It’s a new season, and the city of New York is kicking off a month of Fashion Weeks around the globe. However, with another FROW invitation for Cherwell not making it to our pidges, we were depending on the usually relentless social media updates from our favourite and most followed FROW-ers to bring the catwalk to us and our essay crises. After all, it’s surely no coincidence that NYFW falls this week in time to battle the 5th Week Blues one beautiful Alexander Wang boot at a time! But, alas, our procrastination has been sabotaged. A quick click through Instagram reveals that the bloggers, eds, and celebs upon whom we can usually rely for photographic evidence of everything that they do, see and eat, or photograph and not eat as the case may be, have left their phones in their Charlotte Olympia clutches.
For a good few years now, the most coveted accessory on the FROW has been the iPhone, as proven by the influx of phone covers on the catwalk itself. Now no self-respecting designer would create a collection without matching phone cases.
So, if anything, we were expecting an increasingly greater flurry of blurry photos of the shows as they happened, but this season they’ve been sparser than a skinny jean. Why? Because apparently our reaction to them is like Anna Wintour’s side eye at a North West tantrum (they were some FROW photos we were glad not to have missed!).
As exciting as the first snap of the show from the FROW may be, it is never going to be a good photo. Bad lighting, shaky hands, and an iPhone camera just aren’t going to do the designer justice. If it weren’t for the fact that it was taken at a show it wouldn’t be deemed Instagram worthy, let alone double-tappable. This is just what bloggers, always with an eye on their social media performance, have noticed. Not only do these photos look bad themselves, but they make those taking them look bad too. Bloomberg luxury columnist Hannah Elliott describes it as a ‘“rookie move”. And no one, not even 18 month old North West, gets away with looking like a rookie at a runway show.
Keep up with what’s going on in New York and Oxford with Cherwell on Instagram (@cherwellfashion). We promise there will be no blurry catwalk photos, because – sniff – we’re not there
