Are you a bit confused about the spring ready-to-wear trends for women and what they’re telling us about the times we’re currently living in? If so, you’re not alone. Here at Dandelion Chandelier, we’ve been reading the fashion press, prowling the sales floors of the great luxury stores of Manhattan, and surfing online. And we have a confession to make. We don’t get it. Or maybe we do get it, and we just don’t like it.
OK, “war” is probably too strong a word. But as I reflect on last month’s New York Fashion Week, I’m stuck by the quiet struggle that has been going on for a while now in the American fashion world between four different types of designer brands: street, avenue, lane, and track.
OK, I have a beef with the luxury apparel industry that grows ever more urgent with each passing birthday: why are designer brands and retailers so focused on clothes for skinny people? What hope is there for the standard-sized and zaftig among us?
Prognosis: negative. I have been mourning the loss of one of the great luxury brands in my closet: Michael Kors. It used to be one of my go-to ready-to-wear brands: I loved the mash-up of classic Americana and jet-set European sensibilities, the use of color and texture, and those shrugs! I loved those cute little fine-gauge knit shrugs. I still have approximately fifteen of them in multiple colors, and they have saved me many times from the horror of exposing my upper arms. We adore you, Michelle Obama, but you have raised the upper-arm bar so high that when we consider going to the gym to pump iron, it seems futile, so we just shrug and put on a shrug instead.
Ah, the art of the tease. The first glimpse, just a flash of something amazing, with the promise of more to come. But not just yet. Wonders to be imagined and dreamed of, perhaps someday to become real. Anticipation can be delicious, in luxury purchasing as well as in love.
