NY Fashion Week: Queens of the Catty-walk & Much More

I love clothes, I'll admit it. I have this innate gravitation towards clothing; it comes from a fascination with textures, patterns, and crazy designers. And since clothes make the man, I feel that if I really do want to become a serious manga artist and create relevant character designs, I should keep on top of current and future clothing trends.

This means that when I discover, to my delight, that the girls at my my fave blog for fashion snark, Go Fug Yourself, were hired by New York Magazine to blog at the NY Fashion Week, I couldn't help myself and clicked right over to their posts. The blogs are horrendously organized, but the info and opinions in them are great. (This survey of 100 models was a nice eye opener; am so glad all the girls like me are grossed out by Donald Trump.)

And the best part about the whole site is that they have created galleries of most of the runway shows, for the perusal of interested people like me. My fave shows so far? The ones by designers Rag&Bone and Caroline Herrera, in terms of character design and hat I would love to wear. (The clothes I think are all Ready-to-Wear lines, meaning that they are clothes that could be potentially picked up and stocked at the higher end stores, should said stores choose to stock them. Diff from Couture, which is specific to a person and often bat crazy and avant-garde.)

And the site allows you to create your own photo album for your fave images from all the shows! Click here to see my own album of my fave outfits.

The whole show reminds me that I really need to see Project Runway. Tim Gunn sounds a lot like Richard Wilde, whom I saw and loved at a design convention. (Here's a link to some of the keys he discussed at said place.) Both are gifted design professors, but Tim just so happens to have a cable show about his craft. (Seriously, any reality show creator out there who wants to do a show with Richard in the Tim role, I would so totally watch it; do you know the design challenges he gives his students? Example: gives students an old car, a real one, and they have to create an art piece. Design projeccts are crazy, it would be so fun to watch. But no one listens to me, so meh.) for Tim Gunn addicts, NY Mag also did an interview with him. And he has a photo album of his own to peruse.

Oh, and here are some posts from USA Today on fashion week.

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I have to comment that I did not always feel this way about fashion, of course. In high school all models and ad campaigns were the enemy, the things I stared at with envy and enmity as I unfavirably compared my growing frame to that of the sleek, doctored sirens smirking at me from the glossy magazine pages. Fortunately growing up changes you; somewhere in between Elicia studying fashion and me studying graphic design, I discovered that I had moved beyond those feelings to a much better place mentally, where I now study clothes and ads with the eye of a designer instead of an awkward, impressionable teenager. That eye knows now that the women there are being used as a stylistic choice, a frame on which to hang a dress, purse, car, etc. And on runways the model is not the muse but merely the frame on which the designer hangs his canvas of clothing. The women in the ads and on the runways are not reality a the average person knows it, but rather a distorted form of humanity being used to present the message of the company or designer. It is not personal, just business as usual.

But, as I know all to well, telling that to a fourteen-year-old who destructively feasts on those images is like bashing your head into a brick wall: frustrating and painful. So I did want to counteract the inferiority complex that might ensue for some gentle readers by posting some interesting, body-related links.

In college I took a cultural anthropology class, from a brilliant prof who really helped me see culture in a new way. During the class she showed us the second "Killing Us Softly" video, which is a series of vids studying the effect of advertising on how women are perceived by themselves and by society. Really fascinating, and I highly suggest ordering them or checking them out at a library.

Have you heard about the model ban? Apparently a model died from heart failure related to extreme dieting for a show. As a result, the top shows in Spain, London, and Milan are banning models with a BMI lower than 18. While it was the government of each country who ordered the ban, I hope the fashion directors and designers truly take it to heart. Some people are cnarking about the ban, saying that models have nothing to do with girls developing eating disorders. Are they seriously that stupid? But I realize they, like the music and movie industries, are only trying to deflect blame, which is a natural defense mechanism. Apparently Spain's show went just fine with the new ban, although some designers had to replace some or all of their models. Here are pics from London's Fashion Week; the models are still skinny but perhaps less emaciated than normal? Crap, actually the London will not impose the ban for "aesthetic reasons." Shame on them.

Here was a stupid comment from Kate Moss's publicist. Apparently she is under 18 BMI and would be affected by the ban. The publicist apparently feels girls should just exercise, eat healthy and be normal. Has she told this to her client? Snorting coke does not count as eating, Kate!

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Don't forget the two-night Andy Warhol documentary on PBS that starts tonight! Ever since I saw this exhibit about him, he has morphed in my mind from pop culturist to actual artist with a message. Am excited. Have been eyeing this for a while, but Whitney, bless her heart, also feels people should tune in.