Born of the necessity to center and re-establish Los Angeles as one of America’s premiere fashion capitals, Fashion Week Los Angeles, emerged like a vanilla flower, here one day and gone the next.
In its trail, it left perfumes laced with hope. Finally, a fashion week to rival the golden days of seventh on sixth, but this time on the west coast.
Burdened with expectations and mocked by those who said it couldn’t be done, FWLA has alchemized the scattered shards of the industry.
Those who attended were enveloped in country garden placed in the most industrial of landscapes with beetle-green grass forming a runway from reality to fantasy.
Models approached the photographer laden riser with the strength of an army suited with beauty as armor. Rosy cheeks contrasted with the cool, wet air as sunlight mopped droplets from the rain-dotted floor.
Fashion, no longer just utilitarian, is aspirational. It is freedom, the ability to change unencumbered by shadows of the past. This sacred gift defies those who love, hate, and are indifferent, who say that once you are, you are always.
Alchemy and illusion filled the air from day tonight with a vividness and overpowering sense of timelessness both familiar and foreign, like the faceless people in dreams.
Many decry that fashion is homogenous, but the only thing uniting FWLA’s models was an overpowering beauty leaving me transfixed and stealing my awareness of self and my surroundings.
The reflection of my eyes mirrored the kaleidoscope of Gustav Klimt’s “Woman in Gold.” I felt as if I’d been drugged, with waves of Bourbon heat crawling through my body. The ecstasy so maddening, I feared I would die from it. I wish I did.
