Lame Duck Fashion Week

My style correspondent, Lucia, alerted me this morning to a slideshow of Catherine Holstein's spring collection shown at New York Fashion Week. Sort of like this: 

Sporty.

Waists are important. Any designer acknowledging waists, along with a kimono-sleeve leitmotif, will invariably become one with my wardrobe. The last closet-raid I launched on my mother's 80s casual wear produced an O.R.-scrubs-blue Calvin Klein house dress (what? I know.) that I hemmed to a mini-dress. The shape and fabric resemble the dress above, and I cinch it with a leather belt. Before I get too self-congratulatory, the sleeves of my impromptu dress don't have the volume of Catherine Holstein's pieces, which is an important aspect of their structure and fit. 

Also, New York Fashion Week illuminates the wonder and the tragedy of art. 

The runway show is supremely artful, and it's multi-artful: live-action entertainers walking to thumping music, wrapped in original, custom, and often beautiful clothes that a talented designer spent months imagining and crafting. Celebrities show up, and with them the itinerant paparrazzi, another sort of entertainment. But, most importantly, the runway show is clothes themselves, beauty itself, thought and craft in its most agonized and perfect iterations via fashion. 

However! 

The carnival of Fashion Week is, in the end, a carnival: a celebration of bodies, of materials, of one's self. Vain by necessity. Ephemeral by nature. The tents go up and the tents come down, and the inarticulate beauty conjured into fleeting life by America's best fashion designers disseminates, sprinkles into a million different particles; becomes mainstream (at best) or dissolves into the background. 

Manhattan, like denizens of high fashion, reserves its highest admiration for beauty, and, like elite fashion, Manhattan is a world unto itself. Supremely amused with its own genius, haughty, insular and self-perpetuating. Nothing there endures for long. Yet, so many of the people living in Manhattan have convinced themselves that they alone guard a universal and unassailable perfection, and that every sad soul living outside the confines of their island deserves their complete, if disdainful, pity.  

Artists create such beautiful things. Manhattan is stuffed full with beautiful things. What stays? 

C

P.S. Lucia, you have humility and grace, and you are not the Manhattan of which I speak.