New York fashion week happens in September, which is the correct month for it: the city at its most alive, the industry at its most anxious, the light off the Hudson in the early evening doing something that justifies everything else.
The question of where to stay during New York fashion week has a clean answer and several complicated ones. The clean answer is The Mercer. The complicated answers involve SoHo becoming simultaneously more and less itself depending on who you ask, and a handful of other properties that have different claims on different sensibilities.
The lobby — The Mercer Hotel, 147 Mercer Street, SoHo
But The Mercer first.
The Mercer
The Mercer Hotel is at 147 Mercer Street, on the corner of Mercer and Prince, in SoHo. The building is from 1890, Romanesque Revival, commissioned for John Jacob Astor III, and its bones are the kind that make interior designers grateful — high ceilings, wide windows, proportions that insist on being respected. Christian Liaigre, the late Parisian designer, worked with what he called “romantic minimalism” when he created the hotel’s interiors: proportion, comfort, and restraint brought into quiet harmony.
The hotel has 73 rooms across six floors, including penthouse lofts with soaring ceilings and the loft-style corner suites that best express the building’s character. The Vermont-sourced Danby marble bathrooms are the correct detail to mention when asked what distinguishes the rooms from other rooms. They are not the reason to stay at The Mercer — the rooms themselves are — but they are evidence of the level of attention being paid.
Sartiano's — the dining room at The Mercer Hotel, SoHo
The Mercer is not trying to be a fashion week hotel. It has been a fashion week hotel for twenty-five years, which is different.
The Splendid Edit — Issue No. 01
Penthouse Loft, The Mercer Hotel, SoHo New York — Photography courtesy The Mercer Hotel
Sartiano’s
The restaurant is now Sartiano’s — it replaced the Mercer Kitchen in 2023 after the Kitchen’s near-25-year run — a modern Italian operation overseen by chef Alfred Portale with an open kitchen and the kind of menu that reads as though someone has thought about what the people eating it have been doing all day and has tried to provide the appropriate corrective. The restaurant hosted Chanel’s 2023 Met Gala after-party, which tells you something about the context in which it operates.
Corner Suite, The Mercer Hotel — Photography courtesy The Mercer Hotel
The other six rooms
The six other hotels on this list cover different needs and different parts of the city. The Lowell on East 63rd — for the buyer who finds SoHo stimulating in ways that have become indistinguishable from exhausting. The Mark on the Upper East Side — for the person whose first question is always proximity to Central Park. The Bowery Hotel — for the creative director who prefers downtown with a different edge. The 11 Howard in SoHo — for Scandinavian minimalism applied to New York. The Baccarat on West 53rd — for the person who needs their hotel to announce itself. The Carlyle — for anyone who prefers their fashion week with a hundred years of history behind it and Bemelmans Bar at the end of the day.
The Mercer is not trying to be a fashion week hotel. It has been a fashion week hotel for twenty-five years, which is different. The industry found it, and the industry kept coming back, and the hotel continued not caring about either fact — which is the correct approach, and the reason it continues to work.
The Splendid Edit will cover New York fashion week in full in Issue No. 02, September 2026. The Mercer Hotel: rates from approximately $650 per night. Book through mercerhotel.com.
Photography courtesy of The Mercer Hotel, New York — © The Mercer Hotel