“We all want more sex, and no one is getting enough,” Ms. Coles was saying, noting that the problem is perhaps more exaggerated here than elsewhere. And the reason, she said, may be that in New York people are so busy they forget to bookmark sex time in their day planners. Whereas in England, where she is from, people routinely head out in the evening with the expectation of drinking a great deal, going home and making love, although the term she used for the sex act was vintage Austin Powers.

And in New York and especially during Fashion Week, Ms. Coles, expanding on the subject, was saying, you can easily form an impression that the majority of people have altogether forgotten that one of the primary purposes of looking good in clothes is to attract the amatory interest of someone who might wish to help you remove them. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” Ms. Coles was remarking. “People don’t appreciate enough that sex is free. You don’t have to be rich to have great sex.”

And these observations called to mind a Thom Browne fashion show held earlier in the week at the New York Public Library, one in which models wore garments that, like insect carapaces, projected from their bodies, armoring them.

And Linda Fargo, the Bergdorf Goodman fashion director was saying after that presentation, as she scampered down the library steps in her stilettos, that Mr. Browne “needs a museum show.” And it occurred to an observer some time later that the designer might also benefit from a gift subscription to Cosmopolitan.