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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone, and happy New Year as of sundown tonight to all our Jewish listeners. I hope you can party like it's 5784. Now we find ourselves at the end of summer. September has arrived. Labor Day has long passed. Jewish listeners here come the High Holy Days and despite last week's heat wave, comfortable temperatures are on the horizon. How many of you are anticipating the bright yellows, oranges, and reds, the fall foliage? Maybe you're already heading to your storage units and dusting off your warmer clothes in anticipation of sweater weather.
As the majority of us are waiting for fall to arrive, our city's best-dressed look ahead to the spring and summer of next year. Why? New York Fashion Week just wrapped up on Wednesday, so let's review this week's events a little bit. The significance of this tradition in New York City culturally and economically and peer into the future of fashion. With us now is Vanessa Friedman, fashion director, and chief fashion critic for The New York Times. Hi, Vanessa. Welcome back to WNYC.
Vanessa Friedman: Hi. It's great to be with you guys again.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, were you paying attention this fashion week? Which designers have inspired you to look ahead of what you'll be wearing next year? Are there any trends that you're particularly excited about wearing? Maybe you work in the fashion industry or in an adjacent industry that's part of the major production that is New York Fashion Week. How does this yearly event touch you and how's your industry doing locally post-pandemic? Have you moved away from making a lot of pajamas? Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.
Vanessa, I want to ask you about Fashion Week and the New York economy first, because often when we think about Fashion Week or see it covered on TV or social media, it's all about the glamor of the guests sitting front row or the expensive price tags on those pieces featured on the runway, but you know the fashion industry and New York Fashion Week, in particular, encompasses the labor of people from all economic classes. I'll cite a stat here according to a 2022 piece in the economics review, Fashion Week brings in $11 billion in wages and $2 billion in tax revenue annually. What are these jobs both inside and outside of the fashion industry, behind the glitz and glamor of these shows?
Vanessa Friedman: It's an incredibly valuable event when it comes to city's economy. This is true for New York, it's true for the other Fashion Week cities like London, Paris, and Milan, and it's one of the reasons every time conversations start up about, should Fashion Week change? Should it go away? There's a huge imperative to keep it because it is so important to so many people.
Not just models on the runway, but electricians, taxi drivers, hotels, restaurants, florists, hair and makeup artists, set builders. Then the people who are actually involved in production themselves, whether that is the production facilities, the factories, the actual studios in the fashion brands, the employees who are designing and running the business and running the backend and the stores. Just, think of Madison Avenue, 5th Avenue, Soho, Tribeca, Williamsburg now. There's fashion everywhere and I think there was a stat that something like one in four employees in the United States is touched by fashion.
Brian Lehrer: Wow. Another stat from that economics review piece said it brings in $887 million per year. Not the fashion industry, just Fashion Week.
Vanessa Friedman: Fashion Week. That's more than The New York Marathon and The US Open, and it was more than the Super Bowl when the Super Bowl was in New Jersey.
Brian Lehrer: Incredible. We were just talking on the show last week about how massive the economic impact is on New York of The US Open. It's just a couple of weeks of tennis compared to 162 baseball games in the city each year, and yet the US Open in certain economic terms is bigger. Fashion Week, you're telling us it's even bigger than that. Now in a recent podcast interview with Vogue, Peter Do, and tell me if I'm saying his name right. I think it's Do right?
Vanessa Friedman: It's Do, yes.
Brian Lehrer: The new creative director for Helmut Lang jokingly credited Lang for being the reason no one who works in the fashion industry takes Labor Day off. Can you talk about Lang's move to show his collection in New York City, first in the '90s, and the impact it's had on the global perception of the city?
Vanessa Friedman: Helmut Lang, he's a Belgian designer. He was originally showing in Paris, and at that time, this is back in the last millennium, New York actually went at the end of Fashion Week. I think it went London, Milan, Paris, New York, and there'd be a week in between Paris and New York. What happened was that people would look at the New York shows and they would say, "Oh, American designers are copying the European brands." America was getting bad rep.
Helmut decided to move to New York and show here, and in order to put an end to that conversation, he decided he would go at the beginning of Fashion Week, i.e. right after Labor Day. Because at that time, it was 1997, he was such an incredibly influential designer. Really a designer who encapsulated that kind of angsty minimalism of the '90s that was a reaction to the very overblown power dressing of the '80s. Because he was so important, everyone else followed suit. Suddenly, instead of being at the very end of Fashion Week, New York had leapfrog to the very front of Fashion Week, and that is the situation as it has remained ever since.
