RUNWAY DEPT.CIVIL STRUTTING

The mission: attend “Style Across the Aisle,” a Fashion Week spectacle wherein local politicians walk the runway wearing clothes mostly made by up-and-coming designers from their districts, and determine which of the models exhibits the most diva-like behavior. Which official, be they elected or appointed, is most likely to throw a phone at an assistant while screaming, “I am not wearing more khaki!”? Who, in short, is the civil-servant Naomi Campbell?

- -Henry Alford

“I think there’ll be many models with diva behavior,” Joann Ariola, the City Council minority leader, said the week before the event, which benefitted Witness to Mass Incarceration, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering economic independence for formerly incarcerated people. Yet, leading up to the show, the squawks from the models sounded more like practical concerns than diva demands. Ariola herself was practicing wearing a higher heel than normal. Althea Stevens, a councilwoman from the South Bronx, told her designer, Lisne Bautista, that her full-length gown needed to be taken in because she’d lost weight. David Paterson, the seventy-one-year-old former governor of New York, who is mostly blind, worried about navigating the runway. “If they tell me to go first, I may end up anywhere,” he said. “I might walk out the building.”