Miss Lynn is attending to a client. Clothes are being ferried 7th Avenue style from the Martha Shop a few doors down and the store is a hive of activity. Down the stairs comes the house model all angular bones and a series of jutting precipices that like matching bookends are in fact, two painfully visible lines of clavicle. With a swish of their blonde bob, the barely filled in silhouette disappears into the mirror lined atelier discreetly hidden behind a curtain where an intense consultation is being conducted.

Miss Lynn murmurs some directives to her identically clad assistants - chic black leggings, pony tails and crisp white artists smocks - and when all is to her satisfaction joins me on the couch. The client being tended to behind the curtain, has just happened to wander into Martha International. She is from Pittsburgh and is in New York en route to Paris to indulge just one activity, shopping. Currently, she is being fussed over, pampered and styled and in the process of buying le tout from Martha International she may well have excised the need to cross the Atlantic. This is boutique retailing at its best and it brings to mind the old couturier style; a very personalised fashion of purchasing fashion.

"That's right", affirms Ms. Manulis, known to her proteges and staff as Miss Lynn. "That is what I like to do. I am very service, people and specialty oriented in my approach. Everything that I have at Martha International is something that I worked to create with the designer. I wanted to do something unusual: I hoped to do something innovative and all of the young people that I have gathered to be the core group of Martha International are working directly with me in this personal way because we are trying to catapult new fashion, young fashion into the Nineties".

Martha Boutique is as much a part of the Park Avenue streetscape as the apartment block bastions and polished doormen who stand sentinel outside. Martha is the eponymous flagship boutique of Ms. Martha Phillips, Lynn's mother and queen of a style alma mater in her own right. Martha International is just a few doors down, making a next generational statement in fashion. The premise was to move the downtown fashion set uptown; hastening the treacherous climb up the caste for the designer and in the process injecting into Park Avenue's somewhat reactionary habille, whimsical, youthful and straightforward attire.

Fashion needed to be catapulted into the next decade, says Lynn and it represents a near total departure for the mother and daughter team in catering to the needs and desires of a vibrant new generation of self-possessed, professional young women. Fostering exciting new talent is not a new concept for Lynn Manulis and Martha Phillips: Together they were instrumental in promoting in America the careers of Carolyn Roehm, Mary MacFadden, English designer Zandra Rhodes, Carolina Herrera, Frenchman Christian Lacroix, Bob Mackie, and a then unknown commodity in America, Italian virtuoso, Valentino. It was and is a case of publish the new talent or be damned to retrospection.

Martha International is an amalgam of the successful Martha formula adapted to the lifestyle and unprecedented confidence of "that young professional working woman; that wonderful working lady who is out there making it". The 1500 square feet of specialty fashion is housed in a warm interior designed by leading Italian architect Piero Pinto whose streamlined neo-classical style is the perfect foil for the inventory within.

Pearwood parquetry with pin-beige marble borders made and assembled by a team of Milanese artisans lines the floors and dominating the walls are two 8 foot wide by 17 ft. high frescoes executed in the rare grafitto technique of abstract footage and trellises, symbolizing the tree of life. This flagship store was fashioned as a prototype for an international chain beginning in the major U.S. cities. Like the clothes within the store is supremely stylish, yet quietly funky. In the background, the music pulsating through the sound system is anything but traditional couturier ambient. Lynn is the President and Artistic Director of the four exclusive Martha Shops around the U.S. in Palm Beach where the second Martha International opened, the Park Avenue premises nearby, Bal Harbour and Trump Tower. In deference to its clients' lifestyles and priorities, both Martha and Martha International offer appointments outside of business hours and worldwide delivery proving that the business of fashion is both global and beyond the parameters of conventional trade.

The young designers are handpicked and the MI inventory speculates on their broader success and appeal on the strength of Miss Lynn's uncanny knack to isolate the young, forward thinker - "those I think really have talent".

She defines Martha International as "an experiment" in fashion and uses variously, lightning rod, laboratory and catapult as descriptions of its intent. The object is to seek out young designers to nurture them, and create an environment that guarantees total freedom of expression. "I want to fly with these designers, I don't want to edit or censor them", she says. "My intent is to support them as they express new attitudes and new visions for the future. This is not a momentary flirtation we are having: It's a long-running romance".

