NEW YORK – During New York Fashion Week, garment designers scramble to find ways to make their new collections stand out from the crowd. Each year the runway shows become more elaborate, more outlandish, or more just plain bizarre.
This year, one upstart young designer eschewed the usual glitzy Fashion Week haunts in favor of a humble walk-up…and a webcast on adult live-cam site Cam4.
Pop culture magazine Nylon described the show unveiling designer Victor Barragan’s avant-garde Fall 2016 collection as more like performance art than a traditional apparel debut.
At YTINIFNINFINITY’s presentation, designer Victor Barragan staged his Fall ’16 collection inside an apartment, lining the walls with plastic sheets and streaming the entire spectacle on the sex webcam site, Cam4. His models, all cast off Instagram, gave strip-teases in front of a laptop, taking monstrous bites of corner store croissants, rubbing themselves in Vaseline and slowly removing their tops for an anonymous online audience. One model even took a crushed plastic cup and swallowed a piece, visibly struggling as the fragment worked its way down their throat. If a seasoned editor’s idea of fashion heaven is Alice + Olivia, this was hell — an exciting, subversive world we’ll happily take residency in.
Barragan explained: “I am trying to match our concepts of voyeurism by sharing with a different audience, not just the fashion industry. I honestly expected random people who don’t feel any connection with fashion and our audience to become better engaged by the presentation. It was just so easy to open the laptop and log in. We had four monitors in the back where people who attended could also be close to the screens, watching the show with an outsider’s perspective.
“Of course some people will reject the show, but some others really embrace having new ways to present a collection,” he added. “So far the support from the fashion world has been fabulous.”
Image from YTINIFNINFINITY’s SS16 collection.
