Suzy Menkes, the doyenne of fashion journalism, started it. Writing about fashion for the International Herald Tribune, she gets paid to give an opinion of Givenchy’s latest dresses, Chanel’s suits and Prada’s leathers, Alexander McQueen’s this and Karl Lagerfeld’s that. She tells a world-wide audience who is on and who is off in the latest Paris runway presentations. She’s the Siskel and Ebert of fashion, the first and foremost critic of clothes, and she might just pan a designer’s efforts once in a while. She considers designers to be real artists; she conceives, in fact, the whole women’s clothing industry to be an artistic endeavor, and her opinion is like that of any art critic writing for any medium. (It is more of a philosophical discussion, how we distinguish art from commerce; but the modern runway show has blurred the lines considerably.)
This is a chicken-or-egg question. Did the marketing world we live in now evolve because consumers identified with “the person behind the label?” Or was it the other way around, that the person became famous because the consumers loved his or her product lines? In any case the marketing of clothes has come to depend on name-brand recognition. Rarely do you hear of a product that gained fame by being the proverbial better mouse trap. The extreme cases of this are things like make-up lines with super-model brand names.
So the more outrageous and extravagant the fashion show, hence the more newsworthy. The more outlandish the outfits on the runway, the more the fashion press corps could justify printing the pictures and the more the news was sure to be picked up by the Kansas City Star.
Often as not these PR extravaganzas have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual clothes these designers sell. Rarely will you see a Gucci loafer in a show, for example, or anything else that actually pays the bills for these festivities. The show itself has become the art form. The equivalent of the automobile industry’s “concept cars,” the clothes we see in press coverage of the runway shows are costumes in a dramatic presentation; don’t expect to find them in stores. Thus, a bad review from Ms. Menkes doesn’t hurt sales, just egos. The Lagerfeld cologne still sells in Minneapolis or Moscow even if Karl gets the skirt length wrong in Paris.
So it was natural to expect that in time these shows would be done for men’s clothing. The catch, however, was that menswear that actually sells in stores is pretty predictable. Men don’t relate to their clothes as artistic. Men are into function, for the most part. Propriety. Practicality. Show a regular citizen of Middletown a picture of a guy in tights and a tunic with a turban on his head and he’ll think you’re putting him on. Instead of stimulating business, this PR has the opposite effect. No one ever has the chutzpah to say this. In menswear everybody is so respectful. Even the humdrum offerings from the industrial likes of Tommy Hilfiger and Perry Ellis (who’s been dead for decades) get gushing tributes. It’s a combination of fear of damaging fragile egos and the threat of losing ad revenues. No one ever says anything bad. No one knows what would happen if a writer panned a men’s wear show. It’s never happened. It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes with a twist.
Let’s face it. Men’s wear design really doesn’t take the kind of talent required to make a gold lamè-trimmed, silk tulle hooded, sleeveless evening gown with slippers, cape and matching Rolls Royce interior. That’s for the geniuses in Avenue Montaigne: the real designers. The editors and journalists who cover menswear are looking to be the Suzy Menkes of their side of the aisle. They don’t find a pair of grey serge trousers or a blue broadcloth shirt to be of any interest; not even the more obvious news stories, like the disappearance of pleats from the trousers, or the changing size of shirt collars, gets much attention. All this would amount to little more than a curious characteristic of the fashion journalism business, except for the fact that someone needs to tell men about the tides of change, about the evolution of style. Weird, useless “art” clothes – skirts, kimonos, and the like – in magazines and newspapers don’t help men or help the men’s clothing business. Aside from adding to the notoriety and hype surrounding a designer’s name, aside from the self-congratulation among industry insiders, they leave the average guy, young, old, straight, gay, urban, suburban, hip, callow, all of them, at best uninformed, at worst, turned off completely.