How she chooses the next wave liaisons is admittedly a gamble and she uses no set criteria by which to measure what she has seen but relies on a "very clear and almost blank canvas. I just go out with this 'search' in mind". She will not however, canvass the many imitators, those who are really "just copies of the big boys - that doesn't interest me because I have all of the big guns that I want. And I carry the best of them".

Nor will she place undue emphasis on the faddists, those who "you will not see anywhere, ever again". When one removes these contenders, what remains is Miss Lynn's forte, original, innovative clothing with the stamp of longevity and appeal sewn somewhere indelibly along the hemline. Something that can only be referred to as 'it', in much the same way Clara Bow embodied the curiously puissant pronoun.

"When it has been out there, I have been able to recognise it, thank goodness", she says. "I really trust my instinct and when I think that I have seen 'it', then I buy in a small amount and I discuss my ideas, my attitudes and my viewpoints and cull from there. It is rather like playing roulette. You don't know when that number is going to come up, when you are going to get lucky and in many instances, I have been very lucky. But then on the other hand, I mustn't put it all down to luck. I think that I have been able to really just cut through that very intangible thing that I think a lot of my cohorts don't see. I like to pick up on things that aren't proven: I love the challenge; I find it very fascinating and it brings out the best in me.

"I have the guts, the patience and the fortitude to take on the untried talent and work with them; to help them develop and to meet the outside world; to interact with the customer", she says warming even further to the explanation of her clear commitment. "Unless they are proven, the big stores will have no part of it, they can't risk it. And I like doing that, I am a risk-taker. I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is", she says cutting to the 'art of the matter'.

For this patronage and support; provision of a fertile ground for creativity and guarantee of freedom she demands the observance of just a few inflexible ground rules and they are enacted with the customer in mind. Miss Lynn's proteges are not permitted to dictate from the confines of their studios whipping up size fours for a model apotheosis, without having first sized up the prototype and made necessary adjustments for the more conventional human form. In Lynn's workshop, the equation is a triumverate: the client works with M.I. who in turn works with the designer who consults with the client on a one-to-one basis.

"I ask them to work in a specific manner with a very personal point of view for this new shop. All of them must have their personal appearances here and when it is your week, you must come in and be with the customer. [The designers] are absolutely fascinated with the customer and the customer in turn is fascinated with the designer. The designer looks, listens and consults, might make certain changes or see what was asked for that they didn't have, and the next time around they will take all these new ideas into account. I hear her; I hear what she wants, I hear what she accepts and what she rejects and that gives me a very definite picture. It is a new process, whereby the retailer and the buyer are the same person. We wear the same hats. And when you have the client and designer, all working in tandem, that gives you a solid base, a direction. It shows the designer who is out there and what they really want. We are working together to see what works and what doesn't - it is really like old-style couture.

"In a big department store, that is not possible. The buyer is so inundated with the output of her computer, with the bottom line that she must spend three quarters of her day behind the desk organising so and so many units. She can't afford to take risks and she doesn't get to see the customer. There is no development and that is very important. As a good buyer you have to work with the designers and help them to develop and evolve along the way".

Lest one think that a fashion dictatorship Warhol style, is a possible byproduct of this guild type system one need only look at a photograph Miss Lynn has proudly displayed in her office and recently reproduced in the NYC fashion dailies following the Spring / Summer showings. Miss Lynn and her mother Martha, are seated in the midst of their proteges no one of whom can get close enough to the matriarchal pair who are smiling benevolently from the nucleus of this halo of gifted young creators. It is quite the allegory.

"Miss Lynn and Martha have been my fairy godmothers", bubbles Zng Toi, the Malaysian born diminutively proportioned fashion giant who Miss Lynn propelled to the pages of WWD and beyond.

