The Wolf Sweater Saves Fashion Week
Fashion had mostly given up by 2010. Not formally—the shows kept running, the magazines kept printing—but somewhere between the H&M collaborations and the Ed Hardy plague, the sense that anyone was actually thinking had evaporated. Clothes were being made. People were wearing them. The gap between the two was enormous.
But there were people out there doing it right—mostly young, mostly not trying to prove anything—and I spent time that week looking at five of them.
Sian is fourteen, Australian, and apparently heavily invested in old George Clooney action films and Uma Thurman in her prime. Fine. What makes her interesting are the Doc Martens—proper ones, worn correctly, worn like they’re genuinely hers and not borrowed from someone’s costume box. Everything else in the picture is fine, but it’s the boots that do the work. She’s a redhead with good instincts and I’d bet on her.
Mara is seventeen and from Genoa—a city I couldn’t place on a map with any confidence, but which apparently produces girls who know how to wear a checked shirt. She wears hers with the ease of someone who grabbed it off a pile without thinking, which is the only correct way. Anything more deliberate and it reads as costume.
Lin is from China and has the kind of face that makes clothes secondary. Style is half what you’re wearing and half how you’d look at 2am in a room with bad lighting, and Lin has the second half completely locked. The clothes aren’t bad either. And bare tits never hurt anyone’s argument.
Donal is from Dublin, too young to vote, and he’s wearing a grey sweater with a wolf on it. That’s the whole review. The sweater is perfect and I have nothing to add except that I hope wherever he goes from here, wolves remain involved.
Sammie is eighteen, from Sydney, denim jacket and ripped tights and a facial expression that reads as pleasantly, specifically unhinged—the kind of look that fashion houses spend fortunes trying to cast and almost never find, because it can’t be performed. You either have it or you don’t. She has it. The jacket helps, but it’s not the jacket.