The crowd at Phillip Lim on Tuesday afternoon was abuzz, but not for the usual fashion-y reasons. Seated merrily in the front row of the show was none other than author and former fatwa recipient, Salman Rushdie. This felt like an odd fit — for one thing, Lim was showing womenswear, and for another, Rushdie isn’t your typical fashionista, given that he looks as though he’s eaten a bagel at least once in his life. We decided that, because there are too many unsolved mysteries in the world, we would take one for the team and ferret out the answer to this one ourselves. But somewhere between our seat and his, our brains went into overload. What does a semi-pro celebrity spotter ask Salman freaking Rushdie? Perhaps an incisive question about Egypt? Something about Carine Roitfeld leaving French Vogue? Whether he had fun filming Bridget Jones’s Diary? By the time we got to him, all we could do was take a deep breath and lay this impressive science down on him: “Hi. How are you?”
