Smart Fashion

"One of the reasons fashion is a young person’s game is that older people keep wishing it were dead. Consider how often in this newspaper we’ve heard the groanings that unreal amounts of money, celebrity and marketing are knocking the more genuine stuff out of fashion. Yet even if the complaint seems valid, it is largely an older generation’s reaction to the speed and inorganic nature of change, and not a result of our changing relation to what we wear."
-Cathy Horyn, today's NYTimes

I like to pile on the layers. Not like Mary Kate, and not too messy, but my fashion sense has definitely shifted in the past few years from prim and clean to revealing slivers of white below grey below black that make their way down from my waist to my hips. Turning a dress into a shirt. Turning a skirt into a scarf. It's careless but specific. It's tough. It's insouciance. It makes me feel like me.

My french grand-mere, at a recent birthday party for her sister, accosted me with disappointment. "Your shirt is hanging out...why?" (remember to roll your r's). She of course proceeded to try to tuck my shirt into what was actually a dress underneath, complicated to say the least, and a very awkward scene in the middle of a dinner party. But my point is that what I perceive as empowering and chic--moreso the resolve to go out in artfully deconstructed layers, not necessarily the effect-- she perceived as accidental and ugly.

When i think about holey shirts with cigarette burns, distressed and destroyed denim, everything from the 80's and 90's that has been rebranded as fresh all over every style blog, my reaction is distaste, even though i love to wear all of it. I like everything from Alexander Wang and Balmain and would wear it (if they weren't unreasonably priced and ludicrously expensive, respectively). But i don't see either of these collections as aspirational; they're instant gratification. Don't give me kitsch and don't give me cool and don't slash something ridiculously pricy for the sake of it (I can turn to hot topic for that). That is what easy, viral street fashion is about. And folly and irony definitely have their place. But from designers, i want something worth investing in; give me something that changes my sensibilities about shape, proportion, tailoring, craftsmanship. I have no qualms about dressing sharper, or at least, working towards it.

This season I was consciously drawn to classic, sharp shapes that were deconstructed and then reconstructed smartly, excitingly. The moth-eaten wool suits at Calvin, the haphazard asymmetric natty sleeves at Dries, short-sleeve coats at Marni, just about everything at Comme des Garcons. I like challenging fashion. I like it directional, and maybe even a bit offensive. I like it when it says a bit more about our choices and our strength and our toughness to weather out ideas we deem worthy. Cue Cathy Horyn again:

"In this remarkable season of fashion, which for the first time in years saw continuity among New York, Milan and Paris, designers seemed to discover that if their clothes were just a little bit sober, just a little bit sharper and youthful, they might actually resonate more powerfully with women.

The recession could turn out to make designers better designers."

For fashion to be justifiably important right now, in the midst of this economic meltdown, it needs to be more thoughtful and whittled down while still forecasting that very tenuous, nervy, passionate kernel of what women will want to wear and want to say about themselves with their choices.