"No big mystery there," Parker laughed after the ceremony, held in a tent behind the Upper East Side Smithsonian outpost. "Yes, I knew he was going to win -- but he definitely didn't!"

A practiced fashion promoter, Parker twirled willingly in her silver beaded dress, then piped up, "Don't forget the bag," rummaging under her chair to produce the silver fringed purse, "and check out the shoes," bringing a multistrap stilettoed foot forward. "They're straight off the runway." Ford showed his latest Gucci collection, perhaps his most critically acclaimed ever, in Milan earlier this month.

Shockingly, the "Sex and the City" star and Ford, certainly considered the sexiest designer in any city, were introduced for the first time at the awards ceremony. "It was great to finally meet you," Parker told Ford, whose designs for both Gucci and YSL have helped solidify her red carpet star status, before they parted ways. "I think you're just swell."

And the designer feels the same way about the company he was in Wednesday night. Not just his pretty tablemates - he was seated between Parker and Vogue editor Anna Wintour - but the wider design community that gathered for the event. Fashion design was the last competitive category of the evening, following honors for communication design, architecture design, environment design, and product design. "After being in this room and seeing this presentation, I'm just honored to be here," Ford said, pointing to the work of one of the communication design nominees: "There was the robot with the ears ... I design dresses."

The designer also heaped praise on his colleagues at Gucci Group, where the hotly debated matter of his contract renewal could be settled within a week: "I'm very fortunate. I work with the best people at both Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. They make what I do possible. This is for them."

Since Paul Thompson joined the Cooper-Hewitt as director from Sir Terence Conran's Design Museum in London in 2001, the 106-year-old institution has become much more familiar to the fashion set. Last year's National Design Awards honored Geoffrey Beene with an "American Original" prize. This fall, the museum had planned to showcase Hussein Chalayan in its first-ever solo fashion exhibition, but unfortunately ran into some scheduling snags. "Let's just say it's still in the planning stage," Thompson said Wednesday night. "It's very much a part of my mission for the Cooper-Hewitt to give fashion a bigger role."

And fashion certain came into play at the museum's fourth annual National Design Awards - and not just in its newly added category. 7th on Sixth director Fern Mallis was a member of this year's jury and presented Target chairman and CEO Bob Ulrich with the award for corporate achievement, thanking the retailer "for making it cool to shop where everyone else does."

Ulrich was joined at the event by several of his company's cool-factor designers, Todd Oldham, Isaac Mizrahi, Cynthia Rowley and Liz Lange. It wasn't a Target-only zone though. Discount retailer Kmart was represented by its star designer Martha Stewart, who has begun stepping out again in recent weeks as her January trial date approaches. Stewart didn't linger at the after-party, but made a point of stopping on the way to her car to congratulate lifetime achievement honoree I.M. Pei. "Congratulations, it's just fantastic," she smiled as she shook the 86-year-old architect's hand.

Other fashion folk that participated included Barneys creative director Simon Doonan, who insisted on being introduced as the "diminutive doyen of display," before handing out the prize for communication design to RGA cofounder Robert Greenberg. Carolina Herrera, a vice-chair of the event, presented the award for architecture to the husband-and-wife team of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, while Reed Krakoff, creative director of Coach, a major sponsor of the awards, introduced Pei.