Here is Shai, pushing a broom over Bryant Park slate and wearing decade-old Jordan sneakers ''classics,'' he calls them. This is the fashion show on the runway called Sixth Avenue: Here is Frantz, who installs telephone systems he is wearing a blue construction helmet that matches the knit cap his girlfriend bought for him. ''So bourgeois,'' Hugh mutters after her. Walking up to the door, she declines even to look at Hugh as he sings the virtues of his periodical. Topping off his look - and it is a good look, a look that says ''keeping it real'' - is a San Francisco Giants cap, worn backward.Ī handsome S.U.V., one not intended for carting around kids with muddy cleats, pulls up, and out steps a tall woman in high-heeled boots and a vest that evokes poodle. He is wearing a Phat Farm coat that he bought two years ago for about $150, a seven-year-old pair of Tommy Hilfiger jeans and black gloves that he picked up at a flea market for $15. So is young Hugh, who is hawking free copies of a fashion magazine. Mario is 100 yards and eons removed from the Flavias and Nadias of the world. Each one accessorizes her outfit with a wrap of studied ennui. Each one has perfected a certain strut, in which the pelvis arrives about a half-hour before the shoulders. This means that he will spend his day thrusting newspapers at fashionably dressed men and women who brush past as though he were tendering day-old mackerel.īeyond those doors, women named Flavia and Nadia and Larissa are earning a living by contorting themselves within tulle and chiffon. At the moment, his post is at Sixth Avenue and 41st Street, just outside the doors of the Fashion Week show that is taking place within a huge white tent in Bryant Park. Mario earns $200 a week, plus commission, as a newspaper peddler. ''I'm a big boy,'' he says, ''so I pay more.'' The jersey would normally cost about $60, he confides, but this one ran him $150. What draws the eye, though, is his Cleveland Cavaliers jersey, a LeBron James model. He is wearing a puffy black jacket, baggy jeans and a pair of Air Force 1 sneakers that he bought in Brooklyn for $85. MARIO is a full-figured man, but notice how his ensemble provides a slimming effect.

6th avenue models