Right now, it’s fashion season. Each week, it’s fashion week somewhere in the world. Last week, it was Paris Fashion Week; this week, it’s New York Fashion Week; and next week, London Fashion Week is on.

You may have noticed that I don’t cover any of them.

Why? Because I find them largely irrelevant. Here’s why.

Why fashion week is irrelevant to me

Don’t get me wrong, I love fashion. I love looking at beautiful clothes and getting ideas for my own wardrobe.

But on the runway, I see very little I could actually wear. If I got invited to the Oscars each year (and was a little slimmer so I’d look good in designer creations), it would be a different story — there are some fabulous ball gowns out there!

That’s not my life though. My life involves working from home in tracksuits, attending business meetings, running the Sydney blogger meetups, plus some shopping, social stuff and housework as well.

The sort of clothes I need vary from comfy to casual to corporate, with nary an Oscar-worthy gown in sight. That doesn’t mean my life is completely without glamour, it just doesn’t match any major designers’ visions of fabulousness.

Fashion week isn’t about real clothes

It’s not surprising that fashion week doesn’t show clothes for normal people like me. I can’t afford to buy many designer garments, no matter how much I like them. However, some of the clothes aren’t designed to be worn by anyone — they’re just there to be photographed.

The ‘wearable’ clothing at fashion shows are wearable by a very specific woman: slim, rich and immaculately put together. I don’t have anything against those women, but I’m not one of them, so fashion shows don’t have a lot for me to wear.
The other clothes are made for a different purpose: publicity. An outlandish ensemble may be shown on television, websites, magazines and newspapers all over the world. That publicity is worth a lot of money, and gets the designer’s name known by millions of people around the world.

These are the ones I call ‘publicity stunt outfits’: as beautiful and artistically accomplished as they are, these clothes aren’t meant to be worn by anyone except the model.

So to a relatively average woman in the ‘burbs of Sydney, fashion week is a largely irrelevant affair.

What fashion week does achieve

Fashion week doesn’t show normal women the clothes they’ll wear next season, but it does achieve a lot for the industry — both good and bad.

On the one hand, fashion week helps designers build their brand. Journalists and photographers come from all over the world to view the shows, and it’s their job to keep their readers informed of interesting developments. So anything of interest is likely to get a mention. That gives designers a chance to get publicity worth millions of dollars.

While that publicity might not sell the expensive clothes shown on the runway, it does sell a lot of other things with the designer’s name on them: fragrances, cosmetics, sunglasses, handbags, shoes and cheaper clothing. These are usually designed and created by other companies, who negotiate licenses with well-known designers to use their name to market products. It’s basically a win-win deal: the designers get licensing fees, manufacturers sell more merchandise, and consumers can buy items with a prestigious name on them for a reasonable price. (If you’d like to know more about how this works, there’s an excellent book called The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever that explains it in more detail.)

On the other hand, the outlandish publicity stunts designers use to make sure they’re written about sometimes reflect badly on the industry as a whole. People who don’t already have an interest in fashion may only have contact with the industry through the occasional catwalk pictures on the nightly news. If that’s all you’d ever seen of fashion, you’d think the industry was all about gay men dressing skeletal teenage girls in birdcages or equally odd garb. That might translate to more fashion fans buying perfume, but it also gives people who aren’t fashion fans a really odd view of the industry.

Fashion week’s translators

The unsung heroes of fashion week are the people who translate the designers’ ideas into clothing real people might wear. These people know how to translate a cocoon-shaped ensemble into an attractively full skirt, a see-through dress into a sheer shirt with a camisole beneath, or an all-turquoise outfit into a few cute accessories. They draw their inspiration from the creative but impractical creations on the catwalk, but get the difficult task of turning those ideas into reasonably-priced apparel that real people will purchase in their local stores.

To me, these people are far more deserving of praise than some of the over-hyped designers making ridiculous clothes.

A journalist like Cathy Horyn can watch a week’s packed schedule of outlandish shows and translate it into a tightly-edited list of trends the rest of the industry can use for inspiration. A fashion impresario like Anna Wintour is responsible for creating stunningly beautiful images of those same strange clothes, inspiring fashion fans to update their wardrobes. An anonymous designer at an ordinary apparel companies (like Zoe Hong) can design clothes people want to wear, with a nod to the latest trends from the runway.

As a group, these people have a great deal more influence on what I’ll be wearing next year than any designer will. (But regardless of the trends, I won’t be wearing anything that doesn’t suit me.)

Fashion week: a wonderful fantasy

I’ll probably still look at some of the pretty pictures from fashion week, but I won’t be wearing the clothes. Fashion week’s great for fantasy, but real life requires a little something extra: practicality.

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