New York Fashion Week welcomes the era of pragmatic fashion 

Since Milan’s and Paris' menswear fashion weeks last January, there is a growing movement towards a radical change in fashion and the essence of clothing in general. With their menswear creations, designers followed a product-centered tactic focusing on actual wearable pieces according to the demands of their clientele. A move that tried to balance the two sides of the industry, creativity, and profit, but in many cases creativity was fully absent. As it appears during New York Fashion Week, for Fall/Winter 2023 designers are making clothes that are meant to be worn and not just to be posted on our social media accounts. Suddenly, fashion became pragmatic and clothes lost the essence of the silhouette, or the story behind the creative process of every collection, the actual meaning of creativity itself. Focusing on individualism, the new order of clothes doesn’t bring boredom. On the contrary, they are becoming constructive items of personality in an effort to manifest it. Fashion is outputting the message that just a piece of fabric is enough by making us focus on the craftsmanship process. Instead of lifting us up in a dreamscape, this season's fashion is grounding us in the face of gravitational pull that forces us to live our reality as part of the new normality. For this season clothes don't have a personality or don’t need to steal the attention of others and that looks like a trend and an attitude, a way to see modern life through the spectrum of fashion. 

But let's see how everything started in the first fashion week of a month full of surprises. New York Fashion Week began with Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte. The two co-founders opened their show with a series of all-black looks, a way that became more like a common practice in the last few years for many designers. Dries Van Noten opened his spring 2023 show with 20 all-black looks and Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli closed his Spring 2023 show with a parade of 15 black evening gowns. In case you are wondering, yes black is the new black. Rodarte’s duo threw a glittering dinner party in which Lady Vampire met Morticia Addams in a collection that maybe was a bit too much. A rich fairytale (for grownup kids) is full of jersey long sleeves, velvet, and lace. In the beginning, it looked very rich but the bat wings on the model’s backs and the Queen of the night's theatrical attitude gave a fun aspect to the collection. The result was impressive and definitely re-directed the essence of kitschy-chic. 

Fashion always has the ability to change rapidly therefore in just a few hours we went from being over the top to being dressed in basic wear. Since they joined forces 20 years ago, Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez have always looked at fashion in a contemporary and progressive way. For their latest show, the design duo created a very personal collection focusing on everyday people and on things that their customers loved wearing from them, these two decades they have been operating as a brand. The classic Proenza Schouler black jacket was there tied with a belt on the waist of Chloe Sevigny who opened the show by pairing it with a leather high-slitted skirt and boots. The collection did focus on a storytelling way of impressing the audience instead of that the prints kept to the minimum possible, the fabrication was very specific, while the evening wear was wrapped in leather and crushed satin creating a dark vibe. 

The same attitude was followed by the Eckhaus Latta duo, Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta who opened their show with a male model wearing a dark wool overcoat with reversed and exposed seams over a cropped blue and black sweater and wide-leg black trousers. A look that was completely away from the brand’s joyful aesthetic. There is a specific type of moodiness that makes clothes feel urgent and that’s why they look simple, decorated with zippers and seams only, fitted for every person’s daily routine. Kaite, Tibi, Tory Burch, Gabriela Hearst, Brandon Maxwell, and Michael Kors also created clothes for every woman’s everyday life, keeping them simple and very black. Kaite reinterpreted Diana Vreeland’s style into a contemporary power dressing game filled with black looks, leather, and shearling while Brandon Maxwell focused on grown-up tailoring with minimum embellished details. Every sign of lux extravaganza seems to be silent this season, prints and details are quietly hiding from the eye under fabric or as an inside garment detail and every explosion of creativity is being restricted to a minimalistic approach of the late 80s and 90s. A wave of modern simple dressing styles that Calvin Klein and Miuccia Prada bring to the world of high fashion. 

Within this sphere of safe simplicity, someone boldly stood up only to be an apostle for the importance of imagination and teach us the role of raw creativity in fashion. In a too-commercial New York Fashion Week Thom Browne, chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, got inspired by ‘’The Little Prince’’, a fairytale and a boy’s dream who made the designer the Price of NYFW. Eight tons of sand had been trucked in and scattered across the floor to make a giant clock-shaped desert, with a life-size biplane crashed in the middle. Male and female models walked theatrically while having extra long and wavy nails and wearing coats with broad shoulders, dresses with vibrant motifs, and an overload of tailoring patchwork. For Mr. Browne, gender doesn’t exist in his vocabulary, such as the word boring fashion.