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A show during New York Fashion Week is perceived as a pinnacle of success for an American designer. Yet, as WSJ On Style columnist Christina Binkley reports on Lunch Break, when Fashion Week opens Feb. 7, a number of labels will have dropped off the calendar. Photo: Getty Images.

New York Fashion Week has long been perceived as a pinnacle of success for an American designer. Yet when fashion week opens Feb. 7, a number of labels that showed there in the past will be sitting it out.

Joy Cioci will instead present her collection in mid-March after editors and buyers return from Paris Fashion Week, the last event in the monthlong round of collections. The New York calendar “was so crowded, and it’s so hectic for buyers and the editors, she says of the four seasons she showed at the fashion-week tents. “I just felt that I wasn’t getting the investment return.”

Yoana Baraschi, whose 10-year-old label showed at fashion week for many seasons, will also move to mid-March. Her presentation, she says, will be more intimate, and she will be able to hire high-caliber talent that is usually booked during fashion week.

“Everybody wants the same models and the same stylists. It’s just spinning out of control,” Ms. Baraschi says of the official week. “No one can see as many shows as there are now.”

New York’s calendar has become noticeably more crowded as labels squeeze in with entrepreneurial zeal. While fashion shows used to be limited to high-style labels, midprice contemporary labels and menswear brands are now muscling into New York. One reason: No official body controls the calendar, unlike in Milan and Paris, where just a few dozen labels are invited to show in each fashion week. So far, 283 labels have registered to present collections at New York Fashion Week, up from 204 in Feb. 2007, according to the Fashion Calendar, a company that tracks fashion events.

Giorgio Niro

Yoana Baraschi

While the official calendar runs Thursday to Thursday from Feb. 7-14, designers actually will start showing as early as Monday, Feb. 4, turning the “week” into 11 days.

There are hourly collisions on the busiest days. At 4 p.m. Monday, four labels are showing in various locations around New York. At 8 p.m. Sunday, editors must choose between seeing Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Rucci. And after seeing 10 or more collections a day, most viewers have to look at photos to bring the blur of clothes back into focus.

“I need memory retention. I need a chance to sit and talk to these people,” says designer Daniel Vosovic, who is moving his three-year-old label to a March presentation as well.

Often, it is cheaper to circumvent New York Fashion Week. Mackage designers Elisa Dahan and Eran Elfassy found it less expensive to fly editors to their show at Toronto Fashion Week. They launched Montreal-based Mackage in New York in 1999—but started showing in Toronto last year. “I feel like we were little kids trying to accomplish a dream,” Ms. Dahan says of those early shows. But in Toronto, she says, they can hire top models who are contractually forbidden to do their shows in New York because of agreements with more powerful brands.

The cost of a show during New York Fashion Week is generally six figures and can rise to more than $1 million for big brands. If you hire top models, the minimum cost of a show is $350,000, says Ms. Baraschi, who estimates she will save 60% of the cost by moving to March.

Many designers are creating carefully produced videos of their collections. Rather than limiting their audience to the people at the show, they can send the video to stores and editors, use it for advertising and put it on YouTube and style.com. “It has longevity,” Ms. Cioci says.

Designers who forsake New York’s fashion week still plan to keep their showrooms open to take orders from store buyers during the week, just as they have in the past.

The split highlights the increasing separation between store buyers and fashion editors. Shows, with their pomp and drama, are increasingly focused on marketing to magazine editors. As designers try to accommodate the growing number of celebrities and bloggers, stores have been crowded out. While top fashion executives at big department stores such as Saks and Neiman Marcus still get invitations, they aren’t always in the front rows. And smaller store buyers sometimes struggle to obtain invitations at all.

The chaos is a natural part of a fast-changing industry, says Tom Florio, former publisher of Vogue, who recently took over as CEO of Advanstar Fashion group, which runs eight fashion trade shows. Mr. Florio’s new shows, which seek to get higher fashion into the trade-show environment, aim to lure New York Fashion Week regulars. One show called “The Tents” will launch later this month in Las Vegas, inviting trendy menswear labels such as Billy Reid and Michael Bastian to participate. “There are so many ways to communicate fashion today,” says Mr. Florio. “You don’t necessarily have to tell that story on the runway anymore.

None of this diminishes many designers’ aspirations to reach New York fashion week. To launch her new ready-to-wear Rivini line during fashion week, bridal designer Rita Vinieris started looking for open times in October. “The calendar is insanely crowded,” she says. She settled on Feb. 6, a day before official fashion week. She hopes to reach editors who miss her presentation with a video and private appointments.

