The talented and obscure (his clothes are sold in three boutiques in Asia) young designer Patrik Rzepski opened the week on Thursday with a show in which the models came out clad in nude-colored skintight leggings that zippered up the back like a stocking seam. “People think beautiful means innocent,” Mr. Rzepski said. “I think beautiful can be tough as nails.” When it comes to Fashion Week, truer words have rarely been uttered.
If nude has been everywhere, so too have zippers and flounces and dégradé effects that recall the Hollywood designer Jean Louis and, lastly, a million references to the un-killable 1980s, the decade that looks even more insipid the second time around (or the third, if one considers that much seen on New York runways this week shamelessly reprises the collective homage to “Dynasty” on offer in Europe a season ago).
In practical terms, this amounts to a great many tight leggings, worn with bunched sweat socks and big shoulders. Cue the remixes of Tom Tom Club.
That’s the music the D.J. Jeffrey Tonnesen of the Box seemed to be featuring at Tuesday night’s party at the Prada store on Broadway (actually, Prada calls the place an “epicenter,” which sounds like the retail equivalent of the G-spot). The party attracted the usual mobs of glamorous young women who spend five hours getting ready for an evening with their boyfriends, who look like they just rolled out of bed.
It has often been pointed out that women dress not for men but for other women, and there is no better laboratory for testing out this theory than Fashion Week. “It’s so amazing what people will do for free booze,” remarked one young partygoer, as she brand-checked all the gorgeous leggy and waxed and manicured and Fekkai-coiffed and Louboutin-shod women sipping negronis while avoiding the waiters carrying lobster with cocktail sauce served on individual spoons.
As these lovelies picked their way down Rem Koolhaas’s vertiginous stairs, they called to mind some herd of incredibly rare equines navigating a rocky pass in the Hindu Kush. Sloping behind came their dates in Prps jeans and Rogan T-shirts, unshaved and scruffy, as dopey-looking as pack horses and with the droopy-eyed stoner expression that the photographer Terry Richardson has helped make a fashionable cliché.
“You know, a lot of people hated on me in the beginning,” the model Erin Wasson had said earlier, on Thursday, as she leaned against a rooftop parapet at the artist Spencer Sweeney’s jam-packed fifth-floor loft on Ludlow Street. The occasion was a raucous party celebrating Ms. Wasson’s capsule collection for Ruca, an Orange County label that started out making board shorts and that, through its collaborations with artists, has become a paradigm of the regional style-maker that gains ground on New York.
“People in the business used to say, ‘Who’s this bitch, this ragamuffin?’ ” said Ms. Wasson, who, although she has worked all the runway shows on several continents and has been photographed for most major magazines and is the glamour-puss face of Maybelline, has a style so scruffy and alluringly off-kilter that American editors ape her and entire magazines in Japan are devoted to her motorcycle-boots-worn-with-Lanvin look.
“Models are supposed to look a certain way and to be seen and not heard,” Ms. Wasson said. “That’s a problem with the business.” One of the reasons, she said, that she decided to work with PM Tenore, Ruca’s founder, and not the mainstream labels that court her, was that, “He’s not just about selling clothes, he’s about forming a tribe.”
True, this may be overstating the case somewhat. But there is no putting off the rumblings heard throughout Fashion Week that the business, in its unprecedented international expansion, may have lost sight of some key fundamentals. Like music, fashion is a tribal business, and while it used to be the case that mainstream designers observed this by swiping style cues from punks or hip-hop artists or surfers or skate rats, they are now forced to contend with the reality that those people are less readily exploited than before. These days they all want their own lines.
“We’re living in a karaoke world,” Malcolm McLaren, the music impresario, fashion visionary and cultural gadfly, said Sunday, his voice rising to an animated pitch as he stood on the red carpet at the multimillion-dollar Calvin Klein anniversary party.
What specifically aroused Mr. McLaren was next month’s auction at Christie’s London of rarities from the archives of the high-end vintage store Resurrection, which includes a variety of 1970s items attributed to Mr. McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, who if they did not invent the aesthetics of punk, formalized them commercially.
In Mr. McLaren’s view, which he has pursued in the news media and also in court, the McLaren and Westwood garments are mostly modern copies. Whether that is so (Christie’s stands by their authenticity), the larger questions Mr. McLaren raises have bearing on the hollowness of much contemporary aesthetic production, fashion not excluded. What is the point of cultural artifacts if they are not connected to any specific culture?
“Warhol’s 15 minutes have gone mad,” Mr. McLaren said as scads of interchangeable demi-celebrities marched by. “Everyone is going around trying to authenticate the fake.”
Versions of Mr. McLaren’s ideas seemed to come up again and again during Fashion Week, uttered by people as unalike as Ms. Wasson and the designer Miguel Adrover and the great model Veruschka, born Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort in what was then East Prussia in 1939.
Fashion, said Veruschka — whose work is celebrated, or memorialized, in a lavish new Assouline book as large as a tombstone and, at $500, costing nearly as much — was still a tribal world when she came on the scene in the 1960s. “Diana Vreeland was always open to the new, to interesting things,” she remarked, referring to the Vogue editor who had a keen eye for talent and none for the bottom line.
“She didn’t look at the money market. She didn’t ask the cost of things. Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Why are people remembering me?’ My answer is that the people I worked with, Dick Avedon and the others, put so much into the pictures. A photograph has an aura, and so in many fashion images you look at now, there is no aura. The light is out.”
People in fashion and possibly even the business itself, has lost personality over the last decade, Mr. Adrover lamented one early morning at his temporary studio on Lower Broadway. Throughout the loft, people from his team worked silently on a series of unique garments, made under the sponsorship of the German organics manufacturer Hess Natur. “These days the fashion culture feels so empty,” he said in his idiosyncratic English.
Like Ms. Lehndorff, who left the city four years ago for Berlin, Mr. Adrover quit New York at the same time to open a bar in his native Majorca. Back for a brief Fashion Week appearance, he remarked that his commitment to the scene is provisional. “Everything next, next, next, everything V.I.P., it’s an empty idea,” he said, with theatrical Spanish gloom.
“You don’t feel like digging for meaning right now in fashion, because you dig and dig, and you don’t find nothing,” he added, and then went on digging regardless — as everyone does, fueled by the often unaccountable optimism that the hunt for the new and the next always seems to inspire.
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