Why a made-up fashion season might matter

Here in the Capital District we just got our first semi-respectable snow since October, but the fashion bigwigs in New York, Paris and Milan are already way beyond designing winter duds and have moved on to the pre-fall season. What the heck is pre-fall?, you’re probably asking. In the strange, counterintuitive world of high fashion collections are shown way, way ahead of time, anticipating trends that will happen a good six months down the line. So what you should be wearing next winter will be hitting the runway in early spring, which is not very helpful to people like me (and I’m assuming you, dear reader) who don’t have the money for designer duds and want to wear their new clothes NOW. This is why pre-fall, the baby of the fashion-season world, is great. These new cold weather looks can help pull you out of winter-wear doldrums without forcing you to buy anything new. And if you do spring for new (or old) clothes these collections will give you cool pieces to look out for.

The big talk of the pre-fall season so far has been Chanel’s Indian-themed show. There’s a lot going on here to borrow from. The real Chanel-classic piece in this look is the big, tweed, Grandma-looking jacket, but it’s the combination with the hard-edged jewelry and the unexpected gold leggings that keeps it fresh. There’s also something awesomely early 90’s about this collection, with the dreads, thick black eyeliner and the totally crazy facial jewelry, so I’m taking this as an excuse to revisit some of the most worthy trends of my youth.

Gucci’s collection shows that sometimes you need to see things to believe them. Who would have thought that eggplant, brownish-mustard and bright red look good together? But they do! This collection also showcases lots of below-the-knee or longer skirts which look great with boots and are a better choice during the winter (or ever) than micro-minis.

Finally, Band of Outsiders, my favorite label that I’ll never afford, was heavy on the mid-70’s inspiration. Lots of these pieces look like things that could be found at the thrift store, but a cool heel, some modern makeup or an unusual color combination make them different and still easy to replicate on the cheap.