We mentioned earlier that we were at Fashion Week in New York last month. 
To be honest, we found ourselves more repulsed than interested, which is probably what really triggered our current fashion ennui even before investment firms started toppling like dominoes. 
   
    Here’s what we saw:

    1) Stick Women everywhere.

    Even in a normal week, Manhattan is undoubtedly the home of the skinniest women in the developed world, and the older they are, the skinnier they get.  (Until one day, they apparently just disappear.) 
    Certainly all the walking and the fact that Manhattan kitchens are so small might have something to do with it, but there also seems to be just a lot of Not Eating going on in general. 
    Whether all this twigginess is more of a fashion thing or a man-catching thing is debatable, but fashion certainly has something to do with it, because Fashion Week brought out the skinniest of the skinny, and it seemed like we couldn’t round a corner without seeing some haggard woman teetering on huge platform or high-heeled shoes, always wearing a crotch skimming minidress and always trying to hail a cab whilst “talking” into a cellphone (we think they were pretending most of time).  None of these women—and, we’re not kidding, there were dozens in this exact outfit hailing cabs all over the city—took any actual steps that we could see, probably because it would have been impossible to walk in the shoes without snapping one of their spindly legs.  Or perhaps they just liked posing. 

    Now, it’s not that we don’t “get ” the short skirt/ high-vamped shoes look. 

(photo by Bill Cunningham at the NYT)

   
In fact, we’ve been wearing our toned-down version of it on and off ever since we bought our Franco Sarto “Delta” gladiator sandals last fall for, like, 80 bucks at Nordstrom.

  (We didn’t have the heart to tell the ladies at Neiman Marcus who were oohing and aahing over them just last week how cheap they were.)

But the more we saw of it in New York, the sillier it looked, especially when people tried to walk for any length of time. 

    Which is why there was so much cab-hailing.  Or, as Bill Cunningham notes in his slide show, limping and shoe changing.

        2)  Freaks And Geeks

    Of course we love the innovative design and artsy-edginess that the fashion world tends to attract—it’s so refreshing in small doses, like when it’s the obligatory punk-dressing Project Runway contestant or Carrie Bradshaw, or the “alternative” character in an ensemble cast.
   
    But, let’s face it; too much of it for too long just gets…

... pretty damned annoying. 
    (Seriously,  is there anyone who can look at that picture without wanting to rip that stupid beret thing off that woman’s smug little red-lipsticked head just to see her try to hobble after it in those hideous boots?  Also, why do so many people who pose for the The Sartorialist  have that weird, self-satisfied, d-baggy expression on their face?  It’s a blog, people, not a Vogue shoot.)

   
   
    3) Much Ado About…The Same Old Stuff

    We’ve been through this cycle enough to know that it’s going to be weeks before the smoke clears enough for us to extrapolate any important trends that may come out of the Spring 2009 collections that were shown in Bryant Park.  The European designers and couture still have to weigh in, and the current stormy economic climate will definitely impact what ultimately ends up in the stores next spring. 

    Besides, since none of us seems to be in the mood to do much shopping this fall, we’re just not in that much of a hurry to figure out what we’re going to have to buy next.

    In fact, (okay, True Confession time):  the closest we went to the tents this year was lunching at Le Pain Quotidien across the street from Bryant Park on West 40th. 

  What can we say? 
  There was something about seeing people—like this woman in another Sartorialist photo—trying so hard to look unselfconscious in their costumey outfits, posing and hailing cabs and Not Eating, that made us not just hungry, but hungry for carbs.

  Good Lord, what’s happening to us?