Confession: I have Fashion Week fatigue

I'm over it, I'm under it, and I definitely don't get it. But here, I see my way through.

First, on Israel

From an IG friend on what’s happening in Israel: “We all have friend or family either killed or taken hostage. A nightmare. We are still so traumatized that I can’t put it into words but it is nice to see support from abroad.”

Since for many of us, our heads and hearts are with Israel and the heartbreak of war, I will start by simply saying that this is where I give. And that I have been to the actual organization’s homeplace in Israel and met with several soldiers, so that I feel very comfortable vouching for how they use funds and the action they take. In particular when soldiers are injured, they send a veteran to the hospital who has the same injury, (such as the same lost limb) to give hope and help them navigate this new life. I will also say that there are others far more versed in what’s happening in Israel than I, and that this is still a fashion/style blog and that I want to keep writing and that I don’t feel these things are too trivial to continue writing about, because we need the hope, comfort, and yes, distraction of finding ourselves in style. That said, I understand if you feel too overwhelmed to be here during these awful times and will never take that personally.

So here we go…

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Fashion Weeks should be a no brainer, yes? I’ve loved fashion my whole life. I mean you could say what I’ve liked is shopping (earliest memory: tie shopping with dad in Filenes basement and his telling me, “look for A, Armani, B for Brioni, Z for Zegna.”) But all of that shopping was in earnest an avenue to feeling and then becoming. So for example, choosing to wear dad’s yellow boating slicker to school, and standing at the bus stop, the sleeves dangling past my fingers, this was somehow a moment of rightness in what is the frequent wrongness of growing up.

Though I will say again that I don’t have the gift of natural style instincts, the pursuit of self in style is, like my love of words, one of my earliest memories. Fashion Week should be so inspiring then! A zeitgeist-meter of what lies ahead, what to reach for, a stirrer of good tension and possibilities. There are a few issues for me, though.

1. I am in love with opting out. I spent my whole life opting in to things that in my heart I just didn’t want to do. Doing sports at camp when I wanted to sit in a hammock and read a book. Partying in high school when I hated drinking (thank goodness for you, Zima) and vastly preferred driving around all night with my girlfriends looking for the party to finding it. I hate crowds! I hate short, fake-y conversations. Come to think of it, I think I hate standing. Any time I’ve been invited to participate in anything FW, I’ve managed not to. The only thing that DOES appeal to me is meeting all my Tibi friends for coffees and dinners when in NYC.

2. There’s an emperor-has-no-clothes-ness to it all. Ironically. What I mean is - it’s all so UP HERE. Look, I love ideas, I love to think, I love to read, I love art. I’m your audience, kids. I’m ready to drink the Kool Aid. But sometimes FW conveys this sense of delight in being obtuse for obtuse’s sake, as if trying to nurture or at very least allow an us vs. them sensibility, or just taking itself all so seriously without so much as a wink of recognition. (Do you ever go to one of those restaurants that have a lot of stars, and it’s kind of like you’re on stage while you’re eating, and there’s something really hardcore elite about the menu and the waiter conveys some fussy, farm and flora and foam specific special without so much as a smile of recognition that it’s a little ridiculous?), I like it best when there’s a sense of humor, when at least something is within my grasp, and when that’s ok. (Honestly it’s not unlike advertising, i.e. my “day job,” in that big agencies are still these massive engines, working largely the way they have for decades, and most often delivering only an idea and none of the stuff you actually need to translate that idea to your audience. Especially digitally. A lot of my work is in that translation. And I’m still so amazed at the way clients let these agencies charge them hundreds of thousands of dollars and then come to me like, “all we got is this handful of words. now what?”)

3. The timing is weird. What could be more us-versus-them than talking about Spring 24 when people (you remember people, right?) are in Fall 23! I live in Miami where there are already virtually no seasons. And thanks to our f*cked environment (or menopause) most real people I know are still sweating our heads off when Fall walks. And I was just starting to think about how to make Prada’s gray sweater dressing my own when, boom, we just watched Spring 24. What am I supposed to be doing with this Spring 24 information?