Nary Manivong, whose label will be showed to editors by appointment in March, says he is sanguine about skipping New York Fashion Week. “For me, fashion week will always be there. I can always come back.”

Write to Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

The name of the fashion label that designer Nary Manivong will show in March is Nary Manivong. An earlier version of this article incorrectly called the label NAHM.

A version of this article appeared January 23, 2013, on page D3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why Some Labels Will Sidestep Fashion Week.

By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

BANDERA, Texas — In hard times, some small-town Americans are turning to a new livelihood with relish.

Among them are Andrea and Ben Guajardo. They began selling hot dogs from a pushcart on Main Street in November.

Ms. Guajardo is a grant administrator for a health-care system. Her husband, Ben, is a pipeline operator. Theirs is the first hot-dog stand in Bandera, pop. 957, that anybody here can remember.

“It’s a backup plan,” says Ms. Guajardo, a mother of four. “No one knows what’s going to happen with the economy, and I don’t want to have to scrounge for a minimum-wage job.”

Facing pay cuts and weakened job security, more Americans are turning to this century-old, big-city trade in outposts like Bandera, where cowboys on horseback share the road with motorcyclists. Many of these vendors are working professionals with day jobs, ranging from real-estate agents to train operators.

Sales of carts, which start at about $2,000 new, have heated up in the past year. “Every model is…taking off,” says Joel Goetz, owner of American Dream Hot Dog Carts Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla. Since January, he has sold about 25 carts a week, 15 more than usual.

“Business is really off the charts,” says Dan Jackson, a division manager at Nation’s Leasing Services in Newbury Park, Calif. Leases for hot-dog carts account for about three-quarters of sales, and revenue is triple what it was this time a year ago, he says.

Hot dog vendors are a familiar sight in big cities around the country. For one Texas family, their weekend business is bringing in extra cash amid a slumping economy. Sarah Needleman reports from Bandera, Texas.

Today’s cart buyers are generally older and have more white-collar work experience than was traditionally the case, says Will Hodgskiss, president and “top dog” at Willy Dog Ltd., a New York cart manufacturer. “People are either buying these carts in anticipation of a layoff or to supplement their incomes,” he says. Willy Dog’s sales are up 30% from March 2007.

Street Food of Choice

Hot dogs are the street food of choice for vendors because frankfurters are sold precooked and therefore tend to undergo less scrutiny from state and city health departments. They’re also popular. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Americans typically consume seven billion hot dogs, according to the American Meat Institute’s National Hot Dog & Sausage Council.

“It’s a very recession-proof business,” says Kurt Horlacher, a former sheet-metal worker who co-owns four hot-dog stands in Sarasota, Fla., with his wife, Renee, a former registered nurse.

The two say their sales have increased 20% annually since they started two years ago, and they plan to open three more stands later this year. Their eight employees, who are paid $8 an hour, include laid-off professionals and part-time workers looking to augment their earnings. “I get three to five people applying for jobs each week,” says Mr. Horlacher.

A 25% increase in year-over-year cart sales has prompted one manufacturer, All American Hot Dog Carts Inc., to offer classes in how to succeed in wiener work. Later this month, Hot Dog University will cover everything from the right way to squirt mustard (in a swirling motion with a quick flick of the wrist) to how to heat up buns (steam them over the dogs for two minutes before serving).

Then there’s the art of the sell. “You got to schmooze people,” says Louie Di Raimondo, the Miami company’s founder and self-appointed hot-dog king.

A skilled cart dealer in a pedestrian-heavy area can net up to $400 a day, say many vendors and cart-company officials. Newer dealers and those in less-ideal locations make one-third to half that amount. Weekend and event-only vendors, like the Guajardos, say that when the weather is good, they too can turn a hefty profit.

The Guajardos manage their two-wheeled stainless-steel hot-dog cart just on weekends, from about 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., in this Texas Hill Country downtown dotted with hitching posts, heavy-duty pickup trucks and cowboys leading cattle. They set up again on Saturday nights outside local honky-tonks like the Longhorn Saloon. They average $1,150 in take-home earnings each weekend selling roughly 400 dogs, plus drinks, chips and pickles. The couple’s four children often help out during the day.

“I tell them, ‘Your mom’s going to pay for your college education with hot dogs,” says Ms. Guajardo, while directing her oldest son, 13-year-old Ben, to put some more cans of soda and bottled water on ice. The business is named after another son, 6-year-old “Big Lou.”

