Tom, a fashion consultant with twenty years in the industry, uses Fashion Week as a lens to read culture. He'll document the runway shows and connect what designers present to how we express identity through what we wear.
¡Hey, guys! It's Tom. It's Labor Day here in the US, and Labor Day is kind of the unofficial end of summer. We know the real end of summer isn't for a few more weeks, but this is pretty much end of summer in America. And for the past 8, 10 years or so, Labor Day is also something else here in New York. It signals the beginning of Fashion Week. Now, for almost the past 20 years, our management consulting firm has done a lot of work in the fashion industry. And, you know, the fashion industry is easy for people who don't work in it to poke fun at because it's, well, you know, it's often outrageous. There are often things shown in fashion shows that don't seem to have any relationship at all to real people's lives. But fashion is more than that. Fashion really is an important aspect of culture, and fashion tells us a lot of things about our current state of the world. And I know that that, you know, is a little maybe a little far-fetched for people who don't pay attention to fashion all the time. So one of the things that I'd like to do is, first of all, I'm very interested in your thoughts about fashion, your reactions when you see fashion shows, your reactions when you hear about fashion, whether or not you follow fashion in magazines, what you think fashion means for us as a, as a culture. I'm very interested in those things. And what I thought I would do is, you know, the fashion shows go in a cycle. This week is New York, next week is London, the week after that is Milan, and the week after that is Paris. So over the next month here, we're going to see a lot of fashion and a lot of fashion shows. So what I thought I would do is For this week, I thought I would take a look at the New York fashion shows and try to make some sense out of what it is that designers are showing in the fashion shows. I'll try to put some images over here in, in boxes and pictures so we get a, you know, we can all have kind of a shared view of some of the things that are being shown. And I'll do my best to try to make some sense out of that, try to figure out what are these What are these, uh, clothes saying about who we are now, who designers think we're going to be in the spring, what they think is going on? Whatever observations I can make about what I see, I'm going to make here. So, um, looking forward to your thoughts about fashion, looking forward to making some observations about fashion and trying to tie them in somehow with things that make sense in the rest of our lives. Those of us who You know, as you can tell, I'm not a big fashion adopter myself. I'm kind of a simple dresser. But remember, no matter how you dress, you're saying something important about yourself. You may not think so. You may think you just put on, you know, "Oh, I just put on clothes." But there's a lot of clothes to choose from, aren't there? And we choose things that somehow resonate with our sense of ourselves. And who we want to present ourselves as to the world. So, uh, anyway, that's what I'm going to be doing over the next week. I'm going to be following the fashion shows, seeing what's going on, making some observations here, and looking for your thoughts about them. So take care. I hope you have a great Labor Day, and see you again soon. Bye.
