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The Necessity of Menswear Fashion Week.

I found the dumbest sentence I’ve read this week is when The Fashionisto published an editorial titled “ESSAY: DOES MENSWEAR EVEN NEED A DEDICATED FASHION WEEK?”

Really, “Fashionisto?” Why would you not want a fashion week devoted to menswear if you are in fact a publication devoted to men’s fashion? One would have thought that a publication like The Fashionisto would demand a menswear fashion week.

I’m convinced that we’ve come to the part of the fashion year when there is a lull in the world of ‘fashion’ news with nothing to report. This “essay” made me think the senior editor exclaimed at a staff meeting; “I got a great idea, let’s just allow the dumbest guy in the mail room type up a handful of non-sequiturs while we all take off the rest of the summer! Then we come back after Labor Day when we can all start bitching about the idiots who are still wearing white well into the month of September!”

Sounds like a winner, boss!

Fashion publications tend to forget what I like to consider “The Dark Times,” when men had no idea what was being released by designers. Especially in the small rural towns in Southern Vermont, we only knew what was being released by what was seen in the stores. If you wanted to wear something other than Carhart’s 356 days out of the year and wanted more than what ‘the big chains’ offered, you were out of luck. Casual and Business attire had only a couple of outlets and even then, you had to choose what the store owners – the so-called local experts – already displayed at their stores. You couldn’t invigorate your wardrobe unless you were willing to go to bigger population centers or cities where there were more varieties, but even then, you were restricted to what the shops and tailors had to offer. You were stuck under the yoke of fashion authorities and had to choose what they picked out for ‘the populace’ in advance.

There was the advent of “Style” sections in men’s magazines where the publishers and editors ran reviews of new lines in-between the ads for designers and their labels, with little or no instructions on where to find these additional items in attire. You could look, but good luck if you wanted to touch and own these items in the ads if they didn’t provide something as provocative as an address on where to find these wears!

Before there was the Internet, there were catalogs and mail-order. Which was awesome. It was exactly like the internet but a billion times slower. Catalogs were literally porn for clothes horses like myself except the pages were stuck together with sticky notes.

With the advent of the Internet and online shopping, your choices expanded exponentially but there haven’t been many resources out there for men that inform us on what’s being released by the designers and their labels as they happen. We all had to bookmark our favorite designers or online shops and check back to those pages often to see what was new. I’m surprised that there aren’t more resources out there for menswear that informs the public about what’s new and a direct link to buy those items, now.

Even with all the publications that have flooded the market, there still needed to be a time and place where the clothes are introduced to the public. There needed to be an event where the new clothes and the designers call attention to themselves. Because of these events – Menswear fashion week that occurs twice annually – those of us could talk about what was being released. The conversations we’ve been having in our group sections on Facebook is a perfect example. Obviously.

Before Menswear Fashion Week, nobody cared because nobody knew what was going on. They needed to create an event where editors from “The Fashionisto” would send their reporters and photographers to cover what’s happening in the world of menswear. Without Menswear Fashion Week this year, none of us in The Retroverse or other Anachropunks* would have been talking about Thome Browne nor Alessandro Michele. Judging by the reactions, that might be a good thing.

None of these points were addressed by the writer at “The Fashionisto.” Or, if they did, those points are hiding behind the paywall of that site.

There are a couple of resources that will keep most of us informed on what’s going on in the world of Menswear, and it should be “The Fashionisto” since GQ has fallen down on the job because they’re too busy on their knees performing literary fellatio on designers who are bringing back everything we hated from the 60’s and 70’s.

Until they can find a better way of getting the word out on what designers are up to Menswear needs a week or two of attention whoring, a couple of days when it calls attention to itself and demands that those of us who have a shit about what we wear knows what’s new and who is creating what we want – and especially don’t want – to wear.

As always, I would like to know your thoughts! Should there always be a "Menswear Fashion Week - or should the fashion industry go back to keep it a secret? In the meantime - BUISNESS OF FASHION has great coverage of "Menswear" shows from years past, an using the Facebook widget below, tell us what's your favorite collection from years past?

*When Phoebe Darqueling interviews me for "The Steampunk Journal," I'll finally explain what the term "Anachropunks" really means and why that term is so great! (Return...)