Before they started, “you could find a flying frog easier than a hot-dog stand,” said 75-year-old William Ellis recently as he waited for a Chicago-style frankfurter, including neon green relish and sport peppers atop a poppy-seed bun.

For others, hot-dogging is a stopgap. Real-estate investor Marty Katzenberger turned to it after the housing market tanked and he couldn’t sell any of his properties. “I found that I’m a little clumsy with my hot dogs,” says the 72-year-old, who withdrew $4,200 from his retirement savings to get started at a Sarasota, Fla., beach resort. Mr. Katzenberger, who generates an average of $150 in profits a day and works five days a week, says he’s considering moving to a new location to boost his earnings further.

The work — which requires hours of standing — can be quite an adjustment for people accustomed to sitting behind desks at 9-to-5 jobs. There’s also a lot of preparation and cleaning involved.

Then there’s the growing competition. Many small cities and towns have never had to worry much about enforcing laws that limit the number of pushcarts — until now.

Connie Means, a former college math professor who owns four wiener stands in Gadsden, Ala., recently encountered her first competition since starting her business in 2003. It came from a husband and wife who had previously sought her advice on becoming hot-dog vendors. “I tried to help them,” says Ms. Means, who makes about $42,000 annually working six days a week. “I didn’t realize they were going to set up two or three blocks from me.”

Growing Competition

Gadsden officials say there are more competitors on the way. The municipality of about 37,000 is now considering changes to a vending ordinance that would require new carts to be farther apart from one another. “They all want to be in a four-block radius,” says Shane Ellison, a city planner.

After Jerry and Sandra Mottola ordered a $3,000 hot-dog cart online recently, they discovered that there were only two available locations zoned for the purpose in their hometown of Haverhill, Mass. A local hardware store rejected the couple’s request to set up on its property. Ultimately, they scored an open spot near a courthouse, library and shopping plaza.

Mr. Mottola hopes his new business, Family Hot Dog, will supplement his sagging income as a home contractor. “I’m creating my own stimulus plan,” he says. “I’m not waiting for the president.”

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Lou Guajardo was incorrectly identified as Ben Guajardo in a photo caption accompanying a this article on hot-dog vendors.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A1

By JOSEPH EPSTEIN

One of the enduring mysteries of literary history is the appearance in 19th-century Russia, that vast and barbarous country, of the greatest writers of fiction in all of literature. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are supreme among the novelists of all nations, with Ivan Turgenev not far behind. Then there is Anton Chekhov, master of the short story, and Ivan Goncharov, author of “Oblomov” and “A Common Story.” Among the Russians, the purest artist is Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), author of the play “The Inspector General,” some unforgettable stories, and a single novel, “Dead Souls,” which, even though unfinished, is nonetheless a masterpiece.

Gogol is the comic genius among Russian writers, always playful but never shallow. He had a magnificent eye for the bizarre, for the madcap, above all for what was extraordinary in the ordinary. In his story “The Nose,” he wrote about a barber who wakes one morning to discover a nose stuffed into his morning loaf of bread. The nose turns out to belong to one of his customers, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov. How the nose got into the barber’s bread and how one morning it reappeared on the face of its owner is never explained. Plots are not Gogol’s strong point. Nor was he much interested in ideas, at least not directly.

Getty Images

Portrait of Gogol from the 1830s by Jean Guerin.

“Dead Souls” is about Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, who travels the provincial countryside buying up dead serfs from small landowners. These serfs remain on the landowners’ books until the next census and, even though dead, are still taxable. Chichikov offers to relieve the landowners of their tax burden. His plan is to install these dead serfs on the tax rolls of a far-away estate, on which he will then be able to get a generous government mortgage and come away with a small fortune.

The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was Gogol’s friend and supporter, and the man who gave him the idea for “Dead Souls.” Gogol refers to the book not as a novel but as a poem. “Dead Souls” is a poem about Russia, its provincial backwaters, its secondary characters (clerks, minor officials, small landowners), its heartbreaking squalor. “Russia! Russia!” Gogol exclaims midway through the book, “. . . Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like counters; there is nothing to tempt or enchant the onlooker’s gaze. But what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you?”

What gives “Dead Souls” its poetic quality is its author’s exuberant passion for the details—one might even say the irrelevant details—of provincial Russian life. In his brief, brilliant study “Nikolai Gogol,” Vladimir Nabokov accounts for Gogol’s artistry through this and what he calls Gogol’s “four dimensional” prose, a sinuous style that captures characters in their inner being. Gogol’s scenes light up their surroundings, his characters flame into life, his tragicomic vision touches the reader’s heart.

