Fashion

[Witness]

$5000 and it doesn't even have sleeves?

You want to corrupt that awesome purity of this design with mundane sleeves?!? Retrograde!

[Witness]

Latest London Fashion Week ("Spring 2020"):

[Anaxagoras]

Could also go in the "Now they're just fucking with us thread" although I think that "high fashion" has been trolling us for a long time already.

[Witness]

↑ Indeed, but what do they get out of it? Fame?

[Anaxagoras]

The lulz?

Also, like trolling, it seems you have to do or say something outrageous to even be noticed these days. That may be why some people troll. Because nobody notices or cares if you just say something reasonable and non-controversial. There's probably something similar in fashion.

[gnome]

What's the disconnect? Just like any other form of art, sometimes fashion is intended to shock us or tweak our noses. You could call it "trolling" but isn't that like complaining that a fish is wet?

[Witness]

Let's hear it from the NYT: Why We Cover High Fashion.

The technicalities:

Quick crib sheet: haute couture (or let’s just call it “couture” for simplicity’s sake) is a twice-yearly five-day show fiesta in Paris where a select handful of brands produce hand-made-to-order garments that cost approximately $10,000 to $100,000 a piece. Yes, you read that right.

To qualify as a couture house, which is an official designation like champagne, a brand must maintain an atelier of a certain number of artisans full time and produce a specific number of garments twice a year for a show. There are only a very few that can fulfill the requirements, including Chanel, Dior and Valentino. A lot have dropped out over the years (Balmain, Versace, Saint Laurent), and the governing organization that adjudicates this has relaxed some of its rules to admit younger, less resourced or guest designers, like Iris van Herpen and Guo Pei, who made Rihanna’s Met Gala sunny-side-up egg cape.

And the Higher Reasons^©:

It’s about using this particular craft form as a wormhole into what’s going on in the world. The gowns themselves may not seem that relevant (especially when they reimagine a woman as, say, a lavender bush). But the issues they raise are.

Like, for example, the fact that to a certain extent any women’s wear collection, at any level, should be a treatise on female identity at that particular moment in time. At least if it’s any good. That’s why Karl Lagerfeld made his Chanel bride wear the pants last January, not the corseted meringue; why at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri paid homage to Leonor Fini, an early 20th century Surrealist (I don’t think anyone would dispute the surreal nature of our current era); why at Givenchy, Clare Waight Keller protected gowns dripping in silver fringe with military greatcoats.

Like the fact that the mostly French gatekeepers of couture, the most rigid of fashion sectors, have increasingly lowered barriers to entry to woo and admit designers from China, Lebanon and Russia. Fashion is acknowledging the value of porous borders, even as its Western European home grows more skittish about them.

Like the fact that this is as good a way as any to talk about the current tension between the handmade and human (and historical) and the technological. It’s the fashion equivalent of reading books versus watching YouTube.

And you better believe it.

[Anaxagoras]

World of WearableArt 2019

[Anaxagoras]

A little street fashion



I like it. A bit cheeky. A bit outrageous. Makes you think.

[Abdul Alhazred]

Anax: Just want you to know that not all gay men hate women like this guy

[ed]

I really enjoy fachion, we are rewatching all 17 seasons of project runway. Funny thing is that I cannot tell who is strog and who is lousey. I think I have the fashon analog of tone deafness (which I am too)

Meanwhile ... check out Galliano

[Witness]

[sparks]

Junk porn.

Wherein no actual fucking takes place.

[Fid]

She's doing the mating display of a male ostrich.

[Witness]

[Pyrrho]

[Pyrrho]

Would be better if they were wearing stiletto heels.

[shemp]

They could borrow some from ed.

[Pyrrho]

No socks make a bold fashion statement that will get stronger every day.

[Abdul Alhazred]

It was always said that the fashion industry is run by gay men who hate women.

It looks like whoever it is who runs the fashion industry hates gay men, too.