Zoe-ing, Zoe-ing, Gone!

Billy Farrell / Patrickmcmullan.com QVC broadcasts live from the tents at Bryant Park. Choire Sicha joins the audience of the most successful fashion show in history.

"Clutches are so important,” said celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe from the chaotic center of Fashion Week on Saturday night.

Clad head to toe in clingy black fabrics—the top half of her sequined!—Zoe was debuting her fashion line on the third hour of QVC's “live at fashion week” broadcast. From the "salon tent," next door to the lofted rooms where Diane von Furstenberg and Carolina Herrera showed their spring collections, she was giving home viewers a glam and glitzy “shopping experience."

She was also selling her heart out. Anyone out there who has any sense at all would just snap up one of her new $73 snake-skin numbers right quick! "I think the clutch doesn't get enough attention,” Zoe said gravely.

So she fixed that in short order, selling three-dozen clutches in the next 20 seconds.

By seizing the ultimate symbol of high-end fashion, QVC (the TV purveyor of Joan Rivers' affordable costume jewelry and Quacker Factory bejeweled cotton separates) effectively punctured the steely, sunglassed forcefield of Fashion Week itself. And they did it through sheer money-per-minute, dialing-for-dollars income.

On Saturday night, they walked away with a 76 percent sell-out rate on 42 items, moving more than 70,000 units. Madison Ave. retailers during Fashion’s Night Out could only dream of such numbers. And following that walloping success, QVC did it all again Wednesday night.

But why schlep all the way to Bryant Park? This show could have been staged in a bunker of Des Moines, like a fake moon landing, and the home viewer never would have known. There are two good reasons: "In the end, our customer wants to be taken on a journey—and they want to buy stuff," said Jamie Falkowski, QVC's director of media relations. So they are taking these women, who are at home on a Saturday night buying things off the good old TV, and providing them a glamorous narrative—a night out shopping in New York! From your ratty old couch, no less.

How can she perform these miraculous feats of talking for three hours straight, without even a bottle of water at her side?

And yes, there is a recession: With sales off for the last four straight quarters, QVC needs to suit up and show up to keep those home viewers spending. To that end, they’ve hired Isaac Mizrahi, who's long had a massive licensing empire, even before he began working with Target in 2002; he also embodies the highest of the high end (senior Vogue staffers have been married in his dresses).

So why is he on the QVC, starting this December—just because it's huge? "Huge, huge, huge, huge," Mizrahi told me, outside the show, across from the McCafe at a burgeoning QVC party in the lobby of the tents, at which they were improbably serving Veuve Clicquot. "No, you know what? I honestly feel right about it, because it's a way of actually reaching consumers, like directly reaching consumers. And I have a shop now! You have to go to my shop, on 67th Street, it's a little shop, and that's another way to reach consumers. Right? I think it's really important. You have to be proactive, darling. Proactive!"