Where Does Streetwear Belong In The New York Fashion Industry?

Fashion Week is so weird. Watching runway after runway, flipping your head over and over from left to right, you begin to think think things like: “People are really betting on bare butts for Spring 2018.” There were bare butts at Tom Ford, bare butts from the weirdos at Linder, and bare butts at the Richardson x Pornhub party. You read that right: on Thursday night, Andrew Richardon’s streetwear label held a party to celebrate its collaboration with the internet’s largest pornography site, an event which featured exotic dancers shaking it in Richardson x Pornhub bodysuits on a platform runway to trap music, while dorky hypebeasts in hats from Balenciaga’s Bernie Sanders-inspired menswear collection tucked fistfuls of singles into the dancers’ Richardson x Pornhub thongs. Lourdes Leon, Stella Schnabel, Paloma Elsesser, Joey Bada$$, and Dave East were all there, and it was dirty and really fun. At the party, an artist friend wriggled his eyebrows and asked me, “Are fashion shows normally like this?” Well, actually, yes: fashion shows are a lot of people shimmying on a platform in crazy outfits as spectators throw money at them. It’s just that normally the money is thrown a few months later, at Bergdorf Goodman or Dover Street or on Net-a-Porter. Perhaps a streetwear brand and a pornography website seem like strange bedfellows for the fashion industry, but Pornhub also collaborated with Hood by Air a few seasons ago. And though the fashion industry retains a narrow and elitist aura, in a way it seems that anything can be fashion now, with streetwear labels asserting themselves within the industry establishment as a kind of cottage, ethical answer to fast fashion: relatively cheap items emerge on the marketplace with almost mythical hype that extinguishes more quickly than the allure of a trendy boot or it-bag ever could. Read more at Vice.