As an veritable outsider to What Happens At Fashion Week, I don’t see the bitching, the bitchiness, the bitchery and other assorted forms of the word “bitch”. I don’t see the parties and the painful hipsters with their obnoxious neon wayfarers and their “vintage” clothes that they brought for more money than they’re really worth. I don’t see what happens among the prim and proper editors and buyers and occasional celebrities who sit in the front row. All that I see, and all that most of the world sees is the clothes. The clothes have to stand up and actually speak for themselves, they have to function as a piece of design without the use of alcohol, fear, or a reality distortion field.

The clothes didn’t have much to say. In fact the majority were too lazy to bother saying anything at all. The majority of designers this season opted to uh, to do nothing. Alexander Wang was a godawful attempt at something, but nobody really knew what it was. There was pieces of other collections by other designers flying all around the place in his “collection”. That’s fine- there was in Marc Jacobs’ collection too. Actually there was hints of other collections in everybody’s shows. But where Marc Jacobs makes a coherent picture or whatever for us (I refuse to call it “statement”. There’s plenty of statements if you want to look at it that way, but they don’t make the collection. It’s just everything that Marc Jacobs feels like showing this season shoved together in a picture that you could compare to “Tombstone Blues” or another surreal song of the same ilk. All these references, tossed together, but it works.)
But Mr Wang’s references to other designers and collections didn’t work. As I said; they were flying all over the place. They pissed on the on the floor.

I really do adore Alexander Wang- he’s incredibly unpretentious and seems sweet. He just didn’t have a good season.
Nor did most designers.
Ralph Lauren et al delivered the same goods they deliver every year. By “et al” I mean, well, I mean almost every designer who showed at NY fashion week.
Their clothes were mostly wearable, and stuck to the same formula that each designer’s known for.
That’s the problem– they didn’t do anything interesting. Ralph Lauren looked like Ralph Lauren. DKNY looked like DNKY. Carolina Herrera probably looked like Caroline Herrera even though I haven’t even bothered to look at that collection. I will now.
And by golly it does.

And that’s NY fashion week’s problem. Most of the designers are stuck in this very rigid cast that they can’t develop or take risks or move about. I won’t bother asking “why?” because I know why. You probably do too.
They’re scared; or either bad designers. Possibly even both.
I don’t really care that much, though. More success to the designers who aren’t like that. It’s just a terrible bore when an entire fashion week almost entirely consists of boring clothes.

There were two really good collections. Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein. Some so-called “fashionistas” have called the Calvin Klein collection a rip off in 10 different ways (and a rip off of 10 different designers). Calvin Klein looked like what I thought Calvin Klein should look like when I was introduced to that particular brand when all I knew about fashion was that there was a load of snobs in it; Armani was the best designer ever (in fact he was the only designer I’d ever heard of at that point); and that fashion costs a lot.
Now I know that Armani bores me, but “fashion” or more accurately “good clothes” cost a lot.
Whoever told me about Calvin Klein called it “minimalist” and then I saw some CK clothes from that period and they weren’t really minimalist. They were clothes that the “cute” guy who runs might wear. They were clothes, goddamit, but they had no identity. They could be from anywhere.
The minimalist vision in my mind was destroyed. CK became a Tommy Hilfiger-like label for me- yes, a label– not that I’d heard of Tommy Hilfiger at the time either (I was ten and my parents weren’t Penguin Hipster Magazine Curators or anything like that).

What Calvin Klein was at the time of my introduction to it was a factory designing a collection. Now it’s an actual designer designing what Calvin Klein minimalism should be. White, white, white. Origami shapes everywhere. Folding and pleats. Refrigerated fabric.
I don’t need to write more about Marc Jacobs because I’ve covered that in a previous article. Here I’ll ask any girl that’s reading this and can afford it, to go out and buy some clothes from that collection because you’ll look fucking great. The uniform of the girl in NZ at the moment is neon, obnoxious t-shirts with really big writing, sunglasses, and tight jeans and/or tights. If you’re a “fashion” girl you probably dress in horrible floral that’re vintage-looking but they’re more like a week-old, and probably wearing ballet flats. It’s actually appalling to the eyes. I guess they could do worse: start dressing like it’s 1989 for one (oh! Some of them do..)
The point being buying some Marc Jacobs clothes would shake up fashion rat race- the actual people you encounter in the (concrete) street, rather than the gold-plated streets of Paris Fashion week.
Maybe some manufacturer, somewhere, will do some Marc Jacobs knock-offs and those girls will stop wearing obnoxious slogan t-shirts, and you know, go out and buy a jacket.

She (he?) just acts like we just never have met, NY Fashion Week. She has some other kind of lover.
Stage right is the businessmen in their Armani suits, and Stage left is the designers busy counting their money and running away. In the middle is Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein. Nobody’s yelled “Judas!” at them yet.