The just-concluded New York Fashion Week (Amen!) unveiled some very patchy collections. Very copy and paste, I mean. And I'm not talking patchwork here, even though there was a lot of patchwork going on. Designers of every strata got busy clicking and pasting. Most unapologetically, Marc Jacobs paid an obvious tribute to Yves Saint Laurent, Halston, and Sonia Rykiel, with bales of Missoni’s signature patterned knits thrown in (pictured). So literal was this 'copying' even his champions like Cathy Horyn and Suzy Menkes scrambled for polite metaphors to defend his 'work' (this was fun to read, I must say). We can just about forget about objective fashion reporting. No such thing.Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler (can you imagine having to type this long list of names? Some one spell check this!) was 'inspired' by Prada and Chanel, right? And further down (much further down) the food chain, Marchesa a patchwork of the Dior’s greatest hits by John Galliano. There's much more. And if I'm very good, I shall put it up although I shudder at the thought of having to trawl through those pictures again. Today’s “copy and paste” click click click culture, enabled by the readily available fashion archive on the internet, the readiness and abundance of information, engenders a new generation of lazy, uninspired fashion practitioners.
Instead of leading to design breakthroughs and originality, the fashion information overload, the endless and immediate availability of this and every other fashion collection simply leads to a fashion maze where every tired idea is recycled in ever quicker succession. Endlessly. It makes for mind-numbing, brain dead fashion that is New Yuck Fashion Week. It's thankfully over.(A much longer version of this rant will be in Saturday's Business Times)
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