NEW YORK - Behind the perfected surfaces of the runway shows and glossy parties at New York Fashion Week this month, wasn’t there a less glamorous reality hidden in plain sight?

Yes, sales in United States clothing stores registered an increase of 2.4 percent in August over July, the largest gain since February. But they were still 5 percent below August 2008.

“People talk like the recession started a year ago,” said Tom Kalenderian, the men’s fashion director of Barneys New York. “We’ve been seeing it since 2007.”

The news during New York Fashion Week, held September 10- 17, was not particularly good, Mr. Kalenderian said, and yet it was not all bad. T here are signs that market pressures have had an unexpectedly positive effect.

Behind the rote frivolity of Fashion Week there was another story, one about hunkering down and renewing focus on such unfashionable notions as customer service and value-for-dollars.

There has also been an observable surge of such neglected commodities as creativity and true design. “As much as the recession has been terrible, it cleaned house a little bit,” Cecilia Dean, the editor of Visionaire, said at the Rodarte show. “Creativity blossoms when resources are limited.”

The Rodarte show was one of many hopeful auguries, signs that New York fashion has already started to regenerate itself through improvisation, experiment and collaboration.

Staged at the Gagosian Gallery, the show by the designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy, sisters from Pasadena, California, demonstrated the excited buzz that a creative gift will always inspire.

There was stage smoke and glitter grit on the runway. There was an aural backdrop of Romantic gloom to set off a captivating 12-minute spectacle of neo-Gothic clothing.

More than anything, though, there was persuasive evidence that fashion has a very real place on the cultural mainstage. At its best, it is always about more than clothes, as the men’s wear designer Patrik Ervell asserted before his presentation.

Employing cloth dyed in salt water filled with iron filings, Mr. Ervell used rust to riff subtly on a theme of decay.

“Fashion is part of the culture industry, part of the overall discourse,” he said. “Fashion that is just about merchandise always feels like a dead end.”

If consumers are to be inspired any time soon to extract their wallets in earnest, what will move them to do so is novelty and real design. The kind exhibited during Fashion Week in the dot prints devised by the creative team of ThreeAsFour in collaboration with Yoko Ono; and in Maria Cornejo’s rigorous ongoing explorations of the curve; and in the collection of Thakoon Panichgul, whose workmanship was the more impressive for having trumped budgetary constraints.

“Everybody in the business realizes that you have to make an effort to bring up the quality and value, but most of all the design,” Mr. Panichgul said.

No designer during New York Fashion Week approached the challenge of favoring ideas over merchandising with more madcap brio than Thom Browne did.

“If you’re going to do something people want to see, you’re going to have to take the risks,” said Mr. Browne said after a show that was alternately praised and pilloried.

It would surely require a daring man of to leave the house clad in the stuff Mr. Browne sent out on his runway: neoprene mini-skorts, polka-dotted halter rompers, belled pants lopped off at midcalf, wastebasket hats inset with sunglasses, dropped crotch trousers inspired by a mermaid’s tail.

“I don’t expect people to take it literally,” he said. “I feel very strongly that, particularly in regard to the economy, it is more important not to lose creativity and to show interesting ideas.”


The Rodarte show during New York Fashion Week was an example of fresh ideas from designers willing to take risks.


The designer Thom Browne backstage at his show.