Fforme’s Frances Howie is in a New York state of mind. Last season her customer left town in a figurative sense, but fall was all about returning to the emerging brand’s metropolis.

“We are a New York brand,” she said during a preview. And New York was a character in her show.  She called to mind the 1990 film “Metropolitan,” a romantic comedy of manners about a group of friends who meet to discuss social mobility. The “endangered debutante,” Howie labeled it.

Where did those social swans get their clothing? In the ateliers of Seventh Avenue. It’s a bygone era that still has a few specialized holdouts crafting pieces in the garment district. She used one to construct shearlings that were treated less as luxury than instinct — dangling as scarves, hats, and shoulder wraps as cocooned silhouettes, left deliberately frayed at the edges, elegant but faintly savage.

Hand-tailored suiting in mélange wool faille was deconstructed, made modular with a vest as a separate piece locking together, completing a look. Another slick collarless coat was paired with a tailored sleeveless dress. A dramatic A-line gown in gray mélange ottoman was wrapped in gauze-y wool jersey, creating a trompe l’oeil effect.

Metallic-hued velvet dresses molded the body into hourglass silhouettes with panniers in gold and burnt amber. They came in the finest French velvet, another one of this atelier’s specialties with decades of experience. “If we don’t support these places, they will be gone,” she said, a cause she is passionate about.

Other looks, like outerwear, used hair calf, the tactile continuing to be what makes her work at Ffrome resonate. “We don’t really have accessories. The clothing is the hero piece,” she said.

Metallic halos were hand-hammered in silver and bronze, circling the necklines of minimal silk dresses, partly suspended. The natural elements were immortalized through electroplating: real flowers and leaves were coated, creating one-of-a-kind works of art by a close collaborator of the brand, Barcelona-based jewelry designer Alba Navarro of ANH Studio.

Her endangered debutante emerged in the shapes and fabrications but the soul was unmistakably ’90s Helmut Lang, with ribboned tuxedo trousers trailing the runway and sheer knit tops deconstructed using ribbons cross-stitched into quiet disruption.

“Everything is dressier,” she said of her collection, “but not too dressed up.”  Howie’s Fforme delivered edge without indulgence.