What's left of this fashion month? Reflections on fashion seen in Milan and Paris

When fashion month ends I always find myself in a strange limbo, between tiredness and bewilderment, although bewilderment is often stronger. Midnight strikes and the carriage turns into a pumpkin, the ball ends and we all go home a bit hunched over, to put it the way Thom Browne would, who a few days ago transformed the Paris Opera into his fairy-tale kingdom, happily holding us hostage for an hour of shows and outfits that made me think «Wow, thanks to my work I am for the first time in my life in a place like this». For this report I should have written about my feelings in general and the beautiful clothes I saw during this fashion month, but again I just keep thinking about this: what is left of fashion. Little remains, I would say, or at any rate little that possesses any real meaning. Most of the industry is there because it has to be there. Because the dusty aristocracy of the fashion industry needs it all. Unfortunately, I cannot see it from this perspective, nor can I like everything around me during these weeks. It will be the acting cool, the rules, the sense of inadequacy that also we all share that I do not like. Paradoxically during those scant 20 minutes of the show when the lights and music go up we, the spectators and actors of this play, stop acting and observe. Or at least that is how it should be. I always wonder how many of those people sitting there really care or like what's in front of them and how many just enjoy being there, how many feel they really exist just because a Press Office remembered their name while drawing up the guest list. Yet there are so many people, so many kids who would do anything to be there. 

I wish every fashion week was just art poetry and music, kind of like the Issey Miyake show in Paris was, with its dancers, Koko Nakano's piano notes, the elegance of those movements. But maybe I'm just sensitive to beauty and I like the thought of being moved during shows, while we still live in a world of brutes who get up and run away even before the creative director comes out to say hello. But it's a fast world and you risk missing the next show.