Female Supremacy Articles - Page 27

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As usual with this designer, there were things to admire: a lean clerical silhouette, the severity of a nearly monochrome palette, the way color and its absence were used to mark out the torso in floating zones. But when designers stop conceding to biological function, they move away from the realm of fashion and into that of social engineering. It is one thing to nudge men toward exploring their girly sides and quite another to suggest they sit to urinate.

Still, points to the woman who is without question the most intellectually alert designer to show here for exploiting an idea while most of the competition is content to rummage through a grab bag of shopworn cultural references, slack attitudes and clichés.

There are, in other words, days in the life of a fashion observer when having a nail driven into one’s skull seems preferable to sitting through another evocation of the so-called rock ’n’ roll style. True, there was a time when rock stars dressed with offhand brio and loony extravagance and actually wore leather pants. But Jim Morrison, for the record, died in 1971. Except for style hounds like Rufus Wainwright and Amy Winehouse, most musicians these days dress for the stage in more or less the same crumpled Levi’s corduroy jeans they wear to compose their songs, sitting in a bedroom at a computer screen.