Spring Break
Designers incorporate suffering economy into New York Fashion Week's styles and themes
Dora Wilkenfeld
Issue date: 2/23/09 Section: Focus
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.
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.
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