Lynn indeed inherited a formidable fashion heritage in the Martha shops founded by her mother who established the grand tradition of the specialty shops in the United States and has been a head style commando to the American woman for many years, whose grand design is to the fashionably chic what Schwarzkopf is to both hair care and winning strategies: a crowning glory. Ms. Phillips' stores have long been considered the model in luxurious ladies shopping where the stock in trade is the finest taste from the most acclaimed visionaries; impeccable service and merchandised in much the same way as one would display a priceless work of art.

Although the picture perfect evocation of her own philosophies and those creative of her beloved foster children, Lynn Manulis did not rush to embrace the office of heir apparent. She stepped into the designer shoes after a career on the stage where she co-starred with Vincent Price on Broadway in Angel Street, the play that became the famous film, Gaslight.

"My parents were very clever about it and they were very supportive; they didn't insist that I do something else. It was marvellous how clever they were: I didn't think about it at the time but now!" says Lynn of her parents gameplan when she opted to study theatre in lieu of pattern-making. "I was working and then I wasn't working, as one encounters in the theatre. I analysed it and thought to myself that one is an actor only if one is acting, so what about all the days when one is not acting? I wanted to be able to do something creative every day and I saw that my mother was doing just that.

The novice Lynn was not sure exactly what it was she could contribute but again she credits Martha's perspicacity in making clear through indirect efforts what her daughter's niche may in fact be. She arrived at a time when Martha Shops were expanding and Martha simply told Lynn to come in, look around, absorb the atmosphere and see where she could fit in. "I recall she said to me, 'You know a lot more than you think you know. It is like lint, it is rubbing off on you and you don't even know it is there. It is not possible that you haven't absorbed a lot just by being in the midst of it'".

Lynn would move amongst the artisans in the workrooms as they fitted, sewed and decorated magnificent customised gowns and dresses as well as the ready-to-war and recalls that one day, she heard herself offering opinions; asking questions, experimenting and comparing fabrics and styles. Her flair for the dramatic was unwittingly channelled into a new area.

"My mother was right. I really knew much more than I thought I knew. I could look at a fabric and see what was right. It was like hearing music but never having had a piano, you couldn't know whether you could play yourself. But if you find a piano, you can pick out the notes. The artisans teach themselves, and they teach you, giving you a point of view that people going to business schools never can have. They can never be taught that magic and that magic is what makes the whole thing go round. I like to think that in some moments, a little bit of that magic has rubbed off on me and somewhere I think, I am able to project that".

During a trip to Italy where she was directed by her mother to search out unusual things, Lynn stumbled across a designer named Valentino and deciding that he was a celestial couturier in the making with projected appeal for an American market, she immediately placed multiple orders of his designs and in doing so laid the groundwork for "the designer-as-celebrity" cult which began in the seventies and continuous unabated today.

Martha Shop clients benefited as well as the host of local designing names including Carolyn Roehm, Bob Mackie, Mary MacFadden in that the former became style pacesetters at the same velocity as their European counterparts and the profile of the latter was immediately elevated. Lynn revitalised the Martha institution imbuing it with her own flair, style and tastes, but today as yesterday, her mentor is still her mother. "Her passion for this business is infectious", Lynn says. "Having spent a lifetime under her wing, I've been exposed to her uncanny knack for uncovering that excellence in design and talent".

In the nineties, Martha International aids and abets the talents of a clique of designing dynamos whose individual styles can collectively be labelled post-modern chic. The media loves them, as do the rich and famous, the young in years and young at heart, their designs often tinkering with the sacred icons of the pantheon de mode that nobody feels the need to take too literally any more. The pun has become the fashion.

Christian Francis Roth, the virtuoso of the moment who has taken New York's new fashion arena by storm redefines ornate dressing with a touch of tongue-in-chic in his pop art appliques; Pamela Dennis' softline suits, trenches and dresses made from organza and cut to even further flatter the shapely young figure; Josie Natori's boudoir to evening wear in bodysuits, ornate bustiers and flimsy skirts; the unmitigated style of Randolph Duke whose flair with a fringe jacket needed little advance note - Martha International sold 80 in just one week - partnering his simple black stretch catsuits; Charlotte Neuville's sophisticated urban daywear; Zang Toi's reinterpretation of the suited formality of the Eton dress code feminised and modernised to define the colour and life of the modern girl; the gauzy sensuality of Giorgio di Sant 'Angelo's evening wear and Jeanette's sequined way with a Laker's track suit and spandex cycling ensemble popularised with diamante detail. Hats from Lola Erlich, accessories by Robert Lee Morris, Mia Fonssagrives-Solow and young French designer Inna Cytrine...they are names - unselfconsciously flamboyant in their own rights - that are beginning to challenge the limelight of their progenitors and under Lynn's direction they are mixing it up with the best of the European giants.

