Fashion Photography – The question that some Olympics fans who happened to be in town for Fashion Week found themselves asking was, Where did all the bad taste go?
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One might think that, after days of being bombarded with designers’ best efforts 8 to 10 hours a day on the catwalks, most professionals would want nothing more by quitting time than a stiff drink and a sleep mask. Yet it turns out that a surprising percentage of those who follow fashion occupationally are sports obsessed. And an awful lot of people who couldn’t tell Emilio Pucci from Ralph Rucci enjoy kibitzing about the Norwegian curlers’ argyle-patterned clown pants.
It is true that you are unlikely to see many of the Balenciaga-wearing types glued to the giant screen at a sports bar during the N.F.L. playoffs. Yet designers know better than to schedule shows in competition with the finals of the United States Open, tennis being a singular passion of the Vogue editor, Anna Wintour. And in the rush for cabs after evening shows let out last week, it was easy to spy Ms. Wintour’s fellow editors racing home to catch the snowboarder Shaun White impersonate a space shuttle in the halfpipe at Whistler, or frantic to learn whether the figure skater Evan Lysacek would risk a quadruple jump in the long program.
If it was sports that drew them, they nevertheless could not resist scoring the athlete’s outfits. The Winter Olympics, after all, is notable for its preponderance of judged rather than timed events. And the overall consensus seemed to be that the fashions at the Games, while far from setting any benchmarks for style, were starkly less awful than in the past, and more connected to the world outside the ice rink than at many Games in recent memory. The days of a female ice skater dressing like a prostitute preparing to make her First Communion may be behind us. Why bother with that look anymore, when Lady Gaga has it nailed?
It really wasn’t only fashion people who became involved in Olympic fashion. Sports pages were full of news about Kazuhiro Kokubo, the Japanese snowboarder whose dress sense — generic snowboarder scruff, plus dreadlocks — was considered such a calamity at home that officials reprimanded and then banned him from participating in the opening ceremony.
It was widely reported as “news” when other snowboarders griped about a trend for leaner-cut board pants, which allegedly signaled betrayal of the sport’s individualism, and when the red souvenir mittens made especially for this Olympics, selling for 10 Canadian dollars a pair, became harder to obtain as the Games wore on than an Hermès Kelly bag at the height of the hedge fund boom.
But in a quieter way that drew relatively little notice, a shift occurred toward greater style awareness among Olympians (even those who, like the American snowboarder Hannah Teter, said that they’d begun bothering to brush their hair only recently). Mentally erase the awful Olympics pinnies, and the United States snowboarding uniforms — designed as a take on “classic Americana,” according to Greg Dacyshyn, a senior vice president at Burton, which supplied them — were a generally successful design. Read more »
