There is a mental game one plays every time New York Fashion Week rolls around, with its frenzy of runway shows, its TikTok moments and those bevies of freshly minted influencers for whom Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame seems like a generous allotment.
The game is this: What difference would it make if you removed the first two words from the rubric?
To be clear, this is no slam on a city I persist in loving beyond reason even when the affection seems unreciprocated. So devoted am I to New York, or the idea of it, that even during the grimmest early months of lockdown, I made it my odd business to hike sections of the boroughs I had not only failed to visit before but was unaware could be reached on foot. (That lone pedestrian crossing the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Bridge was me.)
And one of the few hopeful things I observed, in an otherwise grim time, was that, despite the advancing creep of retail sameness that long predated a pandemic, plenty of quiddity remained. The Empire City was not just, as Jay-Z would have it, a state of mind. The flavor was real.
Why, then, I find myself wondering, is this so seldom reflected on New York Fashion Week runways? We know that the city’s iron grip on fashion retail, media and manufacturing has weakened through the years and that many talented local designers have blown off the city and elected to show instead in Paris. Yet the buzzy hive mind that once constituted a kind of fashion week zeitgeist also went poof. So much of what one is given to look at seems “basic” in the slang rather than the literal sense of the word.
Certainly, it did not shout “New York.”
Maybe that is a good thing. Perhaps it’s time to drop the posture of what the art critic Jason Farago termed “the well-traveled provincial” and cast a fresh eye on designs that originate in, say, San Diego or Cleveland.