"Lorraine, dear", she says spotting an envoy from Martha who has scurried into the shop with a collection of items for the Pittsburgh lady's perusal held aloft so as not to muss the garments. "I am looking for a beautiful blouse, is that what you have come to show us? She didn't want white, so that is a nice alternative", she says indicating a cream example. "Unless she wants black lace. I thought the Ferre blouse would be great in that case. Jody, that Moschino blouse they just took into her, the printed one, would be very pretty with that skirt. Tucked in, and she can just open it a very little bit. Ask her to try that".

This unashamed mixing and matching of the drop dead names with the less proven monikers would have been anatherma at the height of the couturier's dominance. But today's women do no necessarily want to be the walking signature of one designer, taking that sole identify as representative of their own. Multi-faceted and self-possessed, she will gladly take direction, but not domination and there is a difference that is acutely apparent to Miss Lynn.

"I have found that the younger woman, even the one who is not twenty any more, maybe thirty something and even after that, they are looking for young, original ideas and they want to have a certain spirit in clothes, a degree of humour. We must put that into our dressing. This lady, she says, indicating the drawn curtain behind us, "she is not a girl any more but she loves the young clothes and she wears them all. We are not going to let her wear something overly short, or something that is clearly wrong for her - and she wouldn't accept it anyway - but she wants something that reflects her spirit. And she's an out of town woman. She didn't even know that we existed and she has been complimenting us because she has never seen anything like it before in America. She was intending to go on to Paris but her plans had changed and she was pleased because she has been able to get a wardrobe that she could have in Paris but for three times the price.

"And when they come to me, they know that they are going to get expert attention. My staff is well trained in that respect because that is my point of view and we know, like a game of chess, what moves we can make successfully and how we can put it all together to take a very decisive look. The girl who comes in here on her lunch hour and tells us that she needs something for tonight or for her hurried trip tomorrow, we can put it all together for her. Whereas, if she goes into a department store, she has no starting point: She has rows and rows of clothes in front of her. She is really inundated and, I think, drowning in the merchandise. We can approach her with a clear view of what she wants, an understanding of her.

"The women put it together the way that they see it and their own personality shines through. That is why I think that this is also a very interesting laboratory that we have here. All these people work within the framework of it. They see each others work and they share a lot of ideas. The result is that you can have a Christian Francis Roth jacket with a Randolph Duke skirt or a Zang Toi outfit matched with something from Jeanette, perhaps. They are gaining a tremendous amount of knowledge from each other".

One does not pay strictly downtown prices for this relocation up the boulevard but as Lynn points out, if Lagerfeld were doing it, one could easily add the GNP of a small nation to the price tag.

Today, the fashion conscious person is not afraid to inject an element of humour into her wardrobe and the parameters of what is permitted and what is not have broadened to the point of obscurity. Popular culture meets pop art; the line between evening and day wear is increasingly a blur; track and field enjoys more than a passing acquaintance with sequins; chiffon sleeves finish black denim; spandex shares the catwalk with silk; and anoraks make perfect stylish sense. Body definition is OK for day - lycra infused garments and shapely suits have created an empowered businesswoman who can cut a killer deal and a fine figure at the same time without having to look like a Louis B. night-Mayer and without compromising her hardearned 'credibility'.

Lynn produces a black and white still of herself modelling one of the outfits currently in stock. A subtle fashion parody is illustrated - mixing sheer black stockings and a touch-the-knee leather skirt topped with a short red trapeze style jacket which all seems very much in stylish order but for the appliqués of M&M's packets, strategically torn to allow smatterings of the little sweets to tumble out in colourful curlicues adhering to the fabric (a very fine wool) and functional also in the buttoning. The cheeky and the classic. Nothing is verboten but is must be paired with restraint, with the classic piece perhaps and made of the very best materials.

