Fashion Week For Dummies

Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

It's Copenhagen Fashion Week, and everybody's talking about co-branding, curves, sustainability and seaters. But what does it all mean? Having been a baffled observer of the fashion world for 13 seasons straight now (yes, fashion time is counted in seasons, which makes you seem more experienced), I thought it high time to share my insights into this esoteric world of stylists, bloggers, PRs and designers, by way of their vocabulary. Some of the words (like "beauty") may appear to be plain English, but don't be fooled. They take on very particular meanings during fashion week, confusing laypersons to no end. Below are some of the essential terms that apply to pretty much any fashion week, and since it's always fashion week somewhere, you might as well brush up on your sartorial glossary.

Co-branding

Ever since Karl Lagerfeld teamed up with H&M to create the first "high-fashion-meets-high-street" capsule collection back in 2004, co-branding has been hotter than an Old English Sheepdog locked in a black Toyota Corolla on a steamy July afternoon. The idea is something so synergetic as cross-pollination between different consumer segments, and there seems to be no end to the creative ways in which the tactic has developed. Local Copenhagen designer Mads Nørgaard did his own version of "Lagerfeld-goes-H&M" a few years ago when he teamed up with rubber-boot manufacturer Tretorn, painting the soles of their otherwise conventional wellies a vibrant fashion orange. Last year, his take on co-branding was outdone by colleague David Andersen, who teamed up with German candy manufacturer Haribo in a confusing collaboration that seemed primarily to revolve around the inclusion of gummy bears in the goodie-bags at Andersen's show. One wonders what's in store this season.

The donkey that imaginably inspired Henrik Vibskov. Photo via Flickr user Dani-Rae Law.

"Beauty" and "inspiration"

During fashion week, "beauty" doesn't mean what you think it means. While you may believe it's a synonym for being pretty, what it actually indicates is any kind of apocalyptic mess a makeup artist or hair stylist, seeing the runway models as their artistic canvases, can come up with. Often, this will be in line with the inspiration of the designer, which can range from things like "solar donkey experiment" (Henrik Vibskov SS10) and "Arctic suburbs" (Asger Juel Larsen AW14) to, bizarrely, "no chocolate" (Moonspoon Saloon SS13).

Oslo Fashion Week. Photo via Flickr user Andreas Brandell.

Oslo Fashion Week

Much like beauty and inspiration,"Oslo Fashion Week" doesn't mean what one might assume. While the actual Oslo Fashion Week was put out of its misery earlier this year, the term now refers to everything that can go wrong at a fashion week, anywhere. A sartorial Murphy's Law, if you will: replacing professional designers with professional athletes who like to put their personal touches on snowboarding gear, inviting local celebrities instead of fashion editors to the front row, seeking international acclaim through Hail-Mary grandstanding against fur, and most ignominious of all, the Moods of Norway label.

Example of usage:

"Did you see her new collection? It was fashion suicide."

"That's an insult to fashion suicides. It was full-on OFW."

Showpiece

Anything you see on the runway that’s too ridiculous to be sold to actual people is called a showpiece. These showpieces have emerged because fashion designers want to craft outlandish images that really have nothing at all to do with the t-shirts, perfumes and boxer shorts they actually sell in stores. They have, after all, gone to Design School (unless: Oslo Fashion Week), and showpieces are a way to reminisce about the days spent lounging with their friends in the crafts room, sewing and glueing ridiculous styles that would, like, totally revolutionize the industry when discovered by Grace Coddington.

Grace Coddington. Photo via Flickr user Jauresti.

Grace Coddington

After the release of The Devil Wears Prada, Anna Wintour references became way, way too obvious for fashionistas with any self respect. Anna, if you will, fell out of vogue. It's all about puppetmaster Grace now, the true mastermind behind the global fashion empire.

Bloggers

Yet while puppetmaster Grace directs what's de rigueur from her Manhattan headquarters, she's simply the pinnacle of a massive fashion journalism pyramid. Its lower rungs consist of bloggers important enough to have other people take their outfit-of-the-day selfies (that disqualifies the pics as selfies, you say? I beg to differ). Unlike, say, political bloggers or recipe bloggers, these webbies primarily use their lanes on the Information Superhighway to project themselves, their outfits, and their spelling mistakes for the world's enjoyment, often "live-blogging" from their goodie-bag-free backrow seats as a competitive advantage against the actual print journalists. The only creatures lower in the hierarchy of fashion are those poor runway-show seaters, who should be worth their weight in gold given the importance of their ability to recognize the truly relevant faces, but who are often, erroneously, dismissed as totally discardable.

Seaters

A recurring theme in runway reviews is complaints about where the journalist was seated, sometimes taking up more column inches than assessments of the clothes themselves. This journalistic self-absorption infuriates designers, who have invested countless hours and finances on their once-per-season time to shine, and the easiest scapegoat is the (usually unpaid, except with the currency of gimmicky collection accessories) seaters, who are subsequently fired from next year's show due to incompetence or inexperience or both. Problem is, in the insanely busy weeks leading up to their next big show, the designers invariably find the seaters last-minute through desperate Facebook updates. And the cycle repeats.

Curves on the runway

Another recurring cycle, every single fashion week, is a big news story about someone putting more "curves on the runway." This euphemism refers to fashion designers employing larger models than those bony ones you can make soup out of (whose body-shapes, apparently, are too jagged to qualify as curves). The news is always on everyone's lips, but never seems to have any lasting effect on the fashion-mainstream hips.

Sustainable fashion

Also on everyone's lips is sustainable fashion. Whoa, you might say. Back off… Isn't that tantamount to vegetarian tiger-sharks? Isn't fashion all about consumption, opulence, dirty global supply chains, and renewing outfits at such breakneck speeds that fashion weeks are actually named after the future? (It's currently Spring/Summer 2015). Yet there are ways to make this dirty business green. Instead of buying fast-fashion at cutthroat prices, you can go sustainable by investing in expensive animal furs, which are durable and often even passed on to the next generation; or by not actually buying clothes, but swapping them with other discount fashionistas who care more about what's new to them than what's new to the runways (how dare they).

Don't assume that this brief dummy guide offers sufficient preparation for actually attending fashion week, though. It barely scratches the surface, and the layer beneath is rife with pitfalls. Attempting to use expressions like décolletage, haute couture, and "cruise" collections (which have no relation to gay sexcapades) could yet bewilder you into faux pas territory. And you wouldn't want to look like an OFW-attendee, would you?