Tales from the Back Row Read Online Free PDF

was like she was topless, and one imagined if she was indeed just on a lunchtime stroll, there would be lots of bankers in suits gathering around, staring at her boobs. I remember wondering, Is this what street style has come to? The painfully stylish look is so done that people have to be NUDE to get photographed?
    It used to be that people who had clearly styled their outfits just so would linger around fashion events pretending to be engaged in meaningful conversations with friends they see so infrequently that 90 percent of their interactions are air-kissing. And then if they were dressed right, a street-style photographer would notice their fab outfit, and they’d be like, “Oh, me? You want to photograph me? OKAY, I GUESS I HAVE TIME! Enchanté, Josephine, but IT’S TIME FOR MY MOMENT!” And then they’d pose with one leg bent inward a little bit like they’d practiced it. Now, swarms of street-style paparazzi and being photographed for that little corner of the internet has become such a fact at Fashion Week that it’s now perfectly acceptable to show up dressed really bizarrely and flashily and just stand there until people gather around you to photograph you. You couldn’t find a more perfect relic of this narcissistic internet age.
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    People who go to Fashion Week sometimes dress just to get photographed. This does not mean people were necessarily dressingmore thoughtfully or more creatively or (dare I even suggest the concept) more practically , but now they seem to dress just purely outlandishly, wearing clothing just for the sake of ornamentation and spectacle. As I started my second year at the Cut, I noticed that’s how it worked: the stranger and flashier you looked—the more garish of a trend cocktail you could turn your body into—the more likely you were to get shot by these photographers. Runway clothes often work the same way: you see so many “normal” outfits as a person who works in the fashion business, that only the weird stuff becomes interesting and the so-weird-it’s-borderline-not-clothing stuff becomes the only apparel that can possibly unhinge the extreme boredom brought on by most fashion shows that suckles the life straight from the teat of a fashion person’s soul. Standing out—and I mean really standing out—becomes the new normal. The good thing about the street-style nonsense is that you get even more spectacular people watching than you’d get without it. Women end up going to fashion shows wearing stiletto sandals and chiffon skirts with no tights in February, or with glittery pineapples affixed to their heads, or with hair dyed to look gray instead of the other way around, or with big furry neon tails attached to their purses or slung around their necks because they’re Louis Vuitton and Prada and therefore elevated from completely absurd items of excess to so on-trend . If a well-styled Fashion Week person got off the plane in 99 percent of the places on the rest of the earth, they’d be treated like aliens, of this I’m certain. Because that’s how you fit in in this industry: wear something that would look insane just about everywhere that is not Fashion Week.
    I once undertook an experiment to see if I could get photographed. At this point, I had three years at the Cut on my résumé: I understood the secret salt of the personal-style blogger. So I decided to go to the shows one day wearing a street-style costume. Ideally, I’d end up with a story about how street-style stardom boils down to a few things that don’t necessarily bespeak one’s totes fab style, but rather a sanitized version of looking ridiculous. My friend at work, Diana, a market editor, tried to call in a bunch of spectacular designer things for me to wear. This being Fashion Week, no one was interested in lending me an outfit because I’m not Madonna (breaking news) and they had