[Photo by me.]
It was the first tense I learned in French: the present. Even when it was first taught to me in fifth grade, I had trouble using it. I couldn't quite figure out how to describe things that were currently happening because that wasn't how my mind worked. I could write "je chante," but it's a lie. I am not singing. And if I were, it wouldn't ever occur to me that I should or could talk about it (partly because I can't talk and sing simultaneously, and if you can, then I applaud you). If you think about it, the present tense is quite confusing. I could say that I am typing, which is true. But while I was doing that, I was focusing on the end of the sentence, my goal in the near future. Once I was done with that phrase, it was over. My act of typing became a thing of the past. It works that way for everything. That's why the right-this-moment does not exist for me. I guess you could say that that's very fitting for someone semi-involved in the fashion world, and in theory it is. Designers and stylists and editors are always referencing bygone time periods and thinking about what's next. The past and the future. It all worked very well until the present caught up with me and caused a major traffic jam. The passé-composé-présent-futur-simple all in one. You could never conjugate a verb like that. You can never live a life like that, especially not one in the fashion industry. Before you have time to separate the different phases, everyone else has moved on.
I was always terrified of that. I look at every show on Style.com for every major season so that I'm never far behind. Is it necessary to know what 230 designers did for their fall collection? Not at all. It wouldn't even be obligatory if I worked at a magazine, or if I were a designer myself. We all know that fashion moves quickly. It's in the same category as journalism in that every second is precious, but not because it's happening. It's because each moment could be fodder for a new trend, a new design, a new story. "New" is based around the concept of the future, the same way "old" is based around the past. Fashion likes to combine the two and create what embodies the "now," the present. When the now exists, the past and future cease to. It's like when you complete the equation two plus two is four. Now all you have is four. The twos are gone. The inverse of that operation yields the same results. Cut four in half, and you've got two twos. You can't have all three at once. Fashion focuses on the four, I focus on the twos. It has recently come to my attention that I have to choose one or the other (at least at this juncture of my life). As the saying goes, you can't have your cake and eat it too. (I've always wondered who gets to eat the cake, though, if I don't get to. Does it just sit around forever and get all moldy and nasty?)
For the past three seasons, I went to as many shows as I could during Fashion Week. It's an exhilarating experience, albeit a highly stressful one. I plan my year around New York Fashion Week. The truth is, before I had begun to attend shows, I still enjoyed fashion. This blog was around for months prior to that first ADAM show on September 10th, 2011. Participating in that seven-day-long whirlwind of awesomeness has changed a lot of things in my life, but I often forget that it's just that: seven days. A mere week out of the fifty-two in a year, which is then only one out of--hopefully--eighty more. It's a tiny, itsy-bitsy, baby-sized piece in the proverbial puzzle.
I've been worrying about the fact that I won't be able to participate in Fashion Week this coming season as much as I'd like to. It feels as though I'll lose my already unstable footholds in the industry if I so much as miss a few shows. Will I disappoint my readers? Will I disappoint myself? Maybe all of those things will happen, or perhaps none of them will. I'm slowly realizing that it's okay to not be at the forefront all the time. It really isn't so terrible to not know what people will be wearing in six months at the same exact moment that everyone else finds out. I won't spontaneously combust if I'm not sitting third row at a show, getting photographs of so-and-so's garments as soon as the model steps onto the runway. Sure, it's absolutely amazing to be able to do that, but sometimes it just can't happen. Every so often I will spontaneously combust if I am right in the thick of things. I suppose it really boils down to whether or not I would like to explode whilst in a huge crowd of fancily-dressed people, or be at home all in one piece.
This February, I'm going to take it slow. Fashion Week is a single week, and I'd like to make it out alive.
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