Reflections On Fashion Weak 2010 (New York)

Recently, New York City just completed yet another Fashion Weak, an industry convention which serves two vital purposes:

1. Play god with everyone’s sense of style by telling them what will make them look cool in the upcoming fall and winter seasons (usually whatever people have the least of in their closets, so they have to buy the most useless shit that slave-labor in China can muster), and, much more importantly;

2. To create gridlock near Penn Station and Port Authority, so that anyone who actually belongs in Manhattan will have difficulty making their train or bus out of the city, by stalling their westbound taxi on 35th, 37th, 39th, or 41st Streets, while exacerbating the existing gridlock on 34th and 42nd Streets. This will also leave etiquette-conscious fashion-spitters with the dilemma of stranding their poor cabdriver in traffic, without the meter clicking, or having to sprint three blocks to make their train, all in the name of helping shallow narcissists impose their will on the masses.

I wasn’t actually at Fashion Weak, but I’m pretty sure there were tall, scantily-clad models prancing down catwalks with pissed-off expressions which say they are, in the words of one famous model, bored, angry, and better than you. Such a cutthroat battle-cry, but they didn’t call the movie The Angel Wears Prada, did they?

The annual “drop” at the surrounding gay bars and clubs was substantial, as usual, as were hissfits, and a few poor allergic types dropping dead after being stuck in the wrong elevator with the most potent, tested-on-screaming-cats fragrances money can purchase, splashed all over the faces of Manhattan’s most successful status-concious social-climbers.

Not all about Fashion Weak is bad, however; it does eventually end, having lasted just long enough for the minor annoyance to pale in comparison to the added Manhattan enjoyment fashion-spitters can derive the other fifty weeks of the year. Kind of like the way some people inflict self-harm, just to experience the good feelings of it stopping.

Ray Gordon