Fashion week might be a great many things, but boring is certainly not one of them. It is a playground for the aesthetes, the novel-obsessed. It is a world filled with beautiful people, beautiful clothes, beautiful cities. A circus made of only the most exotic specimens, led by incredibly handsome ringmasters wearing the chicest of coattails. Its pace – the relentless, ever-changing tornado of it all – is hard to match.
Hi, my name is Jenny Bahn, and I am a fashion junkie.
A fashion dose is unmistakably narcotic, filling you with a rush that does not always live up to its expectations, hitting you with the comedown when it’s over, and shaking your body with the twitchy cravings when you do not have it at all. It’s an addiction you come to love to hate, knowing that you’re sacrificing a normal, peaceful life for a crazed, self-fabricated fury. Whether it’s good for you or not, you begin to live for the hit, making concessions to get it. In exchange for some Saint Laurent booties, a Proenza mini-dress, and a round-trip flight to Paris, you’ll surround yourself with a host of unsavories, while your plummeting bank account begins to match your preternatural thinness. All in the name of a very beautiful, very fast life.
When I think of permanently separating myself from the industry, and all the subsequent fashion weeks it entails, I am often reminded of that scene in The Hurt Locker, when Jeremy Renner gets back from the war to his safe, quiet home, only to go through the death-defying withdrawals of a maniacal adrenaline addict. Sure, that lifestyle would likely kill him, put an irreversible toll on his mental well being, but it was the only thing that he had to live for, that made him feel something. And while fashion doesn’t necessarily make me feel anything, you can’t beat that rush, that high you get when a customs agent stamps your passport, the opiate-like calm when you watch a foreign city pass by the window of your cab, a beautiful blur you only dreamed of as a kid.
