The Fashion Projects (London Terrace)

London Terrace is a series of residential buildings between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth streets and Ninth and Tenth avenues in West Chelsea, Manhattan. There are many designer, photographer and model residents and the buildings were dubbed “the fashion projects” since at least 1995.
 
 
Google News Archive
16 April 1995, Daytona Beach (FL) Sunday News-Journal, pg. 3F, col. 4::
New York’s Fashion set
gathers under one roof
By RENE CHUN
New York Times News Service
NEW YORK—London Terrace is a prewar building in West Chelsea with a 75-foot indoor swimming pool, uniformed elevator operators and spacious apartments, some of them with river views and wood-burning fireplaces.
(...)
The building’s proximity to low-income structures has earned it the label “the fashion projects.” The fashion projects. It’s the type of perverse humor New Yorkers relish. Wayne Scot Lukas, a stylist, loves this joke. “If you live in the projects, they might as well be fashionable,” he said, between sips of Evian.
 
Google Books
Susan Sontag:
The Making of an Icon
By Carl Edmund Rollyson and Lisa Olson Paddock
New York, NY: W.W. Norton
2000
Pg. 279:
In early 1991, in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, Sontag purchased a penthouse apartment situated in the sixteen-story London Terrace, a.k.a. “the fashion projects” because so many designers lived in its fourteen buildings, which take up an entire block between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth streets and Ninth and Tenth avenues.
 
New York magazine
Real Estate 2001: Neighborhood Profiles
Chelsea
By Ben Sisario
Not so long ago, Chelsea was the “ugly stepsister of the Village,” says Gil Neary of DG Neary Realty (whose motto is “A Castle for Every Queen”). With the exception of a few places like London Terrace—now nicknamed the “fashion projects”—it was rarely a first-choice real-estate destination.
 
Google Books
The Rough Guide to New York City
By Andrew Rosenberg and Martin Dunford
New York, NY: Penguin Books
2012
Pg. 109:
London Terrace
The block bounded by 23rd and 24th sts, and Ninth and Tenth aves
(...)
The apartments were later nicknamed “The Fashion Projects” because of their designer, photographer and model residents (past an present names include Isaac Mizrahi, Debbie Harry, Tim Gunn and Annie Leibovitz).