4. Speaking of which, there are too many shows because of the number of cities and seasons (arghhh Resort!), it’s like there’s always a Fashion Week. Before I can process one, another has begun. And it devalues the specialness somehow.

5. I’ve lost the plot. Because of the above, I feel a kind of whiplash. If there’s a deeper idea, I have a hard time processing it. Because STUFF. IS. COMING. DOWN. A. RUNWAY. AGAIN. AND … WAIT. STOP… WHERE ARE WE? So I end up without time to take in a bigger picture and more frequently reducing to “I want this” (Prada grommeted fringe belt) or I want to do that (dig out all my red, no, wait … wear a cotton scarf, towel-like, around my neck ala The Row). And if getting inspired is the point, and the timing of things is already so out of whack, why can’t I get virtually everything I need out of, say watching old Phoebe for Celine shows on Youtube?

6. My sense of mastery kicks into overdrive, and, as is the very issue with the mastery condition, there’s no satisfying it. Leaving me this feeling of deep frustration. Like here’s what I did re Spring 24

   1. read Leandra

   2. read Becky

   3. read Tiia

   4. that’s about it

And here’s what I should be doing to be thorough: Making a list of all the shows that matter to me. (Even that’s not enough because really to be more informed I should first survey designers that might make my POV more well rounded.) Watching them myself. Studying the images on Vogue.com. Reading takes on these shows not only via Substack but also fashion writers like Cathy Horyn. Taking some time to synthesize and develop not just “what I want” but “what I think.” Maybe somewhere remote. Oh and given all of the above, quitting my job. I am a failure! It’s all slipping awayyyyyy!

Ok ok, so after all of the above, I’ll tell you a few things that are swirling in my mind.

1. Nostalgic girls’ school prep vibes. I’ve been finding a strange satisfaction in prep and feeling it as a way to connect with my dad. And then the runways gave me more. There were the barn jackets at Prada. Then Miu Miu made my heart thump with boat shoes! And also that colorful cording wrapped around ankles. Omg omg. This 8th grade boyfriend of mine gave me a make-up gift in high school (after he drunkenly felt up my friend) of a piece of colorful rope, the ends of which he romantically burned together on my wrist to make a customized bracelet. He went to Rivers, but somehow I identify him in my mind as a goat herder? It all came back.

2. Those sheers! They’re not stopping. And then it occurs to me that the sheers I’ve been loving since summer also trace back to primal high school memories. Filmy nighties over functional sweats. Like you had on some Lanz nightgown and then some drama happened and you pulled on sweats under and possibly also over, leaving just the impression of a sheer skirt. These moments conjure such nostalgia, the peaks and valleys of those nights in the space between young and grown, the firefly lights of possibility. This connection jumped out when I saw Carven, and what felt like a stretched out boyfriend sweater over a nightie.

   

3. Side by side with this pull of prep nostalgia, the other thing I’m feeling drawn to is Margiela — even the idea of the trademark four stitches itself. That’s weird, right? I keep thinking — why do I keep searching second hand sites for Margiela? If it’s about prep, shouldn’t I be looking at, say, Thom Browne. Or old J.Crew? So here’s what Margiela had to say about their spring collection: “For the Co-Ed Spring-Summer 2024 Collection, Maison Margiela stages a search for individual truth reflected in the generational adaptation of an inherited wardrobe. Evoking the memory of one age through the radical eye of the next, garments appear as if passed down from one generation to another …The spirit of adaptation infuses misfit silhouettes, spontaneously customised with tape or work-in-progress stitching.” I don’t relate so much to the latest Margiela, but I relate to this.