I write “tragicomic,” for Gogol was far from the mere humorist he is sometimes advertised as being. “I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life,” he wrote in “Dead Souls,” “to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through unknown invisible tears.” The book’s characters might be thought stock—the miser, the spendthrift, the bearish Russian and the rest—but for their creator’s ability to bring them to life with a shimmering individuality.

Chichikov, the character at the heart of Gogol’s masterpiece, is a lower-echelon civil servant with a corrupt past who specializes in what Gogol calls “blandiloquence,” or elaborately empty compliments. Chichikov was brought up by a father whose last words of advice to his son were to please his superiors, not to be seduced by friendship, and to remember that nothing in life is so important as money—advice, notes Gogol, “that remained deeply engraved in his soul.”

One of life’s “acquirers”—for Gogol, a major sin—Chichikov turns out to be an inept acquirer, which makes him quite as interesting as he is detestable. “Wise is the man,” Gogol writes, “who does not disdain any character, and instead, examining him with a searching look, plumbs him to the very main-springs of his being.” That sentence should stand as the first commandment for every novelist.

Chichikov is a fantasist who imagines himself one day running a plush and productive estate, with a pretty wife and fine children, himself the very model of the perfect Russian citizen. Although Gogol writes that “we have not taken a virtuous man as our hero,” he has made Chichikov, though vile and petty in so many ways, oddly sympathetic.

When the rascal is caught out at his game, Chichikov garners our pity. Who cannot feel for the poor wretch, down on his knees, begging forgiveness “in his tailcoat of Narvarino smoke and flame, in his velvet waistcoat and new trousers, with his satin necktie and carefully groomed hair from which emanated the fresh smell of eau de Cologne”?

Gogol was contemplating two further volumes to complete “Dead Souls.” The plan was for the first volume to be devoted to crime, the second to punishment and a third to redemption. He thought of the completed “Dead Souls” as a catechism of sorts that would save the Russian soul. In his second and third volumes, he wrote to a friend, “the Russian would appear in the fullness of his national nature, in all the rich variety of the inner forces contained within him.” Gogol, thank goodness, was never able to get these volumes, with their implicit preachiness, written.

Late in his short life, Gogol found religion and promptly lost art. Once Gogol began to think of himself as a Christian reformer, Nabokov writes, “he lost the magic of creating something out of nothing.” His genius for devising delicious details disappeared; his powers of invention deserted him. Before his death, he burned what he had written of the second volume of his novel. The last 10 years of his life Gogol suffered greatly from writer’s block; he died an excruciating death from anemia of the brain at the age of 43.

“Dead Souls,” meanwhile, is among that small number of uncompleted masterpieces that includes Tchaikovsky’s Unfinished Symphony, and Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities,” but with the important qualification that Nikolai Gogol’s great work is all the better for remaining unfinished.

—Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, with Frederic Raphael, of “Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet.”

A version of this article appeared May 4, 2013, on page C13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life.

Ryan Snook

Booking a free ticket with your frequent-flier miles can seem like casino gambling: Getting what you want is like hitting a jackpot, but more often than not, the house wins.

Not all airlines offer the same odds. Availability of award tickets at the basic mileage level on United Airlines is twice as good, for example, as on Delta Air Lines

or US Airways,

according to the Switchfly Reward Seat Availability Survey. The survey, to be released Thursday, found that United had seats available on 80% of the queries made. Delta and US Airways both had the lowest availability rate among the 25 airlines, at only 36.4%.

WSJ ‘Middle Seat’ columnist Scott McCartney outlines the best and worst airlines for travelers who want to redeem their frequent flier miles. Photo: Getty Images.

Southwest Airlines

and JetBlue Airways

scored best among U.S. airlines. Those two, along with other discount airlines, showed greater availability than airlines with big international networks. Southwest had seats available for every query. Southwest’s AirTran Airways unit had seats available for 95% of queries, while JetBlue offered seats 88.6% of the time.

The disparity in availability is “not accidental,” said Jay Sorensen, president of IdeaWorksCompany, a consulting firm that conducted the study. Some airlines “consciously provide more award seats.”

The survey also tested booking tickets just five to 15 days before departure in April. The chances of getting tickets were better than when booking three to seven months in advance on Delta, US Airways and American Airlines. This indicates airlines have gotten more aggressive about making unsold seats available shortly before departure to make sure planes take off full. Delta’s short-term booking rate increased 35 points over the same period in 2012.