Brian Lehrer: Interesting. I read how you were critical of Peter Do's first collection with Helmut Lang. Although back when Helmut Lang was at the head of the namesake brand describing his clothes, and you just talked about the minimalism that followed the excesses of the '80s, he had said they caught an angsty disaffected cultural mood and a moment and then transcended them. Or was that your-- Sorry, I'm not sure where that quote came from. That's either from you or-- [crosstalk]
Vanessa Friedman: It was me talking about [unintelligible 00:07:12]
Brian Lehrer: That was you. That's a great way to describe that era in angsty, disaffected cultural mood in a moment, and then transcended them. I'm curious what you saw on the runway this week that reflect today's cultural moment, whatever that is. If you're citing the '80s and the money that went behind '80s politics for that era, January 6th inspired closing Barbenheimer, the labor movement and justice movement strike back or am I being too literal here?
Vanessa Friedman: I think we've gotten past the Barbenheimer moment. Certainly, Barbie was enormous, enormous fashion influence in the run-up to the movie. There really was an explosion of pink, and then I think we pinked ourself out, which is not a bad thing. What's interesting is that fashion really has been struggling with how people want to dress in a post-lockdown world.
There were a lot of trends and then we all just stopped. We were all stuck in our houses, in our comfort clothes, in our elastic waist, and ever since, it's been a very tentative dress situation. You see it on the street, you see it in people's questions about how do you dress for work. Do you dress for work? Do you dress for home? We went through a period where we thought comfort clothing was going to remain the king of clothing.
Then we decided, no, the roaring '20s were going to come back and everyone was going to be wearing feathers and sequins and color. That didn't quite happen because look like suddenly there was war and the climate crisis and COVID actually hadn't gone away quite as much as everyone thought. It's been very messy and confusing for I'd say the last two years.
What's interesting is, I think finally that's beginning to sort itself out. There was a sense on a lot of the New York runways that a hybrid proposal of how to dress was maybe the answer to the hybrid life we're all experiencing now. Suiting, but not full-on strict suiting. A jacket with a easy pair of pants or a dress and a flat shoe. It's a easy but empowering way to move forward.
There was that moment, which I think really does reflect where we are. Then there's a whole bunch of really interesting independent young designers who are bubbling up in New York, and they're wrestling with feminism, with rebellion, with subversion, with all these kind of questions that I think new designers generally do confront. In particular, there's a designer called Elena Velez who staged a whole mud wrestling event in Brooklyn.
Brian Lehrer: Wow.
Vanessa Friedman: Which is really about really they got off the dirt that we all get into in everyday life.
Brian Lehrer: Then it's going to have to be laundry detergent week following fashion week. Let's take a phone call. Brandon in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Brandon.
Brandon: Hello?
Brian Lehrer: Hello.
Brandon: Yes, hello.
Brian Lehrer: Hi, Brandon.
Brandon: You have the wrong name, but anyway.
Brian Lehrer: Tell me your right name. I'm sorry, maybe we got confused.
Brandon: Let me make my point. After Bryant Park, Fashion Week has lost this luster. During those days, it incorporated New York City. Unfortunately, the corporate world has isolated it. Sometimes you don't even know when it's occurring because at one time, the fashion were the people relating to the scene. Can you comment, ma'am?
Vanessa Friedman: Actually, I think that designers are doing pretty good job of incorporating New York City, but they're spread out all over the city. For example, Coach was in the public library. Collina Strada was on the roof of one of the buildings in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Michael Kors was in Williamsburg facing the Manhattan skyline and Lower Manhattan on 9/11, and really looking at the life of the city as it had returned. I think that designers are engaging with the city but in perhaps a more diffuse way than when the shows were centered in Bryant Park.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your call. Sorry, I got your name wrong. Wish I didn't say let's go, Brandon. One freshman brand seemed to capture the new purpose of Fashion Week that is to garner publicity. Can you talk about the Fashion Week debut of Shao S-H-A-O, and how the show caught your attention?
Vanessa Friedman: Yes. Shao was a guerrilla show. It's a young designer, Shao Yang, who was a Parsons graduate, and she was working with a publicist called Kelly Cotrone. Kelly had the brilliant or nefarious, depending on your point of view, idea to partner with Anna Delvey, real name Anna Sorokin, the very famous society scammer who had pretended to be a fake German heiress to bilk some of New York's rich out of their funds and had gone to jail and become a social media sensation. She's now released under house arrest while she is waiting the outcome of her immigration case.
