What’s the Point of Fashion Week for Regular Observers?
I looked at the Milan and Paris men’s shows the same way you did: at home, on my computer. I did not watch any of them live. I saw them happen in fragments: an Instagram story taken at Pharrell Williams’ Louis Vuitton while gospel music blared. A clip depicting a line of men in highlighter yellow wigs fit for an anime at Jonathan Anderson’s Dior. The first time I looked at Auralee’s truly lovely collection, it was by way of an article from one of my colleagues here at Highsnobiety. I saw puffer jackets in primary colors, so bright and so familiar that the whole show felt like it was art-directed by a coalition of kindergarteners. I think it is good to experience fashion in this way, with distance.
I will never own any of the clothing that is in any of these shows. And this isn’t because I am a woman. It’s because the clothing we’re talking about here is inhospitably priced. That’s sort of the point. These are luxury objects we are talking about. And I have always viewed clothing as something aspirational. Most people who love and follow fashion view clothing as something aspirational. It’s not something you own; it’s something you fantasize about.
You close your eyes and envision alternate realities: Here I am, having made different choices, sitting at a wrought-iron table in a Mediterranean environment, wearing the ankle-length (on me, at 5’4”) pea-green rain coat from Auralee’s Look 6. Here I am in the shark tooth of a detachable collar at Dior, maybe I’m at the phil. There’s this one Prada shirt I keep thinking about, now that I’ve had time to process, that’s the light blue of the walls in my childhood home. I keep wondering what it would look like, falling off my collarbone, if I were to brush my hair back. Where would it go if I were lying face-up on the grass? How would it move if I was listening to this song?
If the point of all of this — for the rest of us, meaning those of us who are not going to go out and buy any of this clothing — is fantasy, it is important to ask if any of it is successful. And I think the answer is complicated. The Crayola color palette at Auralee was dreamy. From the vantage point of my New York City apartment, where it has been in the teens outside for the past few weeks and all I have been wearing is a pair of Under Armour ski tights and an Icelandic sweater I got at 16, all of the primary colors, the big wool sweaters, the striped trousers, felt especially warm. I found Kiko Kostadinov’s show to be Yummy and Cool. “There are no vibes or characters,” he said to a reporter. I liked that idea — that sometimes fashion doesn’t need to be so narrative, that garments themselves can be their own little stories, ready for you to project yourself onto.
At Raf Simons’ Prada, there was that aforementioned little blue top. A navy sweater with Pepto-Bismol-pink cuffs. Some silly little nylon hats. How lovely it would be, I thought, to wear one of those hats on a rainy day in New York autumn. The fantasy faltered for me when it came to the brightly colored mini coats. This, I felt, was an act of a garment telling me how to feel. You should be wowed by me, the coats seemed to say.
The fantasy also faltered for me at Louis Vuitton. There was a lack of subtlety. Bright and flashy clothes: a sweater with a sort of pixelated fire motif. Leather baseball caps. Photo-realistic printed raincoats. When asked about his collection’s intentions for Vogue, Williams shared: “What you’re going to see is what feels familiar, classic. But it performs. I’m just basically reimagining 2026 [menswear] as I think it should be.” The job of a creative director is to do a kind of world building. What does Williams want the world to look like? Loud. Soccer turf. A gospel choir. Models pushing Louis Vuitton trunks in Louis Vuitton hotel uniforms. This moment, in particular, I could not help but wonder: who is this fantasy for? Who closes their eyes and dreams of being a bellhop? It’s not those of us for whom much of fashion remains a dream state, tantalizingly inaccessible.
Jonathan Anderson’s Dior was sprawling, with influences as ranging as the British film Withnail and I (my first thought: hahahaha cool) to the TikToky guitarist Mk.Gee (my first thought: Are you kidding me? Whatever). In practice, this means a little something for everyone. The moments that were for me were: wool houndstooth trousers, high at the waist. Very British. Very Fussy. The charcoal shorts. The beaded tops that look like the ones that are always in abundance when you go to a vintage store in a basement and the basement has a really specific smell. Those opera collars! Here’s what wasn’t for me: the fur-lined technical fabric ski jacket things. The heavy-handed Dior branding on a leather bag, the random usage of epaulets.
It all felt sort of disorienting from the other side of my screen. I watched all the beautiful clothes come at me when I woke up, at 7 a.m., in my underwear. I looked at the clothes, half awake, that beautiful people were looking at in Paris and Milan during their afternoons, after their cups of coffee. I had been one of them, one time, at a Paris Fashion Week two years ago. I’d been living in Paris, in the 20th, because I needed to figure some things out. And I remember how strange it felt then: me in my very best clothes, in a backless blue dress, quite literally sitting 30 feet away from Sydney Sweeney. I felt so disembodied in that moment. So very unlike myself. Like a stranger in my own life. This must be the fantasy that I had always dreamed of as a girl in a truly unremarkable part of the Northeast. I felt like a completely different person because of my proximity to beautiful things that I would never own. Is this what fashion can do for us?
