The Guy Threw A Birkenstock

[Mike]

Holiday’s Over, Let’s Rock

By ERIC WILSON
Published: September 6, 2007

ON Tuesday night Santana was performing at the Highline Ballroom at the behest of Condé Nast as a preview of its annual advertiser bacchanal, Fashion Rocks. The Plastiscines, a Parisian band of teenage girls who are part of a clique known in France as les bébés rockers, played in Midtown at a fashion show for Van Cleef & Arpels.

And at roughly the same time, Perry Farrell of the late ’80s band Jane’s Addiction was singing before a group of Brazilian street dancers at a former club space in west Chelsea for yet another fashion show, this one for the preppy sportswear brand Trovata.

If starting Fashion Week on the day after Labor Day was cause for caterwauling among professionals who make it their jobs to be wherever fashion may take them, the response of designers was to rebound from their vacations with loud, random music. Mr. Farrell sang “Jane Says,” a song about heroin addiction released in 1988, wearing a navy vest with whitish jeans from the Trovata collection for spring 2008. (It had a vintage feel, you see.)

The rest of the clothes were shown on the sleek male dancers from Brazil, doing something like a tantric crab dance in casual white pants paired with a neat tennis sweater or a striped hoodie, and female models who fanned out around them. One wore a white minitrench, one white shorts, one a white tennis dress. About three-quarters of the way through the performance, a photographer was still asking who was singing.

John Whitledge, the designer of the label, said he was introduced to Mr. Farrell recently by mutual friends and that the singer had helped conceive the idea for how to show the collection last Friday.

“This is about the full experience of Trovata and what we’ve been doing for the last seven months,” said Mr. Whitledge, who split with his design partners last year and has continued Trovata as a solo act. “It’s also about not taking ourselves too seriously.”

Meanwhile, two of Mr. Whitledge’s former partners, Sam Shipley and Jeff Halmos, introduced their first men’s collection, called Shipley & Halmos, with 10 looks shown on Style.com. Perhaps they meant to distinguish themselves from their association with Trovata, as their new clothes — and presentation — were far more quiet.

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times
MUSICAL JOLT Perry Farrell sang an ode to addiction for the Trovata collection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/fashi ... ef=fashion

[hydro]

"I mean this guy is a real moron. He doesn't even understand fashion! ...

love it!!