Elisa Jimenez – Fall 2008 Collection

Posted on Feb 5, 2008 in Fashion

Elisa Jimenez, the self-described “person who doesn’t fit in the box” and “the kid who was always alone on the other side of the playground,” showed her Fall 2008 collection and…well, it’s a little tough to quantify.

 

New York Magazine described it thusly:
“Intrigued, we showed up to Jimenez’s off-site show at Touch Sunday morning to find placed on each chair a playing card and a blown-up surgical glove with “bless” scrawled on it, backwards.  

The high-school drama-class feeling didn’t stop with the mirror-writing. As the models—mostly girls and teens who were friends of Jimenez—marched, slithered, and danced around the room, you could almost imagine the stage direction: “You’re a tiger, a tiger! Get on all fours and slink around!”

And Newsday described it as:
“… a theatrical representation of ‘The Hunger World,’ which Jimenez called a pseudo-fictitious world she started working on some 18 years ago. I still haven’t figured out what this Hunger World is, but from looking at the program and speaking to Jimenez, I know that her models were meant to be ‘marionettes’ and ‘puppeteers,’ ranging from a ‘Little Worm-Thing’ to a ‘Honey-Giver’ to a ‘Mistress of Tenderness.’”

Our thoughts? Look, we’re all for fashion-as-art. She clearly doesn’t give a crap whether her clothes are wearable (she says as much in the interview at Newsday) or even pretty, and we can totally get behind that, but…

Well… 

We hate to say it, because we adore her and we totally get where she’s coming from…

But this just has the distinct whiff of “amateur” all over it.

We love the idea of conceptual fashion, but – and this is the really important part – you need an actual concept to be conceptual. More importantly, you need to be able to convey that concept in the clothing.

This is just obscure for obscurity’s sake and worse than that, it’s all rather drab and poorly made.

If there was a message here, it’s buried under layers of weird, ugly clothing and obscured by the bizarre, unreadable performances of her models. We’ll always be interested in what the weird girl in the cafeteria has to say, but just being weird isn’t enough. Sorry, puppet girl.

[Photos: WireImage/GettyImages]