Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Fashion Month.
Looking at collections is prioritized over schoolwork, and I've always dreamed of going to see a show live. While Style.com does a great job of showing the looks, seeing the way a dress moves or a shirt sparkles could only be experienced in person.
Besides, it's a runway show, there's a whole mood created — music, set — to go along with the clothes.
While Style.com covers shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris, they're hardly the only cities hosting fashion weeks. This past weekend I attended D.C. Fashion Week, and there, I had the pleasure of seeing Hopkins sophomore Michael Van Maele's collection.
I met Van Maele last spring when I interviewed him for The News-Letter. He's possibly the only Biomedical Engineer that designs and hand sews clothing on the side (and if he's not, someone please let me know who the other ones are!).
Here's an example of why we get along: over Intersession, Mike told me his favorite model is Vlada Roslyakova because he loves the way she walks. I promptly went to YouTube to check out her sassy strut. Only us modelphiles spend copious amounts of time watching videos of models walking.
This was D.C.'s twelfth fashion week. There were eleven designers participating in the International Couture Collections show that I attended. It all took place at the Embassy of France.
The shows came out one after another, each of varying quality: some boring, some tacky, some crazy and fun, some beautiful.
It was nice, though, that there were a variety of styles and age-appropriate collections. For instance, Van Maele and Cameron Gray — who showed a very funky and detail-oriented collection — were both very youthful, while the design duo that composed Heydari showed chic and comfy suits appropriate for the workplace.
D.C. Fashion Week might not be big, but they brought in designers from around the globe. One of my favorite collections was by Saman Zar from Pakistan; she showed richly colored and intricately beaded dresses.
I had already seen many of the dresses that Van Maele showed, as a lot of them were featured in Kappa Kappa Gamma's First Annual Fashion Show last spring.
It is a simple and playful collection and it was a whole new experience seeing it on real models (no offense to any of the students who wore the pieces last year). A large part of a model's job is to walk well. I may joke about going on YouTube to see the way Vlada Roslyakova — or Jessica Stam, or Coco Rocha — walks, but that aspect of their job is very important in presenting the clothing, making it move and drawing attention to it.
The models did a great job, but a drawback to having all the shows going one right after the other is that few of the shows had all their models with the same hair and makeup motif, since one model would appear in about four different collections and there just isn't time to change hair and makeup to have all models match for all shows. It was things like that that could have made the shows much more powerful.
It was also very unfortunate that I could barely hear the MC talking, and so missed out on a lot of the designers' bios.
When I could hear him, it was between shows, and he was going along the front row and asking people who they were and where they came from, which I found to be a sort of weird, high school talent show touch.
These were little things that I wish had been tweaked, but overall it was very enjoyable. I imagine in the coming years, they will build up D.C. Fashion Week to be bigger and work out all the kinks that would have otherwise made it a great show.
