The marathon of fashion begins today [Sept. 5] and ends Sept. 13. I'll be here in New York for the duration, so feel free to follow my quixotic travails here or @DebraBass via Twitter (twitter.com/debrabass), Instagram (instagram.com/debrabass) or Vine (I was clearly excited that the colorful invite for Desigual matched my dress).

I'll be sharing videos, photos, observations and interviews with notables along the way, but if you want to fully embrace the week's sensory overload, here are a few more options for staying in the thick of the action.

• The official Mercedes Benz Fashion Week site is pretty awesome. Get the schedule and check out live video of the shows. You can set your alarm to watch in real-time or head to their YouTube channel for repeats. Browse the sites gallery of images, check out the hubbub pre-show and the stampede that follows. And you can interact via any social media option you choose.  

• Women's Wear Daily is the must-consult fashion industry daily. The subscriptions are pricey and a little inside-baseball if you really just want to know when the Marc Jacob's line will arrive at Sephora, but during fashion week the site updates constantly with photos and insights on every collection of note. Check out the preview of Spring 2014 inspirations from designers to find out who was inspired by gravel (yes, gravel) and who took their cues from "the garden of earthly delights".

•Made Fashion Week, madefashionweek.com/schedule, across town at Milk Studios works in tandem with MBFW. If MBFW is the grande dame for fashion shows, Made is the bratty little brother with a nose ring and doc Martens. Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Diane von Furstenberg show at MBFW; household names don't show at Made, the closest is Jeremy Scott who recently has presented collections based on superheroes. Last season, one of Scott's funky knitted sweaters was emblazoned with this notion: "Adults Suck and Then You Are One." 

•Save your hashtags searches for #nyfw and #mbfw. Mercedes Benz Fashion Week (MBFW) does encompass most shows of note, but not everyone who shows during the coming nine days falls under that umbrella. Most people just call it New York Fashion Week but that displeases MBFW even though it's often more accurate. And guaranteed, every designer will offer up a different hashtag and once you wade through all of those maybe you'll have a few characters of content to read.

•Fashion writers and blogs to watch: New York Magazine's The Cut (love), Style.com (indepth and fun), Tom + Lorenzo (the who-would-of-thunk-it dynamic fashion blogging duo, I don't always agree with them but they are catty fun to read) and Man Repeller (Leandra Medine is so fashion forward, she's anti-fashion. The blog is not quite as much fun now that she's married with a staff, but she's got a delightfully blunt way about her). 

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