New York Fashion Week: Can real life exist on the runway?

The question lingers after New York Fashion Week, with Washington Post fashion writer Rachel Tashjian noting that Willy Chavarria, Collina Strada and Eckhaus Latta are telling the stories of everyday Americans.

Maybe it’s the upcoming election, but at New York Fashion Week, brands seemed very eager to put real people, real issues and real life in their runway shows.

At Willy Chavarria, copies of the US Constitution were placed on each seat and an enormous American flag hung at the front of the catwalk.

“The name of the show is ‘América,’ which is America through the voice of an immigrant, or the child of an immigrant,” Chavarria said backstage. “I love the idea of us really embracing the country as a place that is for all of us.”

His clothes were a workwear-heavy offering about “celebrating the workforce” — blue-collar-inspired stiff cotton pants and long shorts, and jackets and plaid shirts men often buy large to cultivate machismo. He street-casts his shows, so you feel as if you’re walking around the city, checking out slightly eccentric dudes’ outfits, rather than admiring a pristinely styled fantasy. It’s reality with some panache.

Chavarria has won accolades for this blend of hip clothing and politics. He was named menswear designer of the year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2023, and is adored by the fashion media. Other designers who like to blend politics and fashion, such as Prabal Gurung and Christian Siriano, make much cornier clothes.

Fashion people always eat up political messaging, in part because it makes them feel that what they do has a purpose (even though self-expression is a great purpose) and what they do doesn’t exist in a bubble (even though people flock to fashion for its escapist potential).

But this recipe can make it tricky to move products. People are talking about Chavarria, but you can buy his clothes only on his site, and there are a few pieces at Maxfield in Los Angeles and New York’s Bergdorf Goodman. It’s always a struggle to pitch shopping as a noble pursuit. We want to feel a bit naughty when we buy something. (Or a lot naughty, as that sterling Alaïa show proved.)

When asked what he wanted to do with the clothes this season, he said, “Well … Sell them!” and laughed. He’s making a big push on a pleated, fluid khaki, the kind that lots of menswear designers — J. Crew; Todd Snyder, whose delicious collection of Italian-ish jumbo tailoring, shown Sunday afternoon, was like a more approachable Fear of God (Fear of Todd?) — are trying to persuade men to buy. At the end was a surprise Adidas collection. (Ka-ching!)

“It’s really a story about empowerment,” Chavarria said. “All of us belong. All of us have purpose. And all of us have the ability to make change in this country, especially starting with the vote.”

A great story. Will it move khakis? Let’s see.

How do you keep people from feeling as if they’re being reminded to eat their vegetables? At Collina Strada, Hillary Taymour’s eco-friendly brand, greens have always been on the menu. Her clothes, made from rose silks and deadstock, are like a uniform for tender, traumatised Gen Z souls: swaddling, happy garments. You don’t buy them because the eco-message feels good but because it makes you feel safe, or, to use that Zoomer buzzword, seen.

I kept thinking about the much-discussed mental health issues caused by the pandemic and growing up online, and the way clothes often seem for people in their 20s like a coping mechanism. Look at how 20-somethings dress today and you see a craving for soft, swathing textures and shapes, especially oversized jeans and pants, and childlike prints. A mix of comfort and protection, and for clothes made in a kind of alternative universe where things are made responsibly, even if they come from the eco-friendly tab on Shein. (What is Billie Eilish’s baggy style if not a kind of trauma-dressing, a way for a young woman who found fame online and grew up in an outrageous spotlight to protect herself with fabric?)

For all of the existential pondering that editors, designers and executives have done over the past five years — about beauty standards, diversity and politics — no one has really challenged the exalted space that is the runway. We still believe that putting someone in an outfit and having them walk around before the powers that be, and then photographed, means that they “belong.” To what? To where?

Now that fashion has more in common with Marvel movies than gallery shows, it seems the runway is less important than ever. (There was a Tommy Hilfiger show on Sunday night, for example, and I can tell you nothing about the clothes even though it was one of my favourites of the week, because the designer reunited several members of Wu-Tang Clan and had them perform a medley of their greatest hits. How can clothes and politics compete with that?) It may seem uncouth to ask, but who are designers really speaking to when they use the runway to make statements?

Perhaps the mischievous approach to the catwalk is what made Eckhaus Latta’s intimate “dinner and a show” so successful. Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus gathered 75 guests in a Tribeca apartment for dinner, dressing a dozen or so in their new collection but asking them to style the clothes in their own way. Comedian Kate Berlant stood up and gave what seemed at first like an impromptu, unhinged speech — “No one here is gorgeous,” she cooed sarcastically — but then began calling up musician Moses Sumney, model and Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter Ella Emhoff, actress Jemima Kirke and others to stride between the tables.

You might think, another designer making a statement that style is more important than fashion — blah! But instead, the show hammered home that Eckhaus Latta has become an essential part of the great millennial adulting journey. It’s like the Gap for sensitive snobs — people who move to New York or LA and want to do something creative, who are trying to make a life for themselves with art or music and drinking orange wine while gossiping with their friends. Stilettos and cocktail dresses seem foreign to you, but so do Lululemon leggings and Stanley cups. Your life stands for something more, or you want it to, anyway, and Eckhaus Latta is the brand that dresses you on the way.

And let’s give another round of applause for Tory Burch. Is any designer having as much fun doing their job as her? Light wrap dresses in a crunchy fabric that exposed one hip, sweater-y coats and dresses and a semi-sheer cocktail dress all looked very sporty, like 1940s sportswear designer Claire McCardell goes to the swimming pool. I love a woman who’s just doing what she wants — Burch is fashion’s answer to the narrative in literature and film of women in their 40s and 50s seizing their destiny and finding that life begins anew.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.

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