(Fashion) Week without end
In his first showing since winning “Project Runway,” designer Jeffrey Sebelia took the wraps off his fall/winter 2007 Cosa Nostra collection amid a sea of 800 Red-Bull-swilling twenty-somethings in L.A.’s downtown Artist District on Wednesday.
The setting — a former ragman’s warehouse turned loft space — was the perfect venue for the Victorian/punk aesthetic of the clothes: skinny-leg denim with Japanese newspaper overprinting; deerskin blazers and pants; crinkled, shredded and layered dresses with woolen tights; and gray wool military-inspired blazers that looked as genuinely re-engineered and repurposed as the warehouse itself.
The timing, though, was another story altogether.
“Is Fashion Week ever going to end?” one party-goer lamented aloud as the crowd queued up.
The Mirror was taken aback that someone would automatically assume the event was part of the Fashion Week festivities which had wrapped up eight days earlier.
Could it be that the recent rash of off-site shows has changed the perception of Fashion Week? Can any half-decent collection with a catwalk and a corporate sponsor be automatically counted in, no matter when it takes place?
Perhaps it was just Sebelia’s “just gotta be me” attitude that made him shun the tents of Culver City, or perhaps his collection simply wasn’t ready in time to show there or in one of the other downtown spaces, but if things keep going on like this, the event might well earn the moniker “L.A.: Fashion (Every Other) Week.”
On another note, the Mirror learned that Los Angeles casting calls for the next season of “Project Runway” will be held Friday through Sunday. If you think you’ve got what it takes to be the next Jeffrey Sebelia (or even if you’re just feeling a little Santino-ish), go to www.projectrunway.com.
