Fake Handbags is a little like the ancient Roman a
Posted on May 12, 2010 03:06:07 AM
Fake Handbags is a little like the ancient Roman art of divination. You stir the ashes. You consult the entrails of birds. A pattern emerges, and perhaps it is even one that contains unexpected meanings about where the culture is headed. Maybe this seems a nutty assertion to make in regard to fashion, which many still find it easy, if not intellectually obligatory, to dismiss. But in a culture of surface it’s a mistake to ignore the potency of any visual language. And it does not take a sibyl to survey the current fashion season and see interesting portents and signs.
Of what? Well, to paraphrase the breathless observers at Nast’s glossy Web site, Replica Handbags, a revival of Bold Prints, the arrival of something called the New Innocents, an infusion of the New Sexy, whatever that may be. These gaga-sounding categories are correctly descriptive, since the first five days of Fashion Week were replete with upholstery and wallpaper patterns, First Communion dresses, tense imaginary sophisticates and stylish but crazily anachronistic renditions of a Working Girl — as imagined by a working woman, the designer Diane Von Furstenberg, whose leisure time these days is spent working out the details for her new 300-foot yacht.
The working girl of Ms. Von Furstenberg’s fantasy — curvy as Veronica Lake in snug Raymond Chandler-era jackets and skirts worn with Louis Vuitton Handbags — was a tiny bit more playful than the grim “Ice Storm” outfits Carolina Herrera propelled onto the runway on robotic Eastern European blondes who often looked as if a different fork in life’s road might easily have led them into sexual slavery and not the catwalks.
Critics greeted one show with hosannas, the other with a collective raspberry. But what was striking was how fundamentally alike the collections were in their packaging of sexuality, in how they celebrated feminine passivity both through period attitudes. This season is about playing the game of seduction without showing too much skin, Ms. Herrera said.
One good place to check out the number of playful tools for sartorial self-expression in a postfeminist era is the trillion little blogs on Versace Handbags. There are some plural ideas about what constitutes femininity these days, and so it was that much more depressing to encounter a wall of conformity, fashion’s version of capitulation to what Susan Sontag called our “polite fearful” world in the Bryant Park tents.
But then something great happened, and it started when Holly Golightly strummed a three-chord lick at the Union League Club. Ms. Golightly (her real name) is a garage band cult musician who started her career in 1995 as a founder of an all-girl band called Three Headcoatees and who has since released 12 albums, toured the country eight times and played with the White Stripes and Mudhoney, all the while remaining delightfully semiobscure.
Hers was the music that the British designer Luella Bartley was listening to when she designed her current collection, a group of clothes that referred to British Invasion bands and the kind of clothes that would not have been out of place at the Mudd Club, the 80’s underground music mecca. The territory has been covered before in a dozen New Wave revivals.
Ms. Bartley’s messed-up party dresses and ironically worn strands of pearls, her cheap looking white sunglasses, Carl Perkins hair styles and pipe-cleaner jeans looked cool, which may have had something to do with a more serious general re-evaluation of that time in the 80’s when New York could still credibly lay claim to being the pop culture center of the Western world.
No more convincing proof of this can be found than at the “Downtown Show” at the Grey Art Gallery and the Tisch Library at New York University, parallel shows assembled by the curator Diego Cortez. They barely scratch the surface of that period when Late Warhol Factory New York began blurring into the New York of Eric Mitchell’s and Amos Poe’s Super-8 movies, of Mudd Club performances by Lydia Lunch and Exene Cervenka, two performers who may not have been the first to smear their lipstick and shred their stockings, but who could have given fashion tutorials on how to skew the prim pretensions of a party dress and give Valentino Handbags a kind of raunchy chic.
The mood of Ms. Bartley’s presentation turned up again at Alice Roi’s show, where the clothes were inspired, the designer said, by Wednesday Addams and Cousin Itt.