Giving voice to those of us who looked at runway images from this past NYFW and thought, lolwut?!? Washington Post fashion critic, and living legend, Robin Givhan, just dropped a particularly spicy piece deriding the “gatekeepers of Seventh Avenue” for “declaring half-baked ideas ready for consumption.”
Those “gatekeepers,” according to Givhan’s NYFW review, are “elevating fleeting passions to the status of lifestyle brands… [and] allowing a thrill for unorthodox or jarring aesthetics to impede thoughtful consideration about technical skill and clarity of message.”
Givhan then goes on to name names. According to Givhan, Gyspy Sport designer Rio Uribe merely “covered women’s nipples with sea shells and called it sustainable fashion.” Of upstart label Vaquera, she said, “there were hoodies and prom dresses and ripped-up T-shirts. And, well, they were just that. Nothing more.”
While she gives credit to some of the “delightfully kooky” ideas that were presented, she skewers the environment that’s responsible for them, claiming that “all too often, the clothes are not well-made, and the ideas are only a millimeter deep.”
And somewhat surprisingly, she puts the blame on the CFDA. By forcing themselves to continuously nominate 10 finalists year after year, she says, “[it] often looks as though the fund is elevating brands before the designers have even figured out how to stitch proper darts and what it means to the shape of a bodice when you make the decision to eschew them.”
“The industry is casting these emerging designers as creative wonders and prize-winning iconoclasts,” she continues, “but many of their ideas still need time to marinate.”
So what does a frustrated fashion critic enjoy in 2018? Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors didn’t offend her sensibilities, and she enjoyed at least a few young up-and-comers — namely designers like Jonathan Simkhai, Christopher John Rogers, Ekhaus Latta, Monse and Mansur Gavriel.
But “as fashion looks uneasily into the future,” she wrote, “it’s hard to know whether rule-breaking designers are pushing the industry towards the light or sending it tumbling into the abyss.”
You can read more about it at The Washington Post.
