A Passion for Fashion.

I've spent much of today deeply troubled by a conversation that erupted on Project Runway last night. (It is good to have first world problems, yes?)

After one of the designers sent a rather indulgent piece down the runway (one that I loved, by the way), Nina Garcia, a judge, criticized it as inappropriate for the challenge because, "Fashion is not art!"

"It kind of is," Heidi Klum, another judge, countered. "Some of it is. If it’s not basic it is."

But Nina reiterated: "Fashion is not art. Stores are not museums. You go to stores to buy clothes. You do not go to stores to look at clothes."

{Hyperbole Alert} This might be the craziest thing I have ever heard!

Of course fashion is art. By its very nature, fashion is art. Apparel may not be art, if it serves only as function. But, fashion's only goal is to is to entice, to capture attention, to woo us with its patterns and prints and colors and pleats and rises and flares and crops and lines and collars and embellishments. It's these details that take clothing from need to want.

And, shame on you Nina, we do go to stores to look at clothes. (I'd pay admission for some.) If we didn't, no one would bother to artfully dress a window with one purpose in mind: to coax us through the doorway, to sample with our eyes the creations of masters.