“Karlie fucking Kloss—tower over me, bitch!” bleated John Cameron Mitchell, playing Humberto Leon, a designer for the brand Opening Ceremony, in a one-act play by Spike Jonze and Jonah Hill that took the place of a traditional fashion show for O.C.’s spring 2015 collection. Kloss played herself, Bobby Cannavale had the role of a stylist, and various other stage actors were pressed into service, with uneven results, and if the inside-jokey exuberance (staged at the Metropolitan Opera, no less) proved one thing, it is that it is at least as hard to write a play as it is to design a truly memorable collection.
This theatrical undertaking was just one of the unconventional acts vying for attention during New York Fashion Week. The British designer Gareth Pugh, who usually presents his collection in Paris, took over a pier on the East River, filled it with smoke, mini burgers, and booze, and, in lieu of showcasing clothing, erected a series of gigantic video screens depicting gyrating bodies, clouds, and other arcane subjects.
The designer Rachel Comey struck the winning formula, offering a three-course dinner while models weaved among the circular tables. This took place at the artist Dustin Yellin’s Pioneer Works, a soaring, twenty-four-thousand-square-foot Civil War-era warehouse in Brooklyn; even though you had to take a taxi to get to Red Hook, you were rewarded with a piece of steak and a bevy of perfectly pleasant ensembles. If you couldn’t wait to get your hands on, say, a yarn-dye stripe cotton leisure suit or an indigo denim smock top, an order form was provided next to the menu. (By next season, your wristwatch may take over this task.) For Marc Jacobs’s event, a pink clapboard house was plopped down in the middle of the Park Avenue Armory. Each audience member was given a pair of headphones to listen to a flat voice intoning a surreal, disjointed tale. This deadpan distraction did not take away from the collection itself, which offered a compelling and surprisingly seductive meditation on militaria.
But all these flourishes were blown out of the water by Ralph Lauren, who rented a lake in Central Park and constructed a sixty-foot liquid wall onto which he projected 4-D images to celebrate his Polo line. Fifty-foot hologram women traversed a landscape that included a rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge that seemed to be straight out of Toontown. The images of the clothes were blurry, but, no matter—you know what R.L. Polo garments look like by now. The whole thing was undeniably spectacular, if a little eerie, and reminiscent of the Michael Jackson apparition that moonwalked a few years ago at the Billboard Music Awards. At the end of the affair, a ghost-like Ralph Lauren appeared, did a little soft shoe, waved, and then dissolved into water droplets.
Though one appreciated these attempts to lighten the mood and rethink the conventional fashion-show system, sometimes, mere clothes on a catwalk were more than enough. Rodarte, the surprise hit of the season (goodbye to the chola girls and Star Wars characters that blighted previous Rodarte runways), was spectacularly back on track, with gossamer-net frocks for a mermaid who is spending her shore leave on the red carpet, and utility jackets that were rescued from humdrum practicality by the lavish application of silver spangles.
“Look, it’s Lou Reed,” I was sure I heard someone say at Alex Wang’s lavish production. Just as I realized that this was sadly impossible, it dawned on me that the singer that was being clocked was Rihanna, who appeared more besotted with fashion shows than the most committed critic. She sported a vinyl rain-bucket hat at Wang, where there were outfits cinched with bar-code printed belts, white-and-green tennis dresses, and neon tubes that were direct descendants of scuba suits. This was hardly the only ode to athletic apparel on the runway this week. (Isn’t the whole idea that you work out like a maniac so that you look good when you’re wearing something better than gym clothes?)
Nicki Minaj, Naomi Campbell, and Jennifer Hudson shared the front row with Rihanna at Versus Versace. All were gathered to view the inaugural collaboration between the Versace house and Anthony Vaccarello, a young designer who shows his own line in Paris and whose fondness for audacious slashing made him the ideal candidate for this assignment. Vaccarello cleverly drained the over-saturated palette from these sultry mini skirts and belly-bearers, rendering the trademark Greek key and lion heads in a restrained and very welcome black-and-white.
“There will be dogs on the runway,” whispered the P.R. rep at Hood By Air, and, picturing hungry pit bulls, I fled to the relative safety of the second row. This proved unnecessary, as there was only one canine in the house—a very large, but tame, Great Dane on the arm of a man dressed in a carefully layered denim jacket, humongous Plexiglass choker, and no pants. The line’s designer, Shayne Oliver, is an extraordinary young man with perfect pitch when it comes to elevating streetwear. Along with beautifully executed H.B.A.-embossed leather bikers and clever interpretations of the classic white shirt, there was at least one handbag based on a stripped motorcycle chassis, to make a young woman reading Genet on the subway feel like an outlaw all day long.
Walking through Washington Square after the Ralph Lauren show (Lauren paired safari jackets with vast paste necklaces, as if the Great White Hunters were wearing their spoils), I was stopped by a guy who begged me to attend the Gypsy Sport fashion show taking place in the park, without a permit, later that afternoon. I did, and after forty-five minutes of a bongo player and a contortionist warming up the crowd, a group of daring young men—and a few women—emerged from under the arch, clad, variously, in baby-blue ruffled rompers, yellow-and-brown striped man skirts, slashed basketball shirts, shredded mustard coveralls, and crocheted skullcaps that morphed into Rapunzel-like braids. The designers, the Harlem-based duo Rio Uribe and Philip O’Sullivan, took their color scheme from the New York subway map, and there were Metrocard pendants around some of the models’ necks. You couldn’t help but melt a bit when one of the designers described their signature polka dots as “Haturns”—a drawing of Saturn composed of two baseball hats. The whole, gloriously messy affair evinced a pure love of fashion that was woefully absent from so many events of the past week, which had cost millions more to mount.
