The Fashion Informer: It’s In the Mail: Best New York Fashion Week Invites

It’s that time of year again: NYC’s style tribes are gearing up for Fashion Week, which officially kicks off at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, September 5th with the Nautica show and ends at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, September 12th with the Dead Birds & Lionheart show, just before sundown on Rosh Hashanah (the shows, traditionally scheduled from Friday - Friday, were moved up two days so as not to conflict with the Jewish holiday).

For the past three weeks, our mailbox has been overflowing with invites to shows, presentations, parties and events – 83 at last count, with more expected next week (and The Fashion Informer only covers the NY shows, so we can only imagine what the inboxes of our European-bound colleagues look like).

Mixed in with the usual “just the facts, ma’am” invites were a few that really stood out, either because of their inventive presentation, clever graphic design or cool packaging, all of which usually referred back, in some way, to the theme of the designer’s spring ’08 collection.

Betsey Johnson sent along a “Prom Queen” booklet, complete with a hot pink balloon and black-and-white pictures from her own junior prom, c.1958 (we smell crinolines!), while Gemma Kahng kept things in the here-and-now with a wonderfully simple invite that pictured the designer herself on the front (her back to the camera, fitting a model) and a Xerox of the official Fashion Week schedule on the back, with the date and time of her presentation circled in pen.

Twelfth Street by Cynthia Vincent and Ports 1961 by Tia Cibani both opted for canvas, zip-topped “envelopes” for their respective invites (Vincent’s featured fuchsia metallic elements, and Cibani’s was jute woven in the shape of a nutshell, with an oval invite tucked inside – a far better choice than Ports fall ’07 invite, a dense grey felt square that smelled so strongly of chemicals we had to throw it out immediately for fear of getting brain damage if we kept it in our office). And Mary Ping, who designs an eponymous collection and the hipster line, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, used a canvas tote bag to announce the latter – the invite printed on the bag itself – and a palm-sized, paper-wrapped notebook for the former, the details printed discreetly on the inside flap of the wrapper next to a brief explanation of the name of her spring collection, “kairos and kronos.”

Phillip Lim is hewing to a travel theme this season, so his invite came in the form of a Passport, with show details and customs’ stamps on the inside page, alongside a lipstick-kissed smiley face in lieu of a photo. Miss Sixty went for a one-two-three punch, with a yellow floral-illustrated invite tucked inside a floral-bedecked greige envelope that was itself tucked inside a shiny UPS-brown box, while Development by Erica Davies’ invite took the form of one of those folded paper origami-like thingies we used to make back in junior high (they have a name, but we’re spacing on what it is), this one rendered in high-gloss white paper that opens to reveal a hot pink interior. (Come to think of it, we’re seeing a lot of hot pink and taxicab yellow on this season’s invites, so let’s see if those are signature colors in the spring collections, as well…)

Gwen Stefani’s invite for L.A.M.B. featured a bulls-eyed lamb in the shape of an lp (that’s short for long-playing vinyl record, for those of you who came up in the Digital Age), in a subtle nod to her other career.

And, finally, NY duo SANS followed up last season’s fashion interruptus invite - an illustration of a peeled, Velvet Underground-style banana that was dripping from the tip, making it look like a you-know-what, which some folks hated and others loved (yours truly was squarely in the latter camp) – with a stark photo of an orange plastic heart (or is it a kidney?), stuck with a trio of pins next to a sprig of parsley. Is it a voodoo or “Silence of the Lambs” reference? Will designers Alessandro DeVito and Lika Volkova be serving up a nice Chianti and fava beans at the show? We’ll just have to wait until Sunday to find out…

Photos © The Fashion Informer