London Fashion Week has drawn to a close. After five solid days of back-to-back posing, strutting and blogging, the fashion masses have fled the capital, and life has once again returned to a familiar level of normality.
I’ve always been in two minds about fashion week. On the one hand, I’m not interested in fashion. I don’t favour the majority of trends, I don’t want to dress in a manner that someone has dictated to me, and I don’t want to look like every other girl on the street. I am, however, interested in style. I love aesthetics, I love quality clothing made from sumptuous fabrics, and I love dressing up. It’s because of these reasons that I feel, on some level, I should be bothered about who’s showing what collection where, and which track the supermodels will be walking out to. I was genuinely interested to read about a few things, until after a day or two of being bombarded repeatedly with celebrity sightings, tweets with too many exclamation marks and things Vivienne Westwood said about Kate Middleton, when I realised that I didn’t care.
What is it about fashion week that bothers me so much?
Aside from the constantly-updating Twitter feed and an overwhelming amount of items in Google Reader, the blogosphere* in general implodes with an overwhelming amount of information. Anyone who’s anyone will be at fashion week, of course – including bloggers – and that’s why I feel like I should care. If I’m uninterested, what then? Everyone else seems to be salivating at the prospect of five days of fashion, even if, like me, they’re not attending fashion week in person. The thing is, you can have a voracious appetite for reading without feeling pressured to attend a book signing. You can listen to music everyday, yet happily go through life never having attended a music festival. Therefore, surely you can be interested in fashion (or style) and not be expected to turn up at fashion week, dressed to impress with a DSLR in your hand and a press pass around your neck, shouting “OMG!” at everything.
* I despise this word. Petition to abolish it and coin a new phrase in its place?
Is there anything about fashion week that interests me?
Maybe, but I don’t have the time or the inclination to scour every fashion website out there and sift through all the picture spams and irrelevant gossip just to find something that I’m mildly interested in. Perhaps I’ll pick up a copy of ELLE in a few months time – you know, when autumn/winter is actually a reasonable thing to start thinking about – and catch up.
Would I go to fashion week, if I received an invite?
In all likelihood, yes. I know, I know, quelle hypocrite! Listen. I doubt you’d find me there for the full twelve (or however many) hours on each of the five action-packed days, but I’d love to sip the champagne and get the goody bags, see some new wares from upcoming British designers, and generally poke my nose around and soak up the atmosphere. Of course I would. Although I imagine I’d feel like a tourist, paying a visit to a strange new world that has its own language, customs and procedures, I think I’d enjoy it all the same – but just for the fun of it, not to see what outfit Alexa Chung has got on, not to make notes on “what I’ll be wearing” this winter, not to hyperventilate over Mulberry’s new bag. And perhaps it’s only fair to formulate an opinion on the business that is fashion week if I attend in person – so let’s see what happens.
Do you care about fashion week?
