Critic’s Notebook
Does Fashion Make Good Theater?
Beautiful image by Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times…
Fantastic article, Does Fashion Make Good Theater, by Charles Isherwood
“Still, as a matter of contemporary anthropology, Fashion Week illuminates, through a magnifying lens, the state of American culture in ways that a lot of theater does not. The relentless production of images reflects the obsession with self-presentation that has made the explosion of social media such a significant development. For the media-savvy younger generations today, after all, if you are not disseminating your image as widely as possible via Facebook and your personal impressions via Twitter, you are fading into oblivion.
The corollary of this idea — even more striking a facet of the fashion world — is that in contemporary America celebrity is not only a virtue, it is practically the only ideal we all share. Spend a few days pushing your way through the flashing cameras and the video crews at the fashion shows and you begin to feel that you will become famous by osmosis. It’s both mildly intoxicating and disturbing.
The fashionable world may not be holding a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet suggests good theater should, but it is definitely holding a camera in somebody’s — in everybody’s — face.”
