I can’t decide if I’ve been in fashion heaven or hell. It was very toasty to be sure, but then again iced beverages were plentiful. However, you categorize it. St. Louis Fashion Week jumped it’s biggest hurdle Thursday night with a grueling gauntlet of 13 designer fashion presentations crammed into a relatively, smooth-flowing 3 and a half hour strutathon.Kudos to all the people behind-the-scenes who kept the pace. I lost count, but we saw more clothes than a small family could wear in a year’s time, even if they wore something different every day. You couldn’t tell by looking at the models, who must have felt the pressure of fashion bootcamp backstage. Every show had a different hair and makeup scheme and a new set of treacherous footwear.

Wednesday there were three shows — Rachel Pally, Laurel Berman of Black Halo and Shay Wilson’s Kinetix. Thursday there were 13. I will recount there names and give you a note about their designs tomorrow when my retinas return to their proper color. Fashion runways are brighter than the sun and unlike Charles Pool of Anheuser Busch who was seated across from me wearing a lovely white blazer and enough bling to light up a room by himself, I did not bring my designer shades with me.

Why were there 13 designers on Thursday?

I was told that the trio of higher profile designers had some requests that needed to be accommodated and in order to assuage any fears of a misstep they were given a separate day.

The marathoners on Thursday fell into the how many models does it take to break a camel’s back conundrum. Some audience members started retiring after the fifth show and there was a slow steady trickle with each additional show. By the end the standing room only crowd had dwindled to around 100 diehards.

But I must give credit for the production of the show. If the audience was fatigued, the crew must have been the walking dead by the end. There were a few gaffes — a few stumbles, one spectacular fall and recovery, a model who had a plastic bag stuck to the bottom of his shoe, a model who fell/jumped out of both shoes and ditched them under a front row chair, a spilled cocktail that cause one model to hydroplane and a near collision with a model by guest who inexplicable dashed across the runway mid-show. But as another attendee pointed out as she scurried for the exit with only three shows remaining, “I love the mistakes, it brings in the humanity.”