She and Kelly used her notoriety to lure the fashion world into seeing Shao's show, which was held on the roof of her building on the Lower East Side, because, of course, Anna cannot actually leave the building. It's certainly a novel way to get people's attention, but it worked.
Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. A little creepy, but really interesting. I don't know.
Vanessa Friedman: It does raise some moral questions, but fashion is a world that often raises moral questions.
Brian Lehrer: I guess. Joseph in Manhattan. You're on WNYC with Vanessa Friedman, chief fashion critic for The New York Times. Hi, Joseph.
Joseph: Hi, Vanessa. I'm a big fan of your writing and have been for many years. I've had the luck of getting to work in fashion and various iterations, both on the publishing side and then ultimately on the brand side. I wanted to ask you specifically about a counterpoint I saw between two designers that you spoke to this year, Peter Do and Willy Chavarria. I thought what was really interesting in your write-up of the shows in Chavarria was that you felt that no designer, "did more to crystallize the way forward than Willy Chavarria, whose genderless suiting deserves to redefine New York fashion."
What did you see was the success of Chavarria's show in relationship to the presentation of genderless clothing in relation to what you felt maybe was missing in Peter Do's and how maybe that collection for Helmut Lang didn't quite live up to the challenging nature of Helmut Lang's original design.
Vanessa Friedman: First, thank you very much for your kind words. I really appreciate it. Please keep reading.
Brian Lehrer: A great question, by the way.
Vanessa Friedman: [laughs] It's an interesting question. I think in terms of Peter's debut, it's very hard to step into another designer's vernacular and shoes, particularly in a house like Helmut Lang that was so incredibly influential. Many designers have tried to do it before Peter. He's not the first person to take that job, and it hasn't worked. There's a tradition of it being a complicated position to take.
I think Peter really got the form of Helmut. He understands the tailoring, he understands the structure of the garments. Helmut Lang had a twisty, slightly pervy, kinky side to it that was often expressed in the details of the clothes. In a strap hanging out, in a bit of sheer, in literally a twisted seam. That emotion, that abstract feeling you got from wearing those pieces, that's what I thought was missing in Peter's Helmut Lang. He's just not that person. There was a sense that the form was there, but the content was missing.
I think what was so extraordinary about Willy's work is that he has both form and content. It's original. His combination of traditions, and pieces, and cultural references is very much about a melting pot, whether it's a melting pot of gender, or what we consider day or night, or professional and street, Latino and American, all that, Latino and waspy, I guess.
I think he takes all these elements, he mixes them up, and he produces this incredible blend, this happy blend that is something new. That, to me, is a way forward. It's taking all these historical building blocks that have gotten us to where we are, and then showing us how they work together to get us where we're going next.
Brian Lehrer: Joseph, thank you for your call. Before we run out of time, and perhaps all of your answers to all of my questions and listeners' questions have really addressed this, if indirectly. We have a number of listeners who are saying to us things like, really fashion week, the fashion elites. One text says fashion yawn really reflects where we are, really doesn't reflect the lives of anyone I know. For people who think this is either shallow or up in the clouds elite, what would you say is the relevance of this entire beat to people's lives, regular people?
Vanessa Friedman: To me, fashion is simply an expression of identity. It's how we communicate. The clothes we choose to wear are how we communicate to the world around us who we are. That is true of everybody, no matter how much thought you do or do not put into it. Those choices you make every day about what you put on your body are a reflection of where you are politically, socially, culturally, economically, at a certain moment in time that makes it incredibly important and incredibly universal. Fashion Week is an attempt by companies and designers to give us the tools we need to communicate who we are. It filters down and out because of social media to all of us.
Even if you're looking at a garment that is very expensive, may not be produced, may seem to have nothing to do with you, in fact, because of the images that go around the world and the way we absorb those images and the way we then personalize them, in fact, it will end up shaping what you see around you and possibly what's in your wardrobe for the rest of the year.
Brian Lehrer: Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic for The New York Times. Thank you so much.
Vanessa Friedman: Thank you. [inaudible 00:18:58]
Brian Lehrer: By the way, let's abolish the tie, but that's another show. Thank you very much, Vanessa.
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