Mr. Krakoff even introduced print, calling it "playing with saturated color" and saying that it was inspired by the 18th-century naturalist and ornithologist Jean-Jacques Audubon, whose bird painting appeared poised on the shoulder of a dress. After a strict start, the Reed Krakoff brand is opening up and moving from the conceptual to a client friendly, but still artistic, place.

The word that best defines a Chado Ralph Rucci collection is "noble." And this week's masterwork hit the high C's of cut, class and craftsmanship. A glacier-white runway was an introduction to a collection where the mainly white clothes, with a hint of buttery yellow, were precision cut — but always with a hint of the body underneath, as though looking through a panel of ice.

Mr. Rucci is an expert in this delicate couture work, which opens up the rigidity of the streamlined silhouette in an intriguing way. This subtle transparency included see-through wrist bands, which, like the silvered shoes, embraced the sense of icy elegance.

But the lofty designer has never seemed more grounded in modern femininity and, as the last strains of Ravel's "Boléro" faded over a white Infanta gown made of the lightest horsehair, the audience leapt to its feet in spontaneous applause.

Gilles Mendel received an award at the White House this week: the National Design Award for fashion design, presented by the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt museum.

His show proved how subtly this fur maker at J. Mendel has moved into the fashion arena.

The collection, with only a handful of white fur trims on slender dresses, was built on right angles: straight lines that followed the body to create a modern, clean but still sensual silhouette. A use of bright colors and geometric patterns, offset with black and contained within vertical lines, made this show yet another example of streamlining at its best.

The client side is often overlooked in the razzmatazz of New York's party-filled, celebrity-driven, overstuffed runway season. But as the subtly draped dresses from the Los Angeles-based designer Juan Carlos Obando were presented in front of a wall packed with summer flowers, the Colombian-born designer proved that you do not have to be a runway superstar to catch the fashion moment.