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Vice Blog

PARIS - WHAT WILL MAKE ME WANT TO KISS MYSELF?

Emailing ticket requests from Vice for the Paris fashion week menswear shows was never going to impress the snobbier Parisian press people. However, this was actually a blessing and meant I could just go to see the designers I really like. As anyone who's ever written reports of shows will know, they mostly involve waiting around for ages, getting really hot, being bored to death, hating yourself for really wanting a better seat and wondering how someone who has spent six years at fashion college has such bad taste. Then you have to lie and write that the shows were great anyway.

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I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that both the far-out Japanese brand Comme des Garçons and Belgium's fashion's biggest name Raf Simons didn't send tickets. We couldn't make Thursday's shows, but those that we did get in to from Friday: Bernhard Willhelm, Petar Petrov, Thomas Engle Hart, Romain Kremer, Rick Owens, Walter van Beirendonck, reads like a list of fashion designers with a fuck-you attitude that are trying to make people look weird as fuck, not rich (and that's why we've featured a couple of them in the magazine).

Paris's fashion scene is home to a lot of freaky skinny guys with asymmetrical hair. They got all worked up and angry with Raf Simons this fashion week because Raf had decided to disown his role as every fashion kid's hero futurist, and told everyone he just wanted to make fashion for the wealthy. Everyone who works in fashion or thinks they do has been talking about this. Of course if those asymmetric kids knew their Soviet history they'd know that Trotsky (he came up with the idea of "permanent revolution") said in the 1920s that those Italian futurist dudes who thought art should be about machines, war, and speed were just angry because they weren't the aristocracy yet, and they would have seen this coming.

Bjork's favorite German fashion designer, Bernhard Willhelm, and long-haired, high-heeled American, Rick Owens, showed the best stuff. Willhelm set his show in a mock-up of a mad artist's studio. Massive wigs were growing out of the models' scalps, and some of them put buckets on their heads. Then the rest of the models came on and everyone was sat round making things, painting stuff or arranging cabbages on a market stall. Take away all the madness and you were left with some amazing printed tracksuits, and by the time Bernhard Willhelm came out in his tiny shorts he looked really normal.

Rick Owens (below) set his tons of black shorts and hoodies to Human Resources' "Dominator." You know, the mental pounding, hoover noise, pioneering gabba track that goes: "I'm bigger, and bolder, and rougher, and tougher. In other words, sucker, there is no other," and every now and then: "I want to kiss myself." Why would anyone ever buy clothes that didn't make you feel like that?

DARYOUSH HAJ-NAJAFI