutes in. The only fidgeting is from those few ladies wearing strapless dresses, whose small busts cannot support such an ambitious attempt to defy gravity; they tug their creeping tops back up at a rate of once or twice a minute.

Otherwise, movement is limited to heads and eyes.

6:06 p.m. I accept a glass of gratis sparkling wine and walk around the perimeter of the room.

6:07 p.m. Swinging ’50s hits like “Papa Loves Mambo” and “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” pipe out from all corners.

6:08 p.m. What a dynamite place to host a memorable conference.

6:09 p.m. Making eye contact with one of the models isn’t like making eye contact with a stranger in real life because, in real life, a stranger whose gaze you catch from across the room will quickly look away. If you make eye contact with a model and avert your gaze, it is not uncommon–but very unsettling–to find her still staring at you when you look back at her several beats later. If a person did this to you on the bus, you would interpret the act as a tacit declaration that they mean to stab you. The models seem content to wage silent mental warfare.

6:10 p.m. I get very excited that the presentation is about to wrap up.

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