"I think that because of the fast pace of our lives today, the average gal doesn't have time to go home and do the dress number for evening", reflects Lynn. "So I think that the designers are right to inject that little bit of sportswear which is very 'now', very clever, perhaps through having a reversible anorak - 'day' and 'night' sides - for example. When I was growing up and dating, it was unheard of to go out in the same clothes that one wore during the day. You had to go home, dress, change your purse, put on your white gloves - the whole procedure!" She laughs as such unyielding dressage as the norm suddenly seems ridiculously overstated. "We were so proper. They were the times that you had the morning suit, an outfit for the luncheon and then a cocktail dress for the evening. but today, that is all fuzzy: everybody does everything. This faster pace must change the attitude of the wearer and also the designer.

"Even the kids now are imitating the older styles with a tongue in cheek. The children today are so free to express themselves with their clothing that when you get them ten years later, you can't keep them 'down on the farm'. That first freedom is the beginning".

It is an unusual rite of passage: the seventies woman whose professional confidence was shot if there was a run in her pantyhose gave way to the eighties androgynyne whose shoulder pads and apparently necessary aggression owed more to Joe Montagna than Madam Gres even coining the scary phrase 'power dressing', empowered the professional persona and in the process, disenfranchising the girl. Perhaps now, the nineties woman has toughed it out with the best of them, has proved her point and dresses for herself, independent and, to a large extent although by no means complete, is freed.

"Oh, exactly', enthuses Lynn. "They are much more feminine than what they have been and much more emancipated. Certainly girls that come in here are liberated to the point where they are not asking anyone if they might have something because they have their own income and they are paying for their clothes. In past years, they had to be sure that their husbands or partners approved. But now these girls are very sure of themselves and they are not being pushed into any pigeonhole: they don't want to be out of a cookie cutter, and by and large, they are happy with themselves.

"In the seventies and eighties, there were a lot of sheep, following each other, thinking that they had to conform to a certain way of doing things, even thought at that time, gals thought that they had broken with tradition. They were all cut from the same cloth. but in my experience, the younger women of today are different. They are also particularly successful more so than they have been in the last thirty years, or than their mothers were. They have developed their own personalities and their own skills - they don't want to be clones. They are very well-educated and possibly making more inroads into the corporate world. When you look at the big law firms today more than 50% of the people working in many of them are women and that applies almost everywhere else; in real estate, in advertising, in your line of work, in the medical field - in both practise and research. So that whole emancipation of women who have been educated in the last 20-25 years has enormous strength and there is a character building that is showing up in their attitudes - who they are and how they present themselves".

And now there is the added 'ism' that surmounts all others - environmentalism which has emerged from the realms sub-culture and permeated the mainstream with all the force of an ozone puncture. Global consciousness has replaced the subjectivity of pure fashion consciousness and the environment has its most zealous fans in the artists and fashion designers of the just pre-millennium culturalists. The key axiom is No World, No Fashion. Cumulus for cumulate, foliate rather than exfoliation; notions of the natural have redefined Planet Earth as the mother of all invention.

In this challenging arena, priorities must be reassessed and awareness has a dual payoff. A sixties 'earthy' sensibility in both philosophy and design has become necessary though instead of alternative thinking and this has inculcated the fashionable lifestyle. But, tie dyes have given way to the sophisticated statement in beaded shifts that are simple but reflect the designer's concern in choice of colours; T-shirts are emblazoned with blunt messages that pull no punches.

In this fashion, Miss Lynn is a Freeland for the nineties whose agenda embraces the issues that form the basis of today's fashion rostrum. To this end, Martha International and American ELLE magazine teamed for an interesting exercise in 'fashion awareness' which was designed around the classic accessory for the thoughtful aficionado, the 'Don't Bungle the Jungle' T-shirt designed by artist Kenny Scharf proceeds of which went to the Companions Art and Nature.