Cashing in miles has been a source of long-standing frustration. Some fliers set clocks to request free tickets at midnight 331 days, or about 11 months, before departure—traditionally the moment airlines open a flight for booking—only to find no seats available on popular flights. And airlines have raised the price of award tickets by introducing higher-cost award tiers, reducing availability at the lowest award level.

Overall, average award availability was about the same as last year, at 71.1%. Availability increased at discount airlines and declined at more traditional carriers with extensive international networks. “Ongoing consolidation and capacity cuts continue to squeeze reward seat availability,” said Daniel Farrar, chief executive of Switchfly Inc., a technology company that provides software for loyalty programs at airlines, hotels and banks, and sponsored the study.

Travelers have an easier time getting free tickets on discount carriers in part because they generally have short flights with multiple departures each day on each route. Airlines generally make more seats available on short flights. They tend to offer intercontinental trips only once or twice a day, and they have more confidence they can sell seats to cash-paying customers rather than giving them away for miles.

Some airlines, including Southwest, are also simply answering customer demand that frequent-flier miles be easier to cash in.

“This was one of the pain points that we tried to solve with the new program,” said Ryan Green, Southwest’s senior director of loyalty and partnerships.

Southwest’s old program had limits on availability. Southwest’s new program, launched in March 2011, offers an award price for any ticket available for sale. Southwest’s percentage of its passenger traffic flying on awards increased to 9% in 2012, from 8.3% a year earlier, according to the company’s annual 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The survey found seats for a huge majority of queries across all airlines for flights under 2,500 miles: nearly 85%. But the success rate for seats dropped to only 43% for flights longer than 2,500 miles.

Among carriers offering long-haul trips, Singapore Airlines

was the most generous for its frequent fliers, making seats available on 94% of queries. US Airways was the stingiest with its long flights, with award seats available on only 4.3% of queries.

Air France-KLM

showed the biggest improvement of any of the 25 airlines in the survey, with availability jumping 22.2 points to 77.9%. An Air France spokeswoman said that as part of an improvement program, the carrier did “indeed try to make more award seats available.”

Delta and US Airways have scored at the bottom for award seats all four years of the survey, though both have upped their availability. In 2010, both carriers offered seats to fewer than 13% of the IdeaWorks queries.

Delta says it, like other airlines, offers all seats on planes to frequent fliers, just at higher mileage cost than the lowest redemption level, which is 25,000 miles for a domestic coach round-trip ticket. Both Delta and US Airways have a three-tier redemption structure, offering seats at the basic level, a midtier level at around 40,000 miles for a domestic coach ticket and a full-fare level for as many as 60,000 miles for domestic coach round trips.

A Delta spokeswoman said the carrier was pleased the survey showed its increased availability for close-in bookings, something Delta has tried to boost. Half of all Delta award tickets are now booked within 60 days of departure. “Award demand is at an all-time high,” she said. Yet Delta customers actually redeemed fewer awards last year compared with 2011, according to the company’s SEC filings, and the percentage of passenger traffic flying on awards last year dipped as well.

US Airways, which said in its 10-K filing that its redemption totals were unchanged from 2011, notes that its short-haul route structure means its customers take longer to reach awards and many prefer to redeem awards on partner airlines for long trips. That availability doesn’t show up on the airline’s website—customers have to call—so it wouldn’t be included in the study, a US Airways spokesman noted.

Consumers earn more miles these days as rewards from credit-card companies and other vendors rather than from actual flying. American Airlines reported in its SEC filings that it issued 209 billion frequent-flier miles in 2012; 66% of them were sold by the airline to partner companies to give as rewards to their customers. The allure of free travel to prized destinations has remained a powerful driver of consumer loyalty.

The survey is based on 7,000 booking requests for two seats at the lowest mileage level, now often called “saver” awards, at 25 airlines. Each airline’s website receives 280 queries on their busiest routes. Consumers can sometimes find better award availability by calling airlines and getting an experienced agent to hunt for seats and check the inventory of airline partners. The vast majority of award tickets, however, are booked online.

IdeaWorks made queries in March for travel dates spanning June through October, and selected itineraries that always included a Saturday-night stay with travel on each airline’s top 10 routes under 2,500 miles and 10 busiest routes longer than 2,500 miles in order to evaluate availability in each carrier’s strongest markets. Circuitous routes and layovers longer than four hours were rejected.

IdeaWorks kept track of the lowest offer each airline had for seats on trips under 2,500 miles and found Southwest had the lowest average cost, at 9,353 points. US Airways had the highest, with an average of 31,143 miles required to get a round-trip ticket for flights under 2,500 miles.

Write to Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 9, 2013, on page D1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Best Airlines for Cashing In Miles.