Day in the Life During -17 Degree Weather

At 6:45 a.m. I wake up and contemplate whether or not today is the day I will finally wash my hair. I think it’s Sunday, but I have lost the ability to decipher between days. The good news: my loyal boyfriend (last name: TV, first name: Apple) bestowed me with the Valentines gift of unwatched episodes of Broad City and High Maintenance. I also ate candy for dinner.

7:00 a.m. I double check that everything is good to go for the 9 a.m. post which is Leandra’s Altuzarra review. Man was that a beautiful collection. I decide washing my hair is probably not going to happen once I check the forecast and discover that if you venture outdoors your eyeballs will freeze into glass. Thanks for the update, Cupertino.

I decide that tights are suitable pants and that with 3 pair of socks and two coats I should be okay. I kind of look like this:

Except that instead of a red jumpsuit it’s a dress my mom wore to a school dance back in the 1800s and/or the 1970s.

Feeling very Inherent Vice minus the muttonchops. The wind pushed me all the way to the train.

My first show was Hood by Air  at noon, which continuously remains a favorite each season. To be frank, it is rare to see something entirely new at any of these shows, especially with this appropriation of the 1970s that has proliferated the past few seasons as we continue to recycle old forms and slightly modernize them. Shayne Oliver, HBA’s creative director, has a refreshing talent for taking the familiar and flipping it upside down and inside out to a point of being unrecognizable. He used denim, leather, khaki and fur and the models wore stockings pulled over their faces. It was indecipherable which were male and which were female, and it didn’t matter.

Around 12:45 p.m. I make my way out onto Wall street only to find my eyeballs doing that frozen thing. Cool choice on the eerie unfinished industrial space HBA, but the lack of insulation posed a problem on this frigid day.

1:00 p.m. At DKNY the girls wore white monikered athletic socks with chunky flatforms and the collection had a lot of strong tailoring and menswear-inspired pieces. Ke$ha was there, and has oddly been at a lot of shows– does she have a comeback I am unaware of?

1:45 p.m. I walk out into the frozen tundra of 26th street. Trying not to cry as my phalanges feel like icicles that could snap off at any second, I am greeted by the jovial, smiling Bill Cunningham sporting his signature blue anorak and no gloves, I repeat, NO gloves. He truly is a superhuman.

Meanwhile, I am hiding in a bodega on 10th avenue in an attempt to warm up. I stay for so long that I feel awkward and buy a pack of gum.

2:30 p.m. I prep imagery for Amelia’s Derek Lam review and Leandra’s post chronicling Public school, Hood by Air and Tim Coppens.  I make sure everything is good to go for the Lacoste and Dion Lee review and then set up Leon Bridges’ closet post and have about 7 day dreams in which he serenades me.

Though I fall into a black hole and lose all sense of time and space during fashion week, I do manage to see my typically-elusive friends who also work in fashion because our schedules finally align. I grab coffee with my friend Cleo around 4:30 in her break between shows and then later go to dinner with my British friend Mod who is here for work. It is a divine reunion of sorts.

Around 8:45 p.m., Mod and I head to the Opening Ceremony presentation which was a photo show from Spike Jonze’s never-before-seen archives. Leave it to OC to outdo its own hipness each season. I arrive fashionably late (the presentation is from 8:00-10:00) only to learn the models were fashionably early. They came out for a blip of time and then vanished. Crap. I ran into a friend who had shot beautiful images of the show and I scrolled through her photos in the middle of the photo gallery. It was very meta.

The clothes had a signature OC panache and embraced its partnership with Kodak through garments emblazoned with the camera company’s logo. The clothes felt easy, as did Jonze’s candid, offbeat, youthful moments he captured on film.

At 9 p.m., a change of pace. We met up with our friend who has been covering NBA All-Star Week and went to some NBA party with the hope that (according to rumors Drake would be there.) Never found out. I decide once we arrive at the club that I do not want to get out of the comfortable, warm car. I drop my friends off, disregard Uber’s price surge and ride alllll the way home.

12:00 a.m. I check my e-mail. My Uber receipt arrived. You would think the car was made of gold and was filled with champagne given what they were charging. Screw New York for having a windchill of -17 degrees and screw the L train for weekend service changes. I’m watching TV and going to bed. Tomorrow begins another fashion week day.

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