New York Fashion Week Is Dead, Long Live New York Fashion Week

Albert Urso/Getty Images

It snowed in New York City on Tuesday, coating the ground with a sludgy powder that reminded me of fashion week street style photos of yore: editors wading through the slush in their chicest coats, as seen on the Blogspot pages of Mr. Street Peeper and The Sartorialist over a decade ago—back when it used to routinely snow in February. Though the flakes melted by sundown, they reappeared (sort of) as a powdery, squishy substance that carpeted the Thom Browne runway during the week’s closing slot.

The happenings of New York Fashion Week sandwiched the Super Bowl this year, which added a fun little comic layer to our biannual local bonanza. While Usher hit the halftime stage in custom Off-White and Taylor Swift willed the Kansas City Chiefs to victory in her embellished Area jeans, New York designers showed their fall collections to an audience of industry insiders who seemed particularly preoccupied with how this whole ship has been staying afloat. Looking back on the fall collections, here are our key NYFW trends and takeaways.

Bright Lights, Big City

Editors who came up scrolling Blogspot were delighted that Proenza Schouler and Eckhaus Latta—two heritage brands of 21st-century New York—remained solid, wearable, and great. At the Eckhaus show on Saturday, there was the brand’s usual murderers’ row of New York personalities: The downtown musician known as The Dare sat two seats down from Real Housewife Kelly Bensimon. The respective presences of Girls actor Jemima Kirke, cookbook maven Alison Roman, SNL’s Sarah Sherman, and TikTokker Victoria Paris provided valuable group-chat fodder for the hyper-online women in attendance. Mid-show, Awkwafina puffed on a Juul. The soundtrack was a woozy live rendition of Lana Del Rey’s “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have—but I have it” that segued into Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” On the runway, the Eckhaus dudes wore earthy jewel knits, sexy low-slung trousers (some pairs, which the brand dubbed the “GoodTime jean,” featured a full wraparound zipper fly), and funky Merrell-style slip-on shoes. Come fall, these pieces will look just as good at all the usual local dive bars and/or stone-milled-flour-made pizza parlors.

Blockbuster labels staged more explicit odes to the metropolis: The Tommy Hilfiger show took place among the booths and passed martinis at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. At Coach, early-20-something models padded around a French-chateau-style Upper East Side mansion in rumpled overcoats and afterhours taffeta gowns; some carried bags fastened with “I Love NY” mugs and officially licensed Yankees caps. (And like last season, a PETA protester crashed the function.)

But no part of New York got as much publicity as the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick late Tuesday evening, when Luar staged its presentation on the ground floor of a multi-use building owned by the team behind the popular Cayman Islands resort Palm Heights. Designer Raul Lopez only found out an hour beforehand that the aforementioned Beyoncé, as well as her sister Solange and their mother, Tina Knowles, would all be in attendance to cheer on Solange’s 19-year-old son Julez, who made his runway debut sporting a beefy patent-leather coat and a backpack version of the brand’s signature Ana bag. All squeezed cozily around the concrete runway inside the warehouse space with corrugated metal walls, creating the most exciting pop-culture happening to transpire off the Jefferson L stop since season 1, episode 7 of HBO’s Girls.

Making It Through

These past few seasons, a persistent theme of New York Fashion Week has been, well, New York Fashion Week: its diminishing salience, verve, and cultural relevance. (That is…until Beyoncé showed up.) On the eve of the first day of shows, a New York Times profile of the deeply downtown Puppets and Puppets designer Carly Mark—who announced she was shutting her arty ready-to-wear operation and decamping to London to focus on accessories—reinstated the tone about how emerging designers are faring in this city, in this economy. When Mark presented her final RTW show on a starkly lit utility floor inside a Midtown office building on Monday, the models took their last walk to a coursing remix of the late Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”—a pointed farewell to the city.

Other designers dug into the world-weariness, focusing on the notion of protection in its various forms. At Peter Do’s Helmut Lang, models were shrouded in hooded parkas, zippered balaclavas, and silk garments that resembled bubble wrap, while the show notes offered a creed of sorts: “The way we live determines the way we dress. The way we dress is the way we equip ourselves. The way we equip ourselves is the way we protect ourselves.” Meanwhile, Willy Chavarria’s show began with a short film titled Safe from Harm, which he named after the 1991 Massive Attack song.

“I didn’t want to do something that’s like, distracting from the shithole we all live [in],” Chavarria told me backstage. “We’ve got fucking wars going on, horrible politics, so much crap… I wanted to do a movie that recognizes how we all feel.” The clip, which stars model Paloma Elsesser and several more of the designer’s muses, ended with collective, cathartic dancing.

“Womenswear, Schwomenswear”

Still, Chavarria is the firecracker designer who won the CFDA’s menswear designer of the year award last fall—though his designs have been worn most famously by Billie Eilish, who sported an exaggerated schoolboy blazer and a skirt-like pair of khaki shorts at the Golden Globes last month. (“Billie, she buys, which is great because a lot of people want it for free,” the designer told WWD.) This season, Chavarria debuted “womenswear,” though that’s a concept he regards lightly.

“Womenswear, schwomenswear,” Chavarria giggled, playfully narrowing his eyes. “What’s a woman, what’s a man? Today was my gender reveal and I still don’t know what it is.” He conceded that stores may always “have a men’s floor and a women’s floor. But clothes are clothes. They’re genderless.” On his runway, models of all stripes (Willy consistently has some of the hottest casting at NYFW) wore variations on padded leather jackets, belly-button-high pleated trousers, and exaggerated suiting.

At Luar, the avatar for Lopez’s latest collection was the metrosexual, as in the men who engage in the heterosexual-ish practice of dressing well, cleaning up nice, and having good taste (and who have, incidentally, buoyed publications like Gentlemen’s Quarterly for decades). Think: sheer shirts, skin-tight jeans, and full sets. For Lopez, metrosexuality once provided a type of protection—a now-shed layer between how he once presented and who he always was. “Metrosexual for me was like this word that a lot of queer people and gay people growing up used to use in an era where you couldn’t say [gay],” says Lopez. “I would say it all the time. Like, ‘Yo, Raul’s metrosexual. He’s not gay.’” Which isn’t to say that we’ve entirely escaped its “weird heteronormative programming,” he adds.

“I have homegirls that are like, ‘I think my man is gay because he's grooming himself and doing so much in the bathroom.’ I'm like, but you're doing that because they're telling you that only gay men do that and it's not true. There’s men that like to look good and why can’t you just let them live?”

Not unrelatedly: Just a few months after archetypal he-man Travis Kelce bafflingly wore a pair of crushed velvet Collina Strada pants en route to a game, the label’s designer Hillary Taymour clowned on the notion of meathead style: sweaty models marched in candy-plaid shirts with exaggerated muscle padding and lace-frilled boxers, curling barbells made of gourds and (in one instance) hoisting an actual, real-life baby on one hip. “In a man’s world that believes might is right,” the show notes read, “we at Collina Strada believe femme is a flex.”

Originally Appeared on GQ

More Great Style Stories From GQ

• Converse Is Bringing Back the Weapon, Magic Johnson's Most Iconic Sneaker

• Usher Is the New Face of Skims

• Brad Pitt Wore One of Patek Philippe’s Best Vintage Watches

• Travis Scott Dropped His Long-Awaited Jordan Sneakers During the Grammys

• Not a subscriber? Join GQ to receive full access to GQ.com.

• Nike Is Dropping an Outrageous Air Force 1 to Celebrate the Year of the Dragon