Fashion Week 2016

I know clothes are important. Clothes are what keep Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel in constant first place as the world's most photographed woman with clothes on. Clothes keep me from getting eaten by mosquitos, no-see-ums, flies, and other insects when I spend some time in the garden.

And I know New York City's Fashion Week is a big deal. I remember when I worked near Bryant Park and saw the annual transformation of the place into a massive tent supported by steel girders, where everyone coming and going seemed to be identified by a large plastic card worn around their neck that flapped on their torso.

But, since I stopped working I stopped knowing where fashion week was being held. My guess is it's not Bryant Park anymore, since I seem to remember that either it got passé to be there, or the squirrels and pigeons complained radically and wanted their trees and roosting areas back.

Since I read two fairly good newspapers a day, I decided to go all in and glance at a review of the show, or shows in today's Newspaper of Record.

A full page in the A section is devoted to Fashion, with photos and lively text by Vanessa Friedman under the headline 'Dressing Up the Dresses.'

I got a bit of a clue that perhaps Fashion Week is held in various parts of NYC these days. Trying to find a recognizable place name in the text I instead came across a description that Coach held "its first official runway show for its first-ready-to-wear line in a 'purpose built' glass-walled greenhouse on the 30th Street extension of the High Line." Imagine that press release! I know about the High Line. I've walked it.

Easily understood is Ms. Friedman's opinion of the setting Coach created for its "first official runway show..." You get the idea. "It was impressive."

Disappointment is understood when she describes the collection, but wonderment sets in (at least for me) when she tells us the "thinness of the collection could be summed up as 1970s prairie biker babes." I guess as a female writing about a fashion show she's allowed to refer to the look of Coach's "first-ready-to-wear-line" as a certain species of "babes."

At some point in my education I was exposed to diagramming sentences. Break it apart, identify the parts of speech, and label the parts, subject, verb, adverb, adjective, phrase, clause, etc.

I know what "babes" can be, and I certainly was there for the 70s (was Ms. Friedman?), but what is a "prairie biker." And when you put it together, what is it? I do get that Ms. Friedman doesn't think it's good for 2015, and certainly not good for Coach's "first-ready-to-wear-line" but what image is she trying to convey?

The only picture in the print edition of the Paper of Record from the Coach show is the one above, a very skinny looking model who has only been eating fat-free yogurt for two years, walking down the grass-sided runway carrying a purse, wearing a colorful dress, topped with what looks like an orange (pumpkin?) colored leather jacket. Maybe it's the jacket that conveys the "biker" look and the dress (wildflowers  on the prairie?) that conveys the "prairie?" Obviously, put it all together and you get a "1970s prairie biker look."

I knew that.

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