Seems like lately I can’t have a conversation without someone mentioning Fashion Week. I realize that this is a style column, making me a style columnist, but to be honest I’m not really up to speed on proper fashion. I don’t know very much about individual designers and can’t bring myself to give a damn about trends or whether or not aubergine is in this season. What I do pay attention to is personal style–it’s not so much the garments themselves as how the person they’re draped over wears them. If there’s one thing watching a lot of movies about con artists has taught me, it’s that presentation is important–if you’re up to no good, at least make sure you look good and no one will ask questions and/or people will fall all over themselves to help you out. What do you mean, White Collar isn’t real?
Last week, I spent some time lurking around Lincoln Center in order to watch the people who like to watch fashion. Usually I take photos of my poor, unsuspecting subjects as unobtrusively as possible, but Fashion Week is an alternate universe in which people expect to have their photo taken, and are in fact probably offended and stalk home in stilettos and a black cloud of self-doubt if no one does. Someone even took my picture! I have no doubt these gentlemen’s suits were very expensive and designed by someone very important but who cares, check out those fly white sunglasses. At first it looked like the one on the right was wearing a bow tie, but it turned out that his shirt collar was a different color than the rest of it, which I thought was a really nice touch.
There were too many interesting people wandering around to keep it to one piece this week, so here’s a bonus page of loose watercolor-and-pencil sketches. Props to the fellow in the middle for managing to match his hair to his pants. If that’s not attention to detail, I don’t know what is.
