No really, I checked with Jezebel editor Anna Holmes, seriously no one cares this year. I even checked with the anonymous comments left on New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn's blog; this is like the most irrelevant-feeling Fashion Week since the terrorists got involved. Why? Well I thought of five good reasons! This guy (pictured) is your first clue…
Marc Jacobs is the only designer anyone cares about and, even though his collection was sort of cool this year, his collection has always been sort of a loss-leader funded by his insane diva behavior and that behavior mostly stopped this year. Last September Marc Jacobs started his 9 p.m. show two and a half hours late and everyone had a hissy fit about it, which in turn caused Marc Jacobs to have a hissy fit over how he was an "artist" and people should not be thinking about quotidian details such as whether their dogs had been fed. Then he dyed his hair blue, went insane and maybe also to rehab. Anyway, that is as good as it gets, in fashion. (That should tell you something.) But he is sane this year. It's all about the clothes, and no one really cares about clothes!
Everyone who isn't Russian is poor. Times Thursday Styles regular Stephanie Rosenbloom has a story about the nation's thrift stores. This is hugely significant for two reasons: 1. It is actually a story, and last year around this time Stephanie Rosenbloom was writing about horseback riding in the Hampton's, but it turns out she has been hiding out in the Business section lately, getting down to proverbial business. 2. The story is that the demand for other people's cast-off ill-advised purchases has exceeded the nation's supply of ill-advised purchases.
Cindy McCain is the new Victoria Beckham. Example: last week Us Weekly decreed Michelle Obama to have hands-down better style than Cindy McCain. This week the selfsame magazine has a whole feature on Cindy's supposed "makeover" and how pretty she suddenly supposedly looks! And that is not even to mention the matter of Sarah Palin's disappearing-reappearing beehive, and Michelle Obama's Thakoon dress and the cool shirt pictured above, which we found on Philebrity. Political fashion icons are the new celebrity fashion icons, and that is bad for the industry because unlike worthless celebrities who are allowed to change outfits as fast as they can spill tequila and Sparks on the ones they were wearing, politicians, at least when they are not wearing $300,000 dresses, have to pretend they understand the realities of working-class Americans busy raiding thrift stores/insurgent safe houses.
The must-have item this year is the jumpsuit. Perhaps you heard about the school in Texas that recently decreed that all kids who chose to violate dress code requirements by rolling up their skirts or whatever would risk being forced to don prison jumpsuits for the remainder of the school day. Now, there is always going to be that one group of totally cool high schoolers who make the prison jumpsuits into some sort of "subversive" fashion statement, but bottom line is that high schoolers would not be incurring dress code violations if they did not want to show off their skinny high schooler legs etc. etc. and those high schoolers grow into the adults who consume fashion. So this gives me pause:
Yet designers are willing to risk everything on a gut feeling. The trend-forecasters, fabric mills and color experts can offer all the advice in the world. It's still little more than a crapshoot when a designer says: Jumpsuits! A lot of them have been saying that over the past few days. Apparently that's what we're all supposed to want come spring. And if Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler are right, we'll want jumpsuits to be silver and sparkly and worn with just a frisson of dominatrix attitude.
Lydia Hearst got hospitalized… And the affliction is kidney stones? Is there even a drug you can get those from?
Cityfile compiled a