on fashion

I would, if it looked like Gareth Pugh’s numbers from his Fall 2013 collection. This is repurposing taken to a very rarified height. They are gorgeous, but the perennial question – Is it comfortable? – immediately comes to mind. I tried to inspect the samples in the Punk [sic] Show at the Costume Institute, and it was impossible to tell (without setting off alarms) what the structure underneath is. This is nothing that new, of course. Alexander McQueen made fabric treated to look like black plastic and bubble wrap in 2009. I also recalled a friend who shocked the quite quite salespeople of the legendary Charivari in the late 70s by wearing a black industrial-sized plastic bag as a rain poncho (holes for head and arms) when caught in the rain one day. Not to mention when plastic was considered modern and forward in the 60s. Still, who wouldn’t want to make an entrance in a Gareth Pugh black garbage bag extravaganza?

Vivienne Westwood recently claimed that high prices for clothes is eco-friendly. The reason? People won’t buy as much because they have to save up for six months or more! An exhibit at The Museum at FIT in 2010 also included couture as eco-friendly. Why? Because people don’t buy as much clothing when it’s expensive, it has greater value so it’s kept longer, and it’s often passed on through the generations. Do you really thing luxury goods buyers are holding off on the purchases and passing them on to their children (or even their maids)? I don’t think so. Could this just be another fiction by clothes hounds and fashion curators used to justify their spending?

“What we are trying to project is a very strong feeling of American-ness,” Italo Zucchelli, CD of Calvin Klein said to the New York Times. Clark Bockelman, discovered by Bruce Weber and anointed by the CK casting directors, is deemed the next big thing. But do his über-Aryan looks represent America as it now, or is this another instant of fashion harking back to an America that really no longer exists? It’s a little like the Right’s insistence on American values, values that are changing rapidly if not completely wiped out by now. Census estimates, according to the Times, indicate that white Americans will be in a minority within three decades. “The transition will mean that ‘today’s racial and ethnic minorities will no longer be dependent on older whites for their economic well-being,’" according to William Frey of the Brookings Institution. So what does all the panting over Clark Bockelman mean?