New York Fashion Week, which strutted its way to a close last Friday, occupies a unique position in the scheme of international fashion expos. The first in the traditional fashion month cycle of New York-London-Milan-Paris, New York sets the tone for the season to come, with a mix of rising young designers and entrenched society gown-makers.
In ways unlike the other fashion weeks, like London, where club kids stage psychedelic parades of unwearable costuming, or Milan, where the pursuit of luxury renders almost everything sumptuous and dull, New York manages to combine the thrill of new, innovative design with a gimlet eye on the bottom line.
And that bottom line is a worrying thing indeed. With the global economy in turmoil and no sign of a blue chip tomorrow on the horizon, the appeal of high fashion's expensive fantasia has, perhaps, lost some of its former luster.
When times are good, designers are free to conjure up armies of space Amazons out of the ether and clothe them in neoprene battle robes, or better yet, whittle out solid-oak dresses that unfold into coffee tables.
Things that otherwise barely register as "clothing," in the fat years are re-imagined as pieces of wearable art, and light on the wearable part. But when the Christmas bonuses go down the drain - shortly followed by the Diwali and Samhain bonuses, and then by the economy in total - suddenly the fashion industry has to take a good, long look at itself and its customers, and ask the really hard question:
Who is the woman today's designers want to dress?
The same designers who just a few seasons ago demanded a few extra limbs or a negative body mass to get into their pieces now train their sights on regular, work-a-day human women. The most dangerous game? Not exactly: the filthy truth about consumer confidence may spell defeat for the space Amazons at the ink-stained hands of Earth stock accountants, but there's still some question about the species of woman designers have managed to bag.
Last week, designers took one of essentially two routes in an effort to keep their business in the black. The first spread that hue, the color both of financial solvency and deep despondency, all over collections full of Gothic lace tights, leather leggings and biker jackets. The look is ready for a street fight on the day the system finally collapses entirely and all anybody has left is her motorcycle and asymmetrical cocktail dress.
The label Phi, designed by Andreas Melbostad, refined the necessities down to a cropped, fur-augmented jacket and pair of heavily zippered pants, and filled in the rest of the wardrobe with, what else, the new basics: fine black knits in the shape of polo-neck sweaters, tights and leggings.
Alexander Wang, the downtown New York wunderkind whose louche and frankly trashy style has been a smashing success, continued his train of thought for fall. If times really take a turn for the worse, his collection will make ideal work clothes for novice streetwalkers. Leather shorts have inexplicably sprung up all over New York. Wang's designs, slim-cut and long, and more often that not in crocodile skin rather than the by-now expected cow, added to the look-but-don't-touch appeal of his ladies of the night.
Wang pioneered the cropped, midriff-baring, violently sexy look a couple of seasons ago, and his erstwhile model muse Erin Wasson took up the torch for her own design collaboration with skate and surf line RVCA. Wasson's own look is a mix of high-powered glamazon in the vein of Jerry Hall and down-and-out Hollywood stripper, and her designs freely mingled sheer tops, leather shorts, leather jackets, vinyl pants, and exposed garter belts.
Preen, designed by Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi, added to the trash-class conflict with a collection full of cut-out bandage dresses, in stretch knits and leather. A leather version, full of knots and holes, in addition to slightly psychotic eye makeup made model Catherine McNeil look like the economic downturn had led her to make a meal out of her dress. If all else fails, at least the fashionably destitute can keep in mind the fact that their dresses can be boiled into a nourishing soup.
Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler and Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte turned out dresses made of shreds. In the Rodarte collection they were pieced together like fashionable Frankenstein's monsters.
The Proenza designers revived silk devore with a series of finale dresses that looked like the remains of velvet gowns clinging to the models after having been almost entirely ripped away by one of the packs of ravening feral dogs sure to take over every street corner in today's dangerous post-human economy.
Some labels that have made their name as purveyors of luxury basics stepped up their game by dragging these staples into the fashion future. Tse, known for their cashmere pieces, put together a collection that wouldn't be out of place on a glamorous Bene Gesserit mother from Frank Herbert's Dune. They featured cashmere cowls, sweeping skirts, wrapped and layered knits, topped off with a nonchalant animal pelt draped across the shoulders. It's wild, ultra-modern and slightly primitive at the same time.
Though the models looked like they couldn't hurt a fly, if in the coming apocalypse fashionable ladies start trapping and taking down their fur coats with their bare hands, the look would be that much improved.
The New York shows may seem so far to have been unremittingly tough and more or less dystopian, a sly return of the space prostitutes with a heart of chrome from "Blade Runner," but sometimes human girls just want to have fun. That's where designers like Marc Jacobs come in.
Jacobs' fall show exploded the black leather android parade taking over the New York runways, with big hair, big shoulders, big sparkle, and big fun. A bad wind is blowing through 2009, which makes the Eighties nostalgia Jacobs referenced even more appealing.
Much as the hard-edged biker of the future look has its strengths, there comes a time when even the most down-at-heel android needs to party, and Jacobs will be right there to outfit her in Pepto-pink hooded coat and matched molded mini-dress.
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