Friday night, abridged

I wasn't really up for going out, but I nevertheless managed a trifecta (fashion show, sitting around my room with a couple friends, and going to an honest-to-goodness keg party) in record time. Part of what made the night so speedy was that I wore 4-5 inch-heeled boots, which tend to make coming back and removing the boots a priority.

The fashion show, though, was impressive, with a runway, screens showing the models as they passed, and cool music. (And I should have brought my camera, but I needed to charge the batteries...) It wasn't clear how much of the clothing was actually designed by U of C students (some clearly was not) but the models were most definitely Chicago students. The better-looking ones were sometimes also the less confident models, and the ones who seemed to be enjoying themselves most weren't always the ones who looked most like models. The few who managed to both look good and smile got plenty of attention from the huge crowd in Hutch. Two very straight guys standing near me (not surprisingly, many guys there weren't so straight) gave a careful assessment of each female model's figure as she passed. So, to answer the age-old mystery of, "What do guys like?", they like skinny, skinny girls in revealing clothing.

Oh, and the event also included free copies of the U of C's glossy fashion magazine, Moda. The magazine and the fashion show reveal two problems with transporting fashion to non-fashion-world settings. First, there's the whole being in Chicago thing--Chicago's not a fashion city, and people here do not care how they look. I mean, people want to attract the opposite/same sex as much as they do anywhere else, but they don't, for the most part, care to look interesting or stylish. At the University, there's more of an interest in fashion (and, given tonight's turnout, a great deal of interest), but the city as a whole does not lend itself to people-watching or boutique-browsing. Then, there's the issue of, do models really need to look like models? As someone who grew up, for better or worse, seeing models strutting by in the neighborhood adjacent to my high school, I'd have to say that I do see there as being two kinds of people, models and non-models. I do not for a second think that models are actually better-looking than attractive civilians, but they all look the same, and the sameness is what permits you to focus on their clothes. While it's striking at first how emaciated models are, you do get used to it after a while, and the fact that, while freaky, they're all freaky in the same way, really does permit a longer glance at each outfit. When the U of C models tonight hit the runway, my first thought was, do I know this person, and my second was, what does this person look like? People's faces and bodies, attractive or unattractive, of the sex one prefers or not, are interesting. Solid-color button-down shirts or tank tops are not so fascinating. So by the time I got to noticing the clothing (much of which consisted of something frilly paired with dark jeans) I was ready to see who'd be walking by next.