Exiled to Paris



My impenitent esteem for fashion comes from designer's translation of current events and their ability to either address them or offer a scapegoat to a distant time or place.  This sustaining element has been notably absent from the spring collections for the last couple of weeks till now! Leave it to the Parisians to restore the giddy thrill that floods you with iconic editorial ideas, future personal style adventures and a dialogue more commonly found in front of a canvas.  Getting dressed yesterday morning was hardly a work of art but motivated by shear non-restrictive comfort.  Anxious to get to the office to see what direction Balenciaga's Nicholas Ghesquiere would be taking the industry for seasons to come, I threw on my oversized vintage jeans and some flouncy overtly feminine top that makes me feel I should be writing epic loves letters or dancing on a table at a satellite nightclub in the Hamptons.  It seems that my own fashion clairvoyance was not on the same frequency as Ghesquiere's Mars 2112 couture, but Junya Watanabe's tribal tango with the west.  My psychic signal was clearly interrupted otherwise I would have accessorized my Katie Holmes sabotaged "boyfriend" jeans with a towering cyclone gelé of gingham and bushels of dried flower.  Other designer's have reacted to the increasingly austere economic climate with funeral dress code palettes or escapist designs reminiscent of the glorious excess of the high eighties but Watanabe offered a clever interpretation by working with an unorthodox mélange of universal everyday materials-denim, bold ethnic prints and broderie anglaise.    So was Watanabe offering a material commentary on emerging nations of Africa or secretly watching reruns of MTV's Sweet Sixteen spoiled brats exiled from their faux-cushion suburban lives and curling irons to living in a Masai village on the Kenyan/Tanzanian border?

—Malina V. Joseph