The project reaffirmed that fashion has not lost is frivolity enmeshed in the popular ethos of the decade, and neither is it sloganeering for the protagonists clearly feel deeply about making the message clear. Artists fight a gentler battle but hopefully help win the war.

"A lot is going to change tremendously. We are going through an enormous period of change and so much depends on what is going to impact upon us in so many areas", says Lynn in whose influence can be found a powerful spokesperson. "In a positive sense, we know that there are going to be tremendous strides in terms of science and we are making strides in our health orientation. We are going to see people overcoming disease and living longer, resulting in an older society, but I think that the fundamental fibre of our countries - yours and mine - is going to change dramatically. It is a question of how do we view ourselves? We have got to get back, I think. We have taken a lot out of our atmosphere, our environment and I don't think that we can go any further like this; we re going to have to change to survive.

"We have to think in terms of ; losing our rainforests, species of animals that are disappearing through extinction...when people are not able to live comfortably because of pollution and environmental disorders, fashion will not be important at all. We won't be here to wear anything! So, we have got to change that. The young consumer coming along, and the young designer and the fabric maker are going to address this. That will change our sense of ourselves; the sense of how you look and how you dress. Fashion will change in the way that we are going to be forced to change.

"We are going to start over but from a different context which is going to be much stronger. We are well into the new decade and yet everybody is already aware of what we did in the last decade. There is an element of guilt about what one did or didn't do in that era. We didn't react to what was happening but now everybody is writing and talking about it. It is very fascinating how our concepts change and how they change so rapidly. In fashion I feel that we will go back to the sixties sensibility in a way that we are currently seeing. In the Millenium, however, we will not go back. We have experienced another war (the Gulf conflict) which has to have repercussions. We are making history every day. 1989 alone will be in all the history books; with the Wall coming down and the change in the Eastern Bloc. It was like spontaneous combustion. We are living through it all and we should be memorising it for the kids. They will ask us about the beginnings of global freedom.

"A lot of the young people who are working in this field or as artists, they feel it very acutely - they always do. Artistic people are always more keenly aware. They won't always know consciously why they are designing in this way because it comes out of what they feel".

The family tree is still made of solid oak and in its imperviousness Lynn has strong hopes for the future branches of Martha International. "I like the challenge that you get in being a really fine merchant. There is an art to it and I don't think that it is too readily found today. In the past there used to be some extraordinary people who were remarkable merchant/entrepreneurs but with the advent of the very large department stores you lose that personal touch and I feel that it is important to hold onto it. If you take for example, the best jewellers in the world, you get down to a few and you find that they have been run by families for a hundred odd years and they have retained that identity, that crux of what they began with. You have an innate, built in strength that nothing has been able to dissipate.

"It is so important that there is a lasting point of view; that it is passed on. It is ingrained in me and I have a son and I hope that I am indoctrinating him in the same way. You do it every day, you say it every day... It is a family heritage. It is something very precious to me and all I want to do is to protect it and support it and bring something new. When you have children, the family tree is preserved and it is the same here. That is how I feel about this. I was so intrigued to see what my mother was able to create from the year 1936 and in the worst part of the Depression. And to have evolved this business and to have become such an incredible force, that to me is remarkable".

She has her eye on Europe for the Martha International shops which may sound a trifle like taking ice to the Eskimoes but in reality, according to Miss Lynn, European women are only just emerging from the igloo. "It's [in Europe] that young women are finally joining the work force in large numbers and will look to their American contemporaries for a point of view on what to wear".

The lady from Pittsburgh prepares to exit having spent the best part of two and a half hours cosseted in the mirror-lined consulting rooms. But she is exhilarated rather than exhausted. She really didn't have to do too much work, after all. "I totally made her over just now", declares Lynn with immeasurable and sincere pride aware that this is one happy woman who in reinventing herself has helped fire the careers of several young aspirants and further affirms the value of Lynn's faith in the unknown commodity.

"Oh, it is wonderful for us", Miss Lynn purrs. "It takes the lid off the pot. If we don't try something new we will never go forward. We won't go out and be really inventive and creative and in many cases outrageous but that is OK because that is the only way you capture moonbeams". And bring them home in jars, fairygodmothers willing.