What will happen if people stop buying ridiculously expensive clothes?

This week, the usual fabulosity has been on display at fashion parties and shows: women in shoes that to most people would represent a mortgage payment, men in carefully constructed coats that could buy a used car. It has always seemed like madness, these Fashion Weeks, even in the midst of the so-called boom. But this year, while I shudder at the price of high fashion, I also worry about what might be lost if no one buys it.

It's next to impossible to imagine that anyone wants to spend this much on clothes these days. I was slipped the "friends and family" discount to a Prada sale this month, offering me 75 percent off the already half-price clothing, and there was still nothing cheaper than a month of groceries. Why do the prices stay so high even during a recession? After all, it's no secret that much of Prada's clothing is made in China and "finished" in Italy: i.e., shipped to a factory near Milan without labels, where those slim black tags are sewn on, rendering them "Made in Italy." (Plenty of other massive designers are following suit in these times.) Presumably, outsourcing is intended to cut costs. Yet a few years ago, when The New Yorker's Michael Specter asked Miuccia Prada why her clothes were so expensive, she couldn't give him a good answer.

It turns out that it's much easier to assess how a dress made by an independent designer—those unfamiliar names Anna Wintour shepherds to fame—adds up to a few grand. What's harder is imagining how dress craft is going to survive.

At the Sewing Factory, 50-odd blocks south of the Fashion Week tents, Nancy Whiskey is overseeing the production of a dress she says she could never afford to buy. A needle-thin, high-heeled crimson-lipped veteran of fashion production—with stints at Adrienne Vittadini, Tahari, Kate Spade—Whiskey (nee Caton) opened the Sewing Factory on the fringes of Chinatown in the months following 9/11. Twice a year, when Manhattan experiences a sudden crush of it-bags and sunken cheekbones, the Sewing Factory usually feels the frenzy. But when I visited this week, the factory was hushed, save for the whirr of a couple of machines, some funk thumping from an old boombox, and the phone occasionally ringing so a designer could talk Whiskey through evolving particulars of a sculptural black wool dress. Half a dozen Chinese-American tailors practice a craft that has been handed down by generations, working eight-hour days for at least the pay a store manager at Starbucks earns, making high-fashion showpieces to fetch magazine editorial attention and thousands of dollars a garment. I've come to see just how one of these garments adds up.

"We're the highest end of sampling for New York," Whiskey tells me, and this year, even loyal clients decided they needed to bring their patterns to a cheaper, mass-producing factory. "Honestly, after Fashion Week, I don't know what's going to happen. The space, the lights, the rent—it's sad. I don't make any money doing this." Even small hipster brands like United Bamboo, which Whiskey counted as a client for years, now give their work to cheaper labor overseas.

Whiskey keeps a time sheet for every garment she produces. She reaches into a file cabinet to show me one for a coat she just made for designer Ashleigh Verrier: eight hours of work on the sewing machines, 10 hours of hand-sewing, and that's before you consider the hand-beading. The black wool dress she is overseeing is the creation of young Julian Louie, a former architecture student who is being touted as the next Balenciaga. He calls to discuss the placement of gorgeous black embroidery, which Whiskey tells me his own mother has made by hand. Designers like Verrier and Louie often only make a couple of pieces in each size; they wouldn't have the option to mass-produce, ethically or otherwise, even if they wanted to. They can't even buy fabric in bulk.