13 September 2010

fashion week


Y-3 Show from Arabelle S on Vimeo.

Fashion Week.

Something about sitting around people who really understand what you like to do, watching a great runway show go by far too soon - it always feels right. Always. It goes by far too fast, sometimes everything leading up to the fashion show is a nightmare, but the show is always a dream. It's a rhythm, something scripted and practiced before I ever knew about fashion and will stay scripted long after I become irrelevant within it: the lights dim, the music starts, models walk in time: one look. Another look. Passed me, into some light at the end of the runway, gone from my reality into the computer screen for everyone else to see. But for a few seconds that look on the runway -- it belongs to my eyes, and it's a privilege to be able to witness it. This moment, it will never happen again. No one but me will be able to say I saw this, now. This is a little part of history.
 
I don't ever want to wake up from this.

Regardless of what people say about fashion with disdain and not just a little ignorance, this is what I love. I'm painfully aware of how much my obsession and my jobs within fashion alienate me from the people I'm becoming friends with in college -- when they're doing calculus, I'm scheduling my month around shows and praying I can make it back in time for class (probably not), when my friends visit my dorm I hardly pay attention to them because I'm answering emails and interviewing over the phone. Whenever I'm in one realm, I worry about whats happening in the other. I do homework on the way to fashion shows, I write drafts for articles to be published in magazines when I'm bored in class. I am never fully in one dimension. Sometimes it's aggravating.

But it's worth it. It's always worth it. Even if my favorite things are fleeting -- months of anticipation for just twenty minutes of a show and ten minutes of talking with my friends I haven't seen in a year -- the joy of being surrounded by clothes, by energy I can feel on my skin -- that's always worth it. It's a dream I stumbled into and I never want to wake up from. Never, ever, ever.