>> Soon after Maybelline announced it would be be taking over from five-year Bryant Park cosmetics sponsor MAC, MAC — presumedly, as New York Times' Eric Wilson put it, tired of having to share "a rather circuslike stage with other sponsors who were competing for attention, sometimes including makers of doughnuts, cameras, toilets and Big Macs" — announced that it would be producing the tentatively-titled MAC and Milk Fashion Week with Milk Studios at the same time as the traditional New York Fashion Week.
The event can be seen as either a complement or a competitor to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, but on the record, anyway, there seem to be no hard feelings. Milk Studios founder Mazdack Rassi says of the initiative: "This week is not an alternative show space, it's a way of cultivating designers and helping them come up with new ways of selling their clothes." And Zach Eichman, a VP of IMG Fashion, which produces the shows at Bryant Park, told the New York Times last week the company welcomed the MAC and Milk event and that bus service between shows would be available when possible. “We can’t do every show in the tents. We hope they will be successful.”
Band of Outsiders
Alexander Wang, Gareth Pugh, and More Are Scooping Up Chance to Show at MAC and Milk's Free New York Fashion Week Venue
Boy and Band of Outsiders Fall 2009 Full of Insiders
>> After two seasons of videos, Scott Sternberg decided to take his Boy and Band of Outsiders show live, creating tableaux vivants of models in classroom, by a lamppost, resting on a park bench, or reading a book on a bed — "I want to use the groupings, or vignettes, to create microcosms within this vast space." Props to the man for being one of the first, if not the first this week to rent a space big enough to hold his presentation and all the guests invited comfortably. Kanye West hit up this show too, and Jason Wu, who shares the same stylist with Sternberg, Tina Chai.
The sportwear label clearly has some major fans — Meredith Melling Burke was running around, camera out — which I've never seen her do — and got up close and personal with the brightly-colored, ankle-tied high heel bowling shoes that Boy collaborated with Manolo Blahnik on; they did look outstanding against the contrasting tights with color-tipped toes.
*image: source
Fall 2009 Fashion Week: Still Necessary, Just with Less of Everything
>> Designers may be pulling their belt tighter this Fashion Week, but hardly any are pulling out of the rat race altogether — the attention is too valuable. "You kill a thousand birds with one stone, because you get that many people there in an hour and you're getting one message across to them," says Scott Sternberg of Boy and Band of Outsiders. "They're writers and photographers and culturally indulgent people with loud mouths."
Instead, designers are saving by hosting presentations instead of runway shows (Monique Lhuillier, Temperley London, and Carmen Marc Valvo), inviting fewer guests (Marc Jacobs and DKNY, who's slicing her usual 1,000 down to 400), sending email invites instead of by mail (nearly everyone), or showing fewer looks to save on fabric and sample-making costs.
Michelle Williams is a Boy's Girl for Band of Outsiders
>> Michelle Williams is used to others snooping around in her business, but for Scott Sternberg's Fall 2008 Boy by Band of Outsiders look book, she got to play a snoop in interior designer Paul Fortune's house.
Sternberg took all the pictures himself with a seventies-era Polaroid camera, set on capturing Michelle informally: "There [wasn't] hair and makeup . . . no lights or anything." His regular stylist Tina Chai was present, to ensure the look book had the un-stylized look he was going for.
The laid-back theme is being carried over into Band of Outsiders's Spring 2009 presentation, which will involve a film featuring two or three of Sternberg's celebrity friends instead of a catwalk. As for the reasoning? The designer told WWD: "I don’t make runway clothes. These are clothes you wear on the street, so I’m just super-uncomfortable with it. It puts it in totally the wrong context — I want to do something closer to where the clothes are, and let people actually touch and feel them as opposed to seeing them on a 14-year-old anorexic model."
*image: source
Emily And Fin
CNC Costume National
Karen Millen