There are a lot of choices there this season, said Linda Fargo, the new fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman. There’s a lot of Fake Handbags, there’s a lot of Cristobal Balenciaga influence with the swing coats and balloon shapes. But there is also something compelling, Ms. Fargo added, about the appearance at a variety of shows of women wearing black lips and black nails, motorcycle jackets with Frankenstein zippers, buffalo plaids of the sort that Vivienne Westwood was toying with in what seems a century ago.
Perhaps when you look at what’s happening politically in this country, you can understand why people are looking for Replica Handbags that’s less about conformity, Ms. Fargo said.
Her point was borne out by the aural backdrops of so many shows, where in place of tame club remixes and mash-ups, there was an emphasis on early punk, the more playful bands of the 80’s like Tom Tom Club and the stylized tristesse of bands like OMD and Depeche Mode. There’s a lot of Louis Vuitton Handbags again, said Michel Gaubert, the French D.J., who was in New York to play for the Proenza Schouler and Michael Kors shows. But it’s new New Wave.
As usual Balenciaga Wallets was Marc Jacobs who synthesized what this observer likes to think of as a bracing spirit of resistance with a show less about referring to anything so chronologically limiting as a specific decade as to a long bohemian genealogy. Lazy minds drifted from the huge knit caps and skirts worn over trousers to associations with Mr. Jacobs’s notorious 1992 grunge collection, which got him fired from Perry Ellis and more or less established him on the fashion map. But the collection was grunge only in the sense that it refused to capitulate to conventional ideas about what renders clothing masculine or feminine and what it means to be sartorially legible as an adult.
If there is anything in the success of Transamerica, Brokeback Mountain, a spate of transsexual plot lines on cable television, drag kings in cabaret and movies like the new Miramax production Kinky Boots, Cartier Handbags seems to show that Americans are regaining their interest in cultural flux. This is not to suggest a revolution is going on or, for that matter, that the barricades for such an event are likely to be the celebrity-lined bleachers at a Marc Jacobs show. But even small subversions come as welcome at a cultural moment as static, obedient and politically benumbed as our own.
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