the good, the bad & the ugly (fashion week edition)

This Fall, We'll All Be Perfectly Princessy Ophelias Channeling David Bowie

Fashion week stomps on! Yesterday's collections included Derek Lam, Tommy Hilfiger, Reem Acra, Calvin Klein, Bill Blass and Zac Posen. The day saw lots of tragically romantic dresses (Ophelias on opium) and lots of skinny, menswear-inspired suits for women (David Bowie). Derek Lam's collection was dominated by dark colors, but instead of somber, the mood was deeply rich and romantic. Plush coats, matchy-matchy suits and party dresses for incurable flirts. Tommy Hilfiger's extremely simplistic, basic designs were almost too safe; Reem Acra whipped up whimsical red-carpet fantasies. As for Bill Blass, designed by Peter Som, there were polished, rich bitch outfits for uptown heiresses. Calvin Klein is designing for a future happening right now, and if you love minimalism, he delivers. For the maximalists (like myself): Zac Posen killed it with Disney-princess gowns and '80s goth-Lolita crinolines (the 8th grader inside me weeps for the pink dress!) Sure, his ridiculous shoes made model Karen Elson fall, (above left) but Diddy was there! To help her up! Jennifer and I designate the good, the bad and the ugly in annotated galleries located after the jump. More »

crashin week

Donna Karan's Hideous Orange Fashion Week Bikes Set Free From Chains By Vigilante Jezebel Readers!!

Donna Karan does a lot of typically ridiculous fashion industry stuff in the name of not being the average typically ridiculous fashion industry person, but her orange bicycles take proverbial ayurvedic macrobiotic unitarian wedding cake. In the name of reducing our dependence on foreign oil/increasing our dependence on branded objects, DKNY's guerrilla marketing team chained these orange bikes all over Manhattan during Fashion Week. Yeah, chained. Meaning, the bikes were:

• Locked up and therefore unusable
  
• occupying valuable parking spaces that might otherwise be used by actual bicyclists
  
• and/or chained illegally to trees
  
• shamelessly/tastelessly aping the "Ghost Bike" phenomenon whereby bicyclists killed in the line of carbon footprint reduction are memorialized with decorative bikes chained near the intersections at which they died.

Mercifully, citizens (including one loyal Jezebel reader!) have been putting the bikes out of their misery, using bolt-cutters to set them free. More »

fashion show

Project Runway's Elisa Jimenez' Crazy, Sorta-Sexy "Hunger World"

Elisa Jimenez made a name for herself as this season's Project Runway contestant most likely to spit on a piece of fabric, rub it in grass to infuse it with the spirit of the earth, and use the word "polymorphic" to describe virtually all of her designs. Early yesterday, the 42-year old performance artist and designer challenged many a blurry-eyed fashionista with a 9 a.m. fashion week presentation/performance piece titled "The Hunger World". Held at Manhattan's Touch nightclub, the show paired real people with puppeteers to present an uneven collection of dresses and robes that would be more suitable for worshiping the moon, perhaps, than hitting the runway. (As devotees of Project Runway know, Jimenez has worked with real puppets in the past, but those, inexplicably, have since been buried in a riverbed.) Confused? We were too. Our morning in the Hunger World — along with a series of images taken by our own Nikola Tamindzic — begins after the jump. More »