A-List Row Call: Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, and Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway and “Slumdog” newcomer Freida Pinto are Fashion Week’s most-wanted guests.

Is First Lady Michelle Obama planning a trip to New York next week? Will Jill Biden take a day off from teaching to see what style lessons American fashion designers have planned for cash-strapped consumers in the months ahead? New York Fashion Week begins next Friday, and if the dreams of American designers are answered, Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Biden will attend at least one or two – do we hear three? – of the fall-winter 2009 fashion collections.

Only a year ago, during the 2008 fall-winter collections, B-list designers would have sold their assistants’ kidneys and been happy to get 20-something tabloidites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie to their shows, but not this season. Loftier A-list designers happily doled out big bucks (sometimes upward of $100,000 a head) to PR consultants and stylists to get actresses like Renée Zellweger and Sarah Jessica Parker just where they needed them: front row and center at their shows.

Fashion is change; the more it changes the more it stays the same. Meaning, Great Recession or No Recession, publicity is publicity, and the pros know how to spin in good times and bad. Many shows, like Marc Jacobs, who has slashed his guest list in half, will be more tastefully conducted than the celebrity bacchanals of seasons past; but big names, carefully chosen, their lines well rehearsed – “I am here to support the American retail industry at this challenging time” – will still be the mainstay of the front row. (Expect savvy front row A-listers to wear respectfully chic black, not riches and bling, while the culturally tone-deaf spin out of favor in so-last-season high flash and hot flesh.)

But where designers used to look mostly to movie houses to cast their front-row A-list – of course still hoping during this month’s pre-Academy Award fever to lure big-wattage nominees such as Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway, Kate Winslet and Penélope Cruz, as well as non-nominated but new Hollywood “It” actress and fashion darling “Slumdog Millionaire” star Freida Pinto – now the White House trumps showbiz, at least as long as the honeymoon with the Obama-Biden ticket lasts.

Designers are praying to their American gods in heaven – Bill Blass, Halston, Geoffrey Beene, the legendary style journalist Eugenia Sheppard – that First Lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden can be delivered to New York during Fashion Week.

And maybe they can.

The hot rumor sweeping Seventh Avenue is that First Lady Michelle Obama and/or Jill Biden will attend a couple of shows during Fashion Week. (Their decisions are still pending at the time of this writing.) Which designers have invited them? "Which haven’t?" is the better question, not that any would comment on record lest they jinx their chances by saying too much too soon. (Jason Wu, creator of Mrs. Obama’s Inaugural gown, shows his fall collection on Friday the 13th and Mrs. Obama is not, as of today, expected to attend – although the rest of the world is clamoring for the limited seats.)

According to insiders, here are the factors in making the decision of whether Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Biden will visit a few shows: On the negative side, neither woman wants to be seen as frivolous, and attending a fashion show, especially in the current economic climate, could be misinterpreted as such.

Plus, during the first months of any new administration, the Secret Service is particularly skittish about having their White House charges travel until they have been able to studiously assess the various security issues being attracted (the kooks and creeps who leap out of the woodwork in the first 100 days) by Washington’s newly minted stars. Securing a fashion show is not easy, and not cheap.