What I'll Be Wearing Next Spring

Thanks to Electress Cathy Horyn's transcendent On the Runway blog, I've learned that my friend Junya Watanabe (right) and others at the Paris shows have decided to dress me in manpri high-water pants next season. It's about time! Somehow when Horyn overcomes what must be an awful case of carpal tunnel and gets on AOL to tell me this is a trend, it makes sense in a way, say, David Skulls Skulls Skulls Colman's article last year on the same short-pantsed subject did/could not. Or as commenter Anjo writes re: Cat's flood-pants entry:

Cathy, I think it does matter—unless you think it doesn’t, in which case I concede the point—but cropped trousers have been on nearly all the runways this season.

Unless you think it doesn't, in which case I concede the point! I AM WHATEVER YOU SAY I AM, IF I WASN’T THEN WHY WOULD I BE WEARING THIS? [Incidentally, the designer most cited as the foremost theorist–practitioner (or practitioner–theorist) of male ankle nudity is a guy named Thom Browne, whose schooldays were likely an unrelenting series of noogies and wedgies and growth-spurt rejection.] In any case, now that Rorty's dead (lol!), let us again praise Horyn as the one public intellectual we have left who really improves the conversation and whatnot. A poster on On the Runway named Autre:

RAF SIMONS’ SS COLLECTION: THE BIG HOMECOMING

My, my, what shall we do with this...There is a problem with amazing designers that go back to reality, to the “material”, rediscovering (= key word) the street like Ghesquiere, youth tribes (”the alternative chic is only chic” as we call it here, from pseudo-rebellious collegiates, to hackers/travelers/ globetrotters). Usually, it comes down to nothing but showing just fashion (no wonder it was Prada-esque, just a bit harder, edgier)...

If anything, the idea behind the material is simply wrong, and even desperately naive. Plus, it relies on a truly childish alternative between the globetrotting youth that are out there, discovering and rediscovering Mother Earth, constantly moving, with large backpacks not being in the way, “writing it with actions” (Raf by Raf Simons slogan), and the inertia of the “www-generation”. What I immediately thought of was Immanuel Kant: the man practically didn’t leave his hometown all his life, looked like a living mummy, yet he gave us something that will be read and read and read. Because the mind travels farther.

No strategic essentialism on the runway! Tactical universality! The critique of pure fashion continues for hundreds more words, leading an Alex W. to write to Autre: "It’s late but I wanted to add, I thought your post was brilliant, you completely touched on decontextualization (the African Queen in Paris/Paris in African Queen)...To be honest [w/r/t Galliano] I didn’t even pay attention to the clothes, so much as the overall message." I'd probably still wear socks with that outfit.

BTDubs: I suspect "SS" stands for Spring/Summer (Spring–Summer?) and not, you know, SS.