Fashion Week

I have had a very busy summer and so I am sorry for not having written anything for a couple of months.

Last week I went with some girlfriends on an overnight trip to New York city with the idea of going to Bryant Park to check out all the glitterati in their Manolo Blahniks going in and out of the designer runway shows (one of my friends weaves and makes clothing for a living). Amazingly, we saw the college-age daughter of another friend of ours who is a student at NYU and who was doing an internship stint at Fashion Week. Knowing it is impossible to get into the shows unless you are someone, we asked her if there was any way she could get us into standing-room-only at a show. She went to find out, and she got us some tickets!

Granted it was the collection of a young and supposedly up-and-coming Russian designer, but still it was a runway show in New York city! The show lasted all of 12 minutes with young, blond concentration-camp-like women walking very fast down the runway in his spring collection. The clothes did not make a lasting impression on me, but it was pretty exciting.

After that we went to a shop on Madison Ave. called "Julie: Artisans' Gallery" which is a gallery of wearable art, and there in the front window were 7 or my purses! I had just sent them to the shop and they had mentioned that maybe they would put some in the window, but it was still terribly exciting. They looked terrific.

We ate in a fabulous restaurant in the Meatpacking District and shopped in the West Village. Then we took a very cheap bus back to Boston ($18 one-way), then another bus up to New Hampshire. All in all, it was a splendid way to spend time with girlfriends.

But frankly, I am really glad to be home. I got my big-city fix and can now reflect on the whole experience. It seems trite to say it, but the whole Fashion Week experience was shallow. Is this what life is all about? To some people it is - paying attention to the latest must-haves. And actually I am quite ambivalent because this is the market I sell to.

I sell cool little containers and artsy jewelry for people to carry around and impress others. I feel uncomfortable about that and yet I really enjoy and have a passion for what I am doing.

I don't know if other artists are in this quandary. Maybe it's a result of living in frugal New Hampshire. Or maybe it's a result of my Christian faith and reading in the Bible about materialism. What ever it is, I've been doing a lot of thinking about it.