Everything old is new again . . . again . . .

Fashion Week has just ended in New York. I tremble with the thrill of it right from the top of my Philip Treacy Toilet Seat Hat to the scarlet soles of my agonizingly tall Louboutins. Even the non-Twittering world is atwitter. Oh, okay–having confessed to you my dark past as a wearer of safety orange fake fur, I can assume you might recognize me as somewhat less than slavishly devoted to following the dictates of the clothing cognoscenti.

Despite being by nature shy and introverted (yeah, I can hear your gasps of astonishment over there, but it’s quite true), I’ve always gone my own way when it came to dressing myself. It may have begun as a bit of a defense mechanism against my self-consciousness on wearing plenty of hand-me-downs or an instinctive rebellion at recognizing my own mousiness. Whatever the cause, I started fairly early to accessorize with an eccentricity of sorts. Eccentricity is always easier to defend than failure to conform, even if the expression of each is wonderfully similar to the other. Uh-oh. Does that mean they’re a variant form of conformity?? What a disconcerting conundrum! Excuse me whilst I swoon on the divan for a moment, won’t you? There. <Fanning myself coquettishly.>

Now, I can look back on my youth and say that there was a time when I would have made an excellent Goth. Pillaging tendencies aside. Naturally as pale as an iceberg and mum as a mummy, I could’ve slipped into some painful-looking post-Victorian getup and been right at home, but the trend, had it existed, would’ve seemed far too participatory for such a wallflower. More logical that I wear my black veil inwardly and merely retreat into wearing rather sober but unostentatious girl-sized menswear; Dad taught me how to tie a proper Windsor knot and I got my grandfather’s beautiful classic fedora off the top shelf of the closet. I even snagged a great pair of period wingtips at my favorite thrift store and earned my one bit of style critique in them from a little child standing near me in a shop one day who tugged on her mother’s sleeve and said in a bemused stage whisper, “Mommy, that lady’s wearing men’s shoes!” If I felt more girly on any occasions, I might as likely have gone for something a bit librarian-ish as any frilly stuff. I was better suited to be prim and buttoned down, what with having a figure that always tended more toward Long Island Iced Tea than a Hurricane.

I might have enjoyed the Steampunk look, too, for its winking humor and skewed sense of history, but not only did it not exist as an entity yet, it would likely have competed too much with my general cloak of invisibility. I didn’t want to be noticed, but I also didn’t care to blend in with others so much as with the scenery–a much safer perspective to be a non-participatory observer and sometime critic, naturellement.

More clothing and costumes from thirty years ago . . .

The other day I read an entertaining article written by, an art critic assigned by his paper to cover the menswear shows of Fashion Week. Clearly, he felt himself in the role of anthropologist far more than that of design interpreter. That, of course, is precisely the issue with observing fashion nowadays. You’re likely to see either a parade of such haute-landishness as can be “worn” by (or somehow installed upon) the models nowhere but on a runway, or else garb so lacking in imagination and originality that you’re hard pressed to term it designed. The latter was evidently the case in the realm of menswear at this year’s shows as witnessed by the poor critic-reporter.

Everything new is old again. Perhaps it’s simply in response to the extremes of the couture fantasyland that we get such reactionary tameness and dependence upon stuff that’s most generously interpreted as retro when it simply lacks imagination. I am far from disliking the traditional or the historically referential (you did read the paragraphs just preceding this, no?) but it does seem just as slavishly conformist and uninventive to show mere color and cotton-content variations on the uniform of the day than to play with the range of possibility.

I always sort of felt that that old bible of American English usage, Strunk and White‘s venerable Elements of Style, ought more accurately to be named Elements of Structure, enumerating as it did the foundations and underpinnings of good form that make good writing a mode of communication no matter how artful the window-dressing of a writer’s style. In the same way, I’d love to see the mavens of fashion, if they really want to be both clothiers and designers, challenge themselves more often to do something truly original upon the foundations of those practical structures dividing the wearable from the merely showy. How far can they push those seemingly infinite possible variations when making new and different combinations, groupings and overlaps of color, texture, shape, drape, weight, trims et al.? The haute couture runway is grand entertainment and supremely good theatre at its best, but it’s so divorced from the world of wearable design it’s as though Messrs. Stunk and White had taken copies of the Canterbury Tales, Ulysses, Huckleberry Finn and Ginsberg’s Howl, and having imbibed a quantity of the aforementioned mixed drinks, looked at each other and said “By cracky, that’s some dandy use of the English language; we could all learn from it,” then jammed it all into the bookbinder’s equivalent of a Vitamix, bound it in gilt-edged leather, and pronounced it the perfect how-to for would-be wordsmiths.

Mostly, if I get too involved in trying to be trendy and fashionable, I'm just the class clown. Not that there's anything wrong with that . . .

Now why is it that suddenly I’ve got this urge to write my blog in iambic pentameter while wearing Chanel and handmade cowboy boots?

Pass me that Iced Tea before I faint again.