It would surprise some people to learn that Mr. Gallo had blond curls and a button nose as a boy. Then, one day — as suddenly as an event in a fable or a dream — he experienced his first “sex thoughts” and his nose grew large and his hair turned dark. And now he is a director famous for having persuaded Chloé Sevigny to be filmed performing on him an act whose name one is discouraged from printing here.

“People think I look scary and mean, and maybe I am scary and mean,” Mr. Gallo said. “But I always wished I had classic nerdy WASP looks.” He always wished, Mr. Gallo added, improbably, that he looked like George Will.

And Mischa Barton always wanted to be Meryl Streep, or at least as much like Meryl Streep as Lindsay Lohan got to be in “Prairie Home Companion,” or anyway like someone with a little more industry heft than the slightly-too-pretty girl who portrays Marissa Cooper on the hit show “The O.C.,” or did until her character was killed off in the usual mysterious automobile “accident” last May.

And that, one presumes, is why she seemed to be everywhere, always, throughout Fashion Week, as ubiquitous and ethereally beautiful as the Holy Ghost, although easier to capture on film.

And this may be the time to say to all those people who cruelly deride young actresses as relentlessly driven strobe-addicted publicity hounds that being one is hard work. Fashion shows are little more than job boards for actors. It is not, after all, as if starlets can post on Monster.com.