4. Maybe it’s not about wearing a version of what my dad wore but the idea of wearing my dad’s actual clothes, adapted for me. And this is not so apart from the prep school nostalgia of it all. Think of Finny in A Separate Piece turning his prep school repp tie into a belt. (My recent act, taking dad’s belts and having more holes put into them without cutting them shorter — key! — that hanging over of excess belt is evidence of the conversion you want to keep. There’s the added impact of seeing stitches or holes in the adapted garment. To the patina of age it adds the specialness of seeing the stitch, hole, customization — the intimacy of that, the evidence of humanity. My Bubbie (mom’s mom) used to sew me doll clothes while I was asleep and she had insomnia. I can still picture this blue nightie, made out of Bubbie’s own too-long nightie; she was so early to sustainability! My own mom isn’t the doll clothes type, but she darns socks for me! And I’m not too cheap to buy new socks yet I always ask her to! Because it’s the most magical thing. This marriage of function, preservation, TLC. And she takes great pride in it and does it so the stitches can be seen. And I adore and treasure everything about this. Those Margiela stitches. Again.

5. When worlds collide. In Mexico City I did a tour of sustainable clothing. And in one of the final moments we met a local designer, Ana Neri, to see her studio which is actually in her home, a sweet apartment in Juárez, next to the better-known Roma In the back of her apartment was her studio, where she was painstakingly piecing together a pair of pants (she’d been at it all day), literally piecing out of the tiniest scraps the way you’d make a quilt. The pants had a little bit of an western-cool vibe. We walked a few flights up to her little show room, it was evening and this view greeted us from the picture window:

   

   Ana’s pieces floated toward me, each one inherently different from one another because they’re all made of recycled materials, and some even made from the scraps resulting from that, pieced together to create a fabric (Ana holds this, below).
   

   

   
   But what called my name were these pieces made from vintage table cloths. I mean on every level. I remembered my grandmother, her occasion table cloths for Shabbat, replacing the regular-day oilcloth ones. And maybe the coolest part: the design of the shirts itself (there are shorts too) is modern and mannish, a sort of oversized but not too bowling shirt, a perfect counter to the sheer, daintiness of the tablecloth fabric. I chose two: one, minty green with white embroidery and another simple and sheer white in front, the embroidery in the back. And she’ll take special orders; often clients want her to work with an actual table linen from their family. She likes that these pieces have stories. All those dinner conversations woven into the fabric. For me, these pieces make sense of all my emotional urges, the mannish, the heritage, the filmy nighties, the evidence of the hand. (I cried, standing in that room, surrounded by these pieces, the evening rolling in. That’s never happened to me before.) And she gave my selections to me in a bag made itself from scraps. Her name embroidered in blue, those visible hand stitches, that evidence of personhood that calls to me, now more than ever.

My to do list

Now that I’ve sort of pinpointed all the feelings (still no mastery to speak of) I do have a course of action that looks like this:

1. Shop my own (and my dad’s) closet for

   1. rope, bead + shell jewelry with a little handmade prep vibe

   2. windbreaker items (I know I have an old Jil Sander kelly green one and last year’s sleeveless Miu Miu)

   3. dad’s old belts and any polos he’s ready to toss

   4. my secondhand short sleeve Brunello blazer

   5. my orange Tibi triangle top (can I get this thing to stay on?)

   6. all the sheer stuff

   7. my blazer from Capsool, which is a men’s big shouldered one that’s been cropped and looks a lot like the tucked big shoulder jackets at Prada

   8. preppy shirting (stripes, checks, polos)

   9. tanks that can sub in for vests to get a not-too-hot layered effect

   10. last season’s Prada cotton tank with lace trim and nightie vibes

   11. all the pleated skirts

   12. detached collars and collar necklaces

   13. white socks

2. Shop serendipitously (not urgently, just take it as it comes!)

   1. long cotton mannish sweaters

   2. vests with a hand knit look

   3. Margiela, likely old, with evidence of stitching/marking/piecing (I’d still like to get my hands on last season’s “onion skirt”

   4. actual nightie or slip dress with a very nightie vibe

3. Inquire: Will reach out to my Miu Miu rep in Miami on a couple things. Yes, i will buy the boat shoes. Because I love comfy walking shoes and in a Miu Miu version I won’t feel like a poser the way I might in some others. Plus at 53 I know to just scratch the itchy itches. I will also tell her I’m gonna want this blue skirt, below, which is the skirt version of boy shorts, fundamentally useful (this length!) and yet takes me somewhere new.

   

   Miu Miu picks/inspo