David Paterson, Andrew Cuomo, Carolyn Maloney, and other public officials hit the runway in a bipartisan Fashion Week defile. Naomi Campbell for comptroller?
By Henry AlfordSeptember 22, 2025
Original article here.
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?
“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.”
The venue was the Beaux Arts lobby of Surrogate’s Court, near City Hall, recognizable to any “Law & Order” fan. The day of the show, thirty-three models, each bearing or wearing their runway outfit, reported for hair and makeup to a third-floor room with vending machines in it. The Manhattan borough president, Mark Levine, removed himself from diva consideration on arrival. “I had to say ‘I’m a model’ on my way in,” he admitted. “And I nearly choked.” The former congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, celebrated for having worn a Fire Department of New York jacket in her official portrait, edged closer to diva status. Modelling a soft leather biker jacket by Karolina Zmarlak with a veil over her face, she commented to a reporter that the fashion show was “inside baseball” and then entreated him to quote her on that, adding, “Interesting observation, right?” The assemblyman Al Taylor, dressed in a gray pin-striped suit by Rachel Richardson, and accessorized with a rhinestone brooch and a pink pocket square, was enjoying himself. “This is fun,” he said. “We’re in Surrogate’s Court and I’m not doing a paternity test!”
Asked where he stood on the diva scale, the assemblyman Eddie Gibbs, the first formerly incarcerated member of the Legislature, put on a pink fedora and said, “There may be some masculinity from me, a thug, walking down the runway.” Across the room, the New York State inspector general, Lucy Lang, told a makeup artist, “I’m not one to turn down false eyelashes.”
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A bystander informed Paterson that Eric Adams had recently taken a poke at Andrew Cuomo, one of his rivals in the mayor’s race, for participating in the fashion show. (Adams, his rep told the Post, has “a city to run, not a runway.”) Paterson shrugged. “Last time I looked at the polls,” he said, “Adams was behind Undecided.”
Cuomo arrived fashionably late-ish, dressed in a blue suit by Gina Newman, so a special hair-and-makeup station was created for him in the hallway. “I have to walk very gently and slowly,” he said, uncertainly. “I’m afraid I’ll wrinkle my suit. You know that moment when everything is just right? This is it.”
The show itself was a thumpingly loud affair marked by cheering. Councilwoman Stevens fluttered and snapped a folding fan. Cuomo repeatedly flashed the shiny lining of his jacket, which was printed with images of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio; backstage, he said of the Queens borough president Donovan Richards’s ensemble, “Queens get the money!” Assemblyman Gibbs brought the swagger, even if his kelly-green suit was giving Mayor McCheese. And Paterson, looking punkish in denim streetwear, shocked the room by launching into a half handstand mid-runway. “I was going to do a front flip, but when I put my hands down they slipped,” he said.
Paterson seemed to have the diva crown clinched until Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels and another mayoral hopeful, showed up in his red beret. Having never held office, he was ineligible to walk, yet he had a few saucy words to say about his rival. “He thinks he’s King Cuomo,” Sliwa said. “Always the last to get there and the first to leave.” Meow: the new Naomi. ♦
Published in the print edition of the September 29, 2025, issue, with the headline “Civil Strutting.”