NEW YORK – When you think about New York Fashion Week, you probably don’t think of porn. Yet, porn is exactly what the assembled fashionistas were treated to when Cloak By Mail (CBM) sent its “subversively awesome street threads” down the runway earlier this month to represent the company’s 2017 ready-to-wipe-off-and-wear collection.
On the platform, models with cum-like ooze splattered on their faces strutted confidently into the spotlight wearing shirts emblazoned with descriptive terms rendered in all caps, like “SPOOGEBAG” and “BUTTSLUT” and exhorting A-list, fashion-conscious celebrity guests like Paul Reubens and Roseanne Barr to “NEVER FUCK A NUN.”
Stemming from a partnership with mega popular adult tube site SmutNucleus, CBM’s latest line combines “the exquisite class of hardcore pornography with the practical economy of high fashion,” according to CBM founder and chief designer Shayme Ramsey.
While the reviews from critics and attendees were mixed, the spectacle definitely got the internet talking — but then again, the internet talks about everything, from My Little Pony and cats on synthesizers in space to chubby, orange-faced loudmouths who get the sniffles during nationally broadcast political debates.
Most importantly, the recent show elevated the profile of both brands, according to noted fashion critic Lynn Jacobs from the quarterly style journal No Vain, No Gain.
“Believe it or not, before this event I’d never even heard of SmutNucleus,” Jacobs said. “My husband appeared to be familiar with the name, as were both of my sons, my father, two out of my three sisters, our gardener and our pool boy, but for me, it was a revelation. I found their website somewhat confusing. All those millions of links and not one of them seemed to offer me a way to put one of those fabulous ‘DUMB FILTHY WHORE’ CBM hoodies in my online shopping cart.”
Others called attention not so much to questions of branding or the quality of the designs, but the underpinning marketing strategy behind the CBM/SmutNucleus collaboration.
“To me, the formula here is as clear as it is brilliant,” said Eric Yaeger, fashion critic for the Newer Yorker. “Basically, it’s free porn plus $600 T-shirt equals $600 porn T-shirt. Granted, a lot of SmutNucleus customers will just go down to Canal Street and buy a cheap knock-off of these T-shirts from some sketchy black-market vendor. But the American consumer market is nothing if not well-stocked by the rich, dumb, classless and gullible, so I see big things ahead for this ingenious pairing of fuck-flicks and fashion.”
For other, more traditional fashion critics, the relationship between CBM and SmutNucleus is cause for concern, a harbinger of darker, dirtier days ahead.
“I just think it’s a very slippery slope,” said Vanessa Wilson from Fashion First magazine. “Sure, today it’s just a handful of models walking down the runway with virtual jizz in their hair and profanities written across their chest, but tomorrow it could be someone getting pushed along in a wheelbarrow being DP’d through strategically-placed rips in a pair of those $700 shredded pants. Where do we draw the line? Can’t the answer be somewhere on this side of watching someone with an obvious eating disorder having his or her butthole spread open by a speculum right there on the runway during Fashion Week?”
Cory Cost, vice president of SmutNucleus, said whatever sales revenue the new line might produce, his company’s main goal has nothing to do with generating sales or increasing traffic to the already-popular tube site.
“We just want to create something that resonates with people,” Cost said. “For most people, this will mean manufacturing shirts that vibrate approximately 440 times per second, but we’re also looking at the feasibility of designing hoodies just for goths and metalheads, which would clock in at the more dirge-appropriate rate of 128.”
