Tender of Birmingham will donate 10% of its sales from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Thursday to JARC, a Farmington Hills nonprofit that helps adults with disabilities. It’ll also give shoppers a shot at prizes: a closet makeover with Jon Jordon, WDIV-TV fashion and style reporter, and a fabulous fall designer handbag.

in another story when Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, first proposed keeping stores open late for a night of shopping as a way to get the global retail economy out of its funk, the question that crossed my mind was, gee, who’s paying for the sales staff, the security and the catering?
Ms. Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, was making a rare public appearance Thursday night in a store that does not carry Prada (save for the perfume). As her magazine is dependent on the health of designer businesses and luxury stores, it seemed that she would do almost anything to coax people to shop again, leading a caravan of handlers from Queens to Bergdorf Goodman and much later to Sean Combs’s store on Fifth Avenue as part of a retail promotion called Fashion’s Night Out. More than 800 stores held parties and kept their doors open until 11 p.m. Mr. Kors, the fashion designer, said they were “beating the tom-toms” for starving retailers.

Ms. Wintour’s appearance in a Queens shopping mall to kick off the event was a gesture to show that the idea of holding shopping parties during a recession was not, in her words, “elitist.”

“It’s bigger than our wildest dreams,” Ms. Wintour said while waiting for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to arrive. He was half an hour late, and it looked as if her patience was waning.

“We’re just hoping that our global fashion stimulus package works,” she said.

The scene was utterly chaotic, and it was not entirely clear that many people had bought much more than a Fashion’s Night Out charity T-shirt to benefit the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and the New York City AIDS Fund, so they could have it autographed by Ms. Wintour. Terry J. Lundgren, chief executive of Macy’s, said the chain had sold more than half its 6,000 T-shirts, for $30 apiece, by 5 p.m. Mr. Kors was joking that Raquel Zimmermann, the model, would soon take to the public address system and ask for a price check on ladies’ lingerie.