The conundrum facing New York fashion week is this: the pop cultural noise and fanfare around fashion is louder than it has ever been, but everyone – from the consumer to the editors-in-chief – is bored with traditional catwalk shows. The clothes on the catwalk have become overshadowed by the circus of celebrity, models, gossip and street tyle that wraps around them. The actual show has become the excuse for the party, rather than the party itself. What to do?
Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, duo behind the cult label Opening Ceremony, had an idea: how about asking Spike Jonze and Jonah Hill to reboot the catwalk show by scripting a one-night-only, one-act play about a catwalk show, in which the new collection serves as theatrical costume in a story about the human dramas of fashion week?
Wacky idea but it might just work. And it did. 100% Lost Cotton, performed using the Metropolitan Opera House as the stage, the audience watching from bleachers backstage, was a story set during the castings and fittings for an imaginary Opening Ceremony catwalk show, with a story playing out between designers, stylists, models and journalists. Actor Elle Fanning played Julie, a 16-year-old model newly arrived from Oklahoma; Catherine Keener played a fictionalised, monstered version of Carol Lim.
This was a satire of the fashion industry in which its superficiality, absurdity, addiction problems, and shoddy treatment of young women were all skewered with black humour. “Her legs are making that skirt look horrible,” said the fictional Leon about a model wearing his clothes. “What’s wrong with your legs? Are these your normal legs?” The supermodel Karlie Kloss made a cameo, only for another woman to bitch that she was “in her late early 20s”.
No matter how funny – or accurate – the play would have been a failure, from a fashion week point of view, if the clothes had gone unnoticed. A theme of innocence wove through the evening, drawing together the clothes and the play. This was a nostalgic collection inspired, said Leon and Lim, by their suburban teenage life in the very early 1990s. An announcement was made before the performance prohibiting the use of phones or cameras, citing a New York City law: a bold move in an age where being shared on social media is all-important, but one which restored a sense of occasion which fashion week sometimes seems to have lost, and imbued the evening with nostalgia. The shape and curve of hems were inspired by primitive computer code, the colours inspired by suburban pools and gardens. Julie, the heroine of the play, represented the ideas which the clothes also try to capture. The dovetailing of script and fashion was an ambitious idea – if it only half-worked, it should get credit for that.
It was perhaps slightly bad luck that Anthony Vaccarello’s debut collection for Versus, the secondary Versace line, immediately followed Opening Ceremony on the fashion-week schedule. The house of Versace takes the business of being sexy and slender and wearing almost nothing very seriously indeed – the very attitude that had just been sent up, to great effect, six blocks away. Nonetheless, Donatella will surely be thrilled with this collection, with which Vaccarello, who has already made his name in the industry with startlingly revealing dresses, riffed on the house symbols like a man to the Versace manor born. Greek keys, lion heads, black leather, gold hardware – and bare skin – made for a recognisably Versus, highly commercial collection. Vaccarello, no doubt, has his eyes on the prize: the two designers who preceded him at Versus, Brits Christopher Kane and J W Anderson, have gone on to lucrative deals with international luxury giants Kering and LVMH.
