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".