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When Opening Ceremony announced that Spike Jonze and Jonah Hill were writing a play that would serve as the brand's New York Fashion Week runway show, the internet collectively wondered if this was indicative of a new type of fashion week—one that wouldn't elicit complaints of boredom and cries of "same old, same old."
The play came and went last night and managed to dazzle everyone except Vanessa Friedman, the newly-appointed chief fashion critic at the New York Times. In her first major NYFW takedown for the paper, Friedman didn't hold back. She argued that Hill's jokes (centered around poking fun at fashion industry stereotypes) fell flat, and she wasn't surprised that the celebrities in attendance were the ones who laughed the hardest.
I have no issue with mocking fashion — I do it enough myself, and it is a sector ripe for the poking. Nor do I have an issue with the idea of fashion week transmogrified into a pure marketing exercise, where a brand sells a concept instead of clothes. Indeed, I think Opening Ceremony might as well have taken the idea to its natural conclusion and forgotten about showing the collection altogether.See a few videos from the performance, which starred Elle Fanning, Dree Hemingway, Karlie Kloss, and Rashida Jones, after the jump.
· Opening Ceremony: The Play Is Not the Thing [NY Times]
· NYT's Vanessa Friedman on Why Fashion Criticism Isn't Dead [Racked]
· NYT's New Fashion Critic Opens Can of Sass on the CFDA Awards [Racked]
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