It takes money, connections, ingenuity, and nerve to get noticed during New York's biannual fashion week, an eight-day extravaganza choked with almost 100 shows. Devoted friends willing to work for standing-room-only invite help, too. But the real challenge for this season's slew of designers new to the runway is to stay in touch with the desire to create, which is what drove them to stuff and seal 1,000 invitations, turn a car body shop into a catwalk in less than two hours, and pull one all-nighter after another to put the finishing touches on clothes.

"This is all I wanted to do my whole life," says Tawfik Mounayer, who experienced power shortages of his own at the Angel Orensanz Foundation on Norfolk Street. "It's the price you pay for showing in a 150-year-old synagogue and not in the tents. They're too sterile." Like Saifi's show, Mounayer's was a family affair. His father drove in from Syracuse with platters full of homemade tabbouleh and hummus that models washed down with bottled water and chilled cheap champagne. "It's not like I have a production company," says the twenty-five-year-old, who draped and sewed together a knockout lace dress from an old tablecloth. "Jane, my operating officer and right-hand gal, and I do a lot of tap dancing." The duo threw a "ten dollars and a dream" party to raise money for the show. When a friend asked why prices had increased five dollars since last season-his first-Mounayer explained, "Honey, for fall there's suede involved."

Plus, the stakes for his sophomore effort had been raised: fashion legend Polly Mellen made an appearance at Mounayer's debut last season, and he was hoping for a repeat of that once-in-a-lifetime event. She didn't show up, but that doesn't worry Mounayer. "I'm in it for the long haul," says the designer, who takes freelance assignments to keep the money coming in.