By the time he returned 10 years later, to launch the fashion label Rag & Bone with his Wellington College contemporary David Neville, Mayor Rudy Giuliani's zero tolerance had pummelled away a lot of that tension - yet there were still some satisfyingly edgy neighbourhoods to be found in Manhattan. 'Even in 2001, when I first came to the Meatpacking District, it was pretty ropey, and it was exciting to have that element of danger. Now you go out here at night and it's full of women in high heels and guys from Long Island - not quite the same energy.'
Over the past decade, Wainwright and Neville have developed acutely sensitive barometers to New York's constant shifts and eddies. Rag & Bone began as a men's jeans brand and has grown into a darling of American fashion with 40-something stores and 500-odd international stockists - all partly thanks to its designers' keen outsider's eye for the city and its inhabitants. Starting with their wives (they ask, sweetly, that I emphasise that), moving to the team that staffs their growing office on the corner of 13th Street and Washington Avenue (they're still in the Meatpacking, in offices that have expanded from one floor to three plus a store), and then down to the girls they observe on the street, much of their womenswear output has been informed by a desire to anticipate the wants of New York's women.
