{FASHION} The Woman That I Want to Be
Admittedly, I spend a lot of time thinking about the future: my goals, my aspirations, where I'll be in my career and in my personal relationships and how my friendships will evolve and grow as we all move in our respective fields and from one city to the next. I don't get so caught up in it that I can't live in the present, but it is fun (and often self-motivating) to think about where I'll be in one, five, ten years. For a long time, I couldn't picture myself ever getting married (I think, subconsciously, it's because even as a child, I knew that I wouldn't have a traditional family), and I certainly couldn't imagine myself in the white-picket-fence-suburban paradigm that so many of us are raised to idealize. I could picture myself as a career woman, a person who was independent and strong willed and had great hair and a home that looked like something out of a budget-version of Architectural Digest. Continue...
A big part of the image I'd created was my wardrobe, feminine and playful and with a sense of humor, punctuated with classic statements and anchored by strong tailoring and structure. Perhaps my Miu Miu predilections would mature into a more acute taste for Prada, and my love for glitter into an appreciation for fine beading and couture detailing.
I had a fairly visceral response while watching the Honor show. It was on Valentine's Day, and the collection was appropriately peppered with hearts and pink and all the saccharine visual elements that make me flutter with glee. I love Valentine's Day, not just because I'm an unabashed romantic, but because of the aesthetics of the holiday - so of course the collection spoke to me not unlike a box of custom made Sweethearts might, with phrases like, "Femme 4 Lyfe" and "Nice Lipstick." Combine that with my feelings of absolute elation in my personal life and... well, swoon.
Designer Giovanna Randall has a feminine whimsy that reminds me of what once was Luella Bartley's collections, (a label I still mourn over). Poppy pink and soft lilac and almost-white mint green - and for fall, no less - find a maturity in the crisp cuts of the collection. The leaf print, just slightly formed into the hearts that reappear throughout, literally made me sigh out loud. I'd wear that to brunch. Or to high tea at the Beverly Hills Hotel, (they'd find sanctuary in the face of the landmark's wallpaper). Or to literally any function, ever, because it's just so perfect. It's Jackie Onassis Twee, Ladies-Who-Lunch-Minus-Several-Decades, and quite possibly made for a Lula Magazine editorial featuring the sisters Fanning. The clothes are undeniably gorgeous: they are, truly, everything I often wish I could wear, but I started to question why that was the case, other than pure aesthetics.
With some distance from the collection, from Valentine's Day, and from the photos I had taken myself, I came to look again with a fresh view at the collection. Was it knowing that the couture-price points of the Honor collection would likely prohibit me from ever actual participating with the clothes on the level of consumption? Was it the idealized success that goes along with the lifestyle that affords a person to have such wonderful pieces in their wardrobe? Was it the waifish, pale frames of the models? It's hard not to internalize that, indeed, perhaps if I looked a bit more like the girls on the catwalk, I'd be a step closer to obtaining the lifestyle that goes along with the wardrobe. It's hard to confront, and even admit, what may be lurking in our subconscious - but there's something about fashion week (the excitement, the adrenaline rush of cabbing it from Lincoln Center to an obscure studio in Chelsea, the exhaustion), that always brings me to this point.