What It’s Like: An Outsider’s Perspective on Fashion Week

Two things that are true:

I write a blog that focuses almost exclusively on my opinion about clothes.

I am not a fashion blogger.

My recent Fashion Week experience re-confirmed for me that what seems like dissonance but is actually what I like most about Style Girlfriend: I can talk about clothes without caring about fashion.

{Perry Ellis by Duckie Brown Spring/Summer 2013}

I do not attend fashion shows. This resolution comes partly by choice, partly by circumstance. I don’t enjoy them, and I’m not often invited, so it works out well.

I’m perfectly content with this arrangement, for several reasons. First, the clothes I talk to you guys about are in no way the clothes going down the runway at these things. Do you care if burgundy is hot for fall? Probably not. Do I care if burgundy is hot for fall? Nope. You guys care about burgundy if it looks good on you and will make the cute girl at your office or in your class or at the end of the bar notice you.

Style Girlfriend is not about trends, and it’s certainly not about unattainable fashion that comes at prices most of us relate to cars, not clothes. It’s about style – finding your own personal look, and discovering what looks best on you and makes you feel good.

That said, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a serious case of the FOMOs during the two whirlwind weeks of fashion shows here in New York each year. The “everyone’s hanging out without me” vibe gets under my skin and pollutes my mind with whispers about how, if Style Girlfriend was bigger, I’d be invited to more shows. How, if I worked a little harder, I’d sitting front row with the editors from GQ. So as much as I tell myself I don’t want to go, a little part of me can admit that I wouldn’t at least mind getting asked to the dance.

 

So when I received an invitation to Perry Ellis by Duckie Brown a few weeks back, I said yes. Of course yes. I’ll get a good story out of it at least, I told myself.

In the days leading up to the show, I was busy with work on the women’s side of NYFW. One of my many career incarnations in my freelance life is with a beauty company that does the makeup backstage at many of the women’s presentations during Fashion Week. It’s work I enjoy, and even better, it’s work that allows me to sit behind a computer while other colleagues are out battling the backstage crazy. I receive images from the shows, then describe the looks I see. And I can do it far away from Lincoln Center and all the other pop-up show venues.

The PExDB show was being held at 2pm in New York’s Meatpacking District (an extremely “scene-y” neighborhood, my first clue I should have stayed far away) on Tuesday, towards the end of Fashion Week. The whole morning I battled an increasingly turbulent case of nerves. The kind of nerves you get in fourth grade when going on a field trip at school but you don’t have a best friend and you don’t know who you’re going to sit next to on the bus.

I considered skipping it altogether. I emailed a friend, a fashion photographer who feels comfortable at these kinds of things but doesn’t take them – or himself – too seriously.

“Just go! he said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“They could all point and laugh at me when I walk in. They’ll know my shirt’s from Old Navy and my shoes are from Target, and I’ll be banished from Fashion forever?”

“Just go,” he said.

So off I went.

Walking the avenue from the subway, I steeled myself up for what was to come. War? No, but it felt like it. Me versus the cool kids. I saw the swarm of street style photographers; no one raised their camera to their eye. Fine. I looked pretty (I thought anyways), but I dress more for guys than for girls, which (I told myself) doesn’t make for as interesting pictures.
At the entrance, I walked up to the friendliest-looking PR girl wielding a clipboard. Checking my name off her list, she handed me a small card with a row and seat number on it, and I walked inside.

Inside, well-dressed beautiful people milled about. No one had taken their seat yet, despite my purposely arriving only ten minutes ahead of the scheduled start time to avoid  the fear of having to mingle. I recognized a few people, all from the menswear “scene” of which I am sort-of-but-not-really a part of because of all the reasons listed above. I have zero beef with anyone geeking out over the merits of $5,000 double monk shoes, but it’s not what I get excited about; it’s not what I talk about on here; and it’s not what you guys are interested in (unless you are? in which case, sorry, you are probably in the wrong place).

I’ve just always had the feeling – and it may be completely one-sided on my part – but I’ve always felt a little…less than welcome among this crowd.

Should I go talk to this editor from that menwear website, I wonder while scrolling through Grantland on my phone to look busy.  We’ve met at a few parties, but I don’t think he knows my name. No, I’ll just stand over here in the shadows, having a serious relationship with my phone. Cooler than looking around, earnestly smiling at strangers hoping someone will talk to me.

But the reception in the hangar-style show space was crap, and pretty soon I realized I couldn’t pretend I was texting anymore without looking like a crazy person.

I found a girl, like me, standing by herself, looking a little awkward, and chatted her up. Turns out, she was a pharma rep/budding jewelry designer, so we talked about her necklace that she made. I tried not to glance around too much seeing what everyone else was up to. Finally, people started to make their way to their seats.

I texted my friend again, even though I knew it wouldn’t go through. “I AM HAVING SERIOUS MIDDLE SCHOOL FLASHBACKS. AWFULNESS. THIS IS TERRIBLE AND I HATE EVERYONE.”

Not quite the right frame of mind to view a spring/summer collection. The show finally starts, and I drag my new friend to sit in the unoccupied seat next to mine.

My seat was in the very middle of the very last row – the same one they give at awards shows to the director of the indie film that was critically acclaimed but no one actually saw and who you know isn’t going to win anything.

The show itself was fine.

Fine in the way that I don’t even know what to tell you about from it. The color palette consisted almost exclusively of khaki. There were lots of logo-less baseball hats. One male model wore a chainmail t-shirt that made me laugh trying to picture how it would be interpreted for “mass” retail at Gap two seasons from now.

A few varsity jackets, a few parkas. I like varsity jackets and parkas, but I don’t think either are blazing any trend-setting trails. I liked the music.

{The designers. So normal-looking, right? I wonder who came up with the chainmail shirt}

So I won’t be back. Unless by next season I’m somehow important enough to merit a plus one so I can take a friend along, I think me and Fashion Week will probably part on good terms after this. Nobody’s fault, things just didn’t work out.

It wasn’t all bad, of course, and again, I have no bone to pick with Perry Ellis or Duckie Brown. Quite the opposite, really. I very much appreciate them thinking enough of Style Girlfriend to extend an invitation. Because the experience really reaffirmed my purpose here.

To talk real talk to you guys about how you can look and feel your best, with a little inside information on what us ladies want to see you in.

No matter the season. No matter the trend.

**Also, if you visited the site yesterday, you may have seen the – very preliminary – notes for this post, which accidentally went live for about an hour. I ended with a very nasty word that I never use out loud about a fashion blogger also in attendance at the show who’s never been particularly welcoming to me. I seriously never even think that word and am totally horrified you may have read it here. For that, I apologize, but I was just transcribing the notes I had scribbled down on the back of the program at the time. And also, she totally was acting like one.

(images: Style.com)