Fashion Week Time Travel

A "bonus episode" of sorts

Fashion week is coming. Again. It feels like it’s always fashion week somewhere. But I didn’t realize the cosmic significance of this regularly reoccurring phenomenon until I talked to Camilla Carper.

It is an understatement to say I am a fan of Camilla. I’m actually nuts over their work. Take, for example, the experiment where they bought a roll of white linen, cut and sewed it into clothes, wore those clothes exclusively for a whole year (and altered the clothes as the seasons changed) and then… sewed it all back together into one swath of fabric again.

This is how the linen was looking by June

This is what linen looks like after a year of wear

Or maybe take the experiment where Camilla could only wear clothes they borrowed from other people:

Camilla wearing clothes loaned to them by strangers, for their project ON LOAN

Or take the experiment when they loaned out their most precious garments to anyone who wanted them, or when they displayed their entire closet in a gallery and could only get dressed there. Their work is intimate, thought-provoking, and so deceptively simple it makes me furious. I think Camilla’s brilliant.

So when Cam asked me to participate in a performance they were doing about the concept of fashion week, how could I refuse?

This is a seven-minute “episode of Articles of Interest” about how Camilla uses fashion week to upend the fabric of space-time.

This was supposed to be a bit satrical, but this piece ended up being really thought provoking for me: what is this whole “fashion week” phenomenon, and where did it begin? What is its allure?

While the French created the runway show, America (Amurica!) invented the concept of fashion week. It was the brainchild of the infamous publicist Elenor Lambert, as a way  to create attention for American manufacturing after WWII. Other countries began to emulate the Fashion Week structure: first Milan in 1958, Paris 1973, and London in 1984. By the 1990s,  international Fashion Weeks were happening week after week, cascading on top of each other. 

But in America, home of the fashion week, New York Fashion Week (NYFW) was tightly controlled by the CFDA, aka the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which maintained a tight hold on the goings-on. The CFDA controlled the calendar, which used to be a tight linear schedule, with no overlapping events. The rigid structure gave the CFDA tight reign over which designers had the best time slots, especially because all the runway shows used to be held in one dependable central location: Bryant Park.  It was all very rigid, professional, and sanctioned.

 That was, until the mid 90’s

Obviously this is a little mini exploration— not a comprehensive “episode”— but it was made to accompany Camilla’s “fashion show” performance at Pratt Manhattan Gallery. For their work, Cam mined their past and turned their memories into “new” garments, further messing around with the continuum of fashion space/time.

Camilla Carper and ricky sallay zoker (AKA YATTA), who did the music for the performance. Photo by Logan White

Yours truly, wearing a poncho/cape/quilt made up of Camilla’s clothes from one year of high school. Makeup by Bunny Lampbert

To begin the performance, we were all covered in ghost costumes, labeled “CFDA” Photo by Andres Altamirano

The performance started within the exhibit The New Village

Camilla is represented by Lydia Rodrigues: a great gallery and a great place to buy great weird clothes.

On a personal note, the magic of fashion week never gets old for me. I mean, I’m not one of those journalist running from show to show- this isn’t exactly what I cover. Maybe for that reason, I am not blasé about it: I love getting to see a fashion show. It’s hard to explain, but it’s exhilarating to have permission to stare at a model who is dressed really well. You don’t realize how taboo that is until you’re allowed to indulge in it. Artifice and all, there’s nothing quite like a beautiful runway show. Happy NYFW to all who observe.

Other articles of interest

• The Textile Society of America's annual symposium is open to everyone this year! November 12-17th online

• Working on a book is fun and also lonely. It feels like I’m waking up early every morning to work on an extremely complicated jigsaw puzzle. However, I’ll be poking my head out of isolation to talk at Resonate Podcast Festival in Virginia and the DS Podcast Festival in Belgium. Give a shout if I’ll see you at either!

• If you, like me, have also been waiting for an exploration of the intersections of kink, Judaism, Zionism, domination, subjugation and historical trauma (fertile!) keep an eye out for Bound Up, a new book by Leora Fridman. I’ll be hosting a launch event at P&T Knitwear on 10/10

• I learned so much from taking a college-level course on the history of fashion, offered by the one and only Eugene Rabkin of StyleZeitgeist. There’s still some space available in the cohort for the next semester, and I can’t recommend it enough.