"The New Ordinary"

The article that I read was called “The New Ordinary - New York Designers re-envision the American Woman” from the Style & Shopping Section. The author was Josh Patner. To summarize, the author touched upon several points related to the fashion industry, garment construction, and the goals fashion designers strive to achieve each season within their collection. A good designer always tries to use the following three fundamentals of dressmaking correctly - straight grain (which gives a garment structure), bias (which gives softness), and darting (shaping fabric to the body). In addition, each season designers strive to “make the extraordinary or make the ordinary new again.” Overall, New York Fashion Week left many designers disappointed with the ordinary.

The voice of the article was very educated, knowledgeable, and clever. I enjoyed the article because the author was very bold with some of his opinions. For example, at one point, the author uses euphemism to state that Zac Posen “showed a fun but incoherent collection of frothy dresses and will likely have trouble expanding his business if he can't find a way to show clothes for a woman who doesn't live in an evening gown.” In another, humor is used, “…most American of American designers, Michael Kors, loves his separates like a preacher loves his down-home religion.”

I think the audience for this article could be anybody who is interested in the fashion industry – old, young, un-educated or knowledgeable. Most fashion students have to do weekly media reports and I think this would be a great piece to talk about because the writer uses fashion vocabulary, fashion history, and contemporary styles in this essay. For example, I, as a fashion student, personally did not know that “…today's American designers are saddled with the dying legacy of New York's Garment Center, a manufacturing capital that grew strong, in part, from copying European designs before American sportswear was born in the 1940s.” In addition, fashion design students, could personally take something from this essay as well, especially when in the first paragraph, the writer describes garment construction in detail:

“Take an orange and drop a handkerchief over it. Notice the way the fabric folds around the orange's curves. If you stitched the handkerchief tightly at the folds, you'd be making darts. Now pull the handkerchief taut from two adjacent corners—you're looking at the fabric's straight grain. Now pinch the handkerchief from its center, letting the points fall. Notice the drape. You've found the bias, the line that bisects the straight grain diagonally.”

The author ends by stating that Michelle Obama would most likely be attracted to the spring 2009 collection of Marc Jacobs. “If she wears them to the inauguration, it would be a revelation.”