I often wish that I was a fashion writer for a magazine which got free tickets to things and was invited to lots of cool parties and launches.
Mostly the models were incredibly thin (no surprises there) and looked outrageously bored. Several had difficulty walking in the shoes and I felt like that gave the whole event a bit of an amateur quality.
I could rub shoulders with C-grade celebrities, eat lots of canapes and drink out of those mini champagne bottles.
Karl Lagerfeld could send me roses on my birthday and one day the editor of Vogue could knock on my door and offer to pay me ten dollars per word for any random fashion-related thoughts I care to put on paper.
Obviously I have a bit of an overactive imagination.
So, in the spirit of keeping it real, I paid for my friend and I to go and see one of the Designer Series catwalk shows at Melbourne Spring Fashion Week on Friday. (My editor is cheap!)
The event was on at the Melbourne Town Hall, and of course all the reserved seating tickets were given away to more important fashion writers weeks in advance. So we had to fork out and sit in cattle class with the masses. And there were masses!
I am going to take a moment to whinge – why did the organisers of fashion week feel it was appropriate to sell more tickets than there were seats?
While all those annoying VIPs were getting shown to their ‘reserved’ spots, upstairs in the balcony there was mayhem as we all scrambled to find a seat and snatched goodie bags from each other. My friend Duncan ended up sitting on a step!
And meanwhile, goodie bag? All we got was a chocolate, a packet of coffee (why?), a minute bar of soap, a couple of satchets of hair stuff and a packet of pads.
What was Duncan going to do with pads?
Anyway, onto the clothes. The show featured clothing from Fat, Alpha60, ANT!PODiUM, Gary Bigeni, TV, Opus and Arnsdorf.
All the stuff all the cool kids are wearing. So it was fairly predictable: there was a lot of black, pants were high-waisted and skinny, dresses were shapeless and sack-like.
It was disappointing that there was so little colour – there was a disturbing amount of beige and a lot of washed out greys and blues.
Heading into summer I was really hoping to see more pattern and colour – although, I suppose these brands aren’t known for that.
The menswear was so boring it’s not even worth mentioning. Although one of the male models had a rather luscious crimped blonde mane that made him look rather like that girly elf from Lord of the Rings.
Mostly the models were incredibly thin (no surprises there) and looked outrageously bored. Several had difficulty walking in the shoes and I felt like that gave the whole event a bit of an amateur quality.
And would it have killed them to be wearing a bit of bronzer? I mean these girls were tiny, but the catwalk lights were fairly unforgiving and in the swimsuits every lump and bump was on display – and certainly not in a good way.
We were there to see clothing from local Melbourne designers and boutiques and one would assume that the garments we saw on the catwalk are going to be in stores this season. But the show certainly didn’t make me want to go out and buy the clothes.
The models didn’t make the clothes look good and neither did the hair, makeup or lighting.
By far the best bit was the ludicrous finale, where a whole gaggle of models in ugly sack dresses rushed down the catwalk with their arms outstretched like a horde of skinny zombies chasing down the world’s last Krispy Kreme donut.