Words Not Minced

Last week was Fashion Week in New York, where designers show their collections for the forthcoming season (in this case, next spring) and everyone loses their collective mind over some trend or other. Even though I spend an inordinate amount of time shopping for and thinking about clothes, I don't pay any attention to what goes on at Fashion Week, because it has absolutely no relevance to how I dress or what I might consider buying.

Designers often structure their collections around a theme, which is an entirely justifiable creative impulse. However, sometimes the chosen theme is so obtuse, recycled, or just plain wrong that it merits special (negative) attention.

I consider Michael Bastian a talented designer whose work is best seen in his own namesake collection. Those clothes are classically styled but with a more modern cut, made exceptionally well of beautiful fabrics, and are obscenely expensive.

His line for Gant, however, is another thing entirely, and a young thrifter and blogger from Portland, ME who goes by A Fistful of Style has done a deservedly venomous takedown of the spring 2013 collection from Gant by Michael Bastian. Read it first, then see for yourself. It is honestly insulting to think that he and Gant expect people to pay good money for this horrible-looking retread crap, but obviously I am not the target market for the line.