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Amy Spindler

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Posted Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2000, at 9:00 PM ET

For designers who make both women's and men's clothes, this week has been a rare opportunity to double up on their runway shows. The men's fashion shows overlapped with the women's show dates this season. Cost cutting, since shows can run up to $100,000 and some toppish models make about $7,000 an hour, is always appreciated. So, suddenly, there are multitudes of male/female coordinated dressing opportunities. Perhaps more than there even were in the '70s, when "I'm his because he deserved the best" and "I'm his because he loves me" T-shirts were so popular.

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But the only major designer never to cave in to putting beefcaky male models on the runway clumping around in his clothes next to similarly dressed women, is Ralph Lauren. He really hates that male-model-on-the-runway stuff. And granted, it always looks a little silly, manly men striding around to show clothes, alternating with the women models, wearing her stripes to match his stripes, or cowboy togs to match his. Remember prom night? Your boutonniere, her poufy dress, everything in teal. The Academy Awards couples have started dressing a bit like that, color-coordinated for the photo opportunity. It's an earnest effort, when done most dramatically, to show how harmonious the marriage might be. But people with good marriages, I think, dress in stridently clashing clothes. No one who has time to think about spousal color-coordination can possibly leave room for wriggling some independence.

Ralph shows up this morning, followed by Michael Kors, who devoted his show to what he called "Palm Bitches" last season and dubbed "Park Avenue Princesses" this time around. If the film Boiler Room is the new Wall Street for the new greed-is-good era, certainly Kors is the new Lacroix. Remember those pouf dresses, the socialites' legs extended beneath them like living Joshua trees?

But the most important thing I have to do today is write a tangy little morsel of a speech for the New York Times Magazine's new entertaining editor, William Norwich. I'm told (I've done no research to verify this for lack of interest) that Martha Stewart started her career editing the "Entertaining" supplements of the New York Times Magazine. Billy Norwich, who was most recently a contributing editor at House and Garden magazine and a columnist of tangy morsels at the New York Observer, is going to do regularly what he did in this coming Sunday's magazine. Which is (although you should really buy the paper to find out): observe a wonderful party, write witty commentary, run through the easy recipes, and explain what makes the party a success. His story has an even greater voyeuristic appeal because he lets you eavesdrop on the conversation, too, which considering the guests, has a sort of Coppola The Conversation effect. The nice thing about having Billy at the Times is that he's one of those people who, the minute he leaves the room, everyone says how wonderful he is. Which anyone who's spent any time around journalists knows is not the sort of thing they want to bandy about, when there are so many spicier things you can come up with to say about someone.

The party is in the top-floor penthouse of the Times, which, if the building housed anything but the Times, would be a groovy playboy pad for illicit affairs. For those who peruse real estate ads, it has CITY and RVR VUS, WBFB, 40-foot ceilings, and a cook's kitchen. It would be a great studio apartment.

And Billy, unlike Michael Kors, has anticipated nostalgia for a time that isn't the '80s, so he's gone back to the 1950s for his appetizer recipes, which are from the legendary hostess Elsa Maxwell's cookbook. And which means they'll probably clog arteries, thicken waists, and be generally delicious.