unfocusedfocus:

Fashion’s Night Out! Have you heard about this? It is a night of “fashion” in which “fashion” translates loosely to… well, it’s different things to different people. Mostly, you see women wearing stilettos they can’t walk in, and then there’s you trying to hold back the giggles as these women try walk on the cobblestone streets that are ever present in SoHo (I mean, they should know better, come on). Then there are the street style blogheads, with statement collars and Jeffrey Campbell Litas and cold shoulder tops and studded details and torn shorts that show off buttcheeks. Lastly, there are the people who think that Guess and Bebe are the heighth of fashion; these are the people you would find in the Meatpacking District on any given Friday or Saturday night. So these are the people you have to push out of your way when you are a girl with a Fashion’s Night Out mission. 

My mission for the night was simple and direct - get to OAK NYC on Bond St. and grab a free Cheap Monday t-shirt with graffiti work on it done by Smurfo of WCKIDS. That’s all I wanted from tonight. The event started at 7pm, and it took dinner and a couple of South Park episodes to get me thinking that I live in New York City and if I don’t try to go to this event, I don’t DESERVE to live here. Because this is what happens to a lot of people who live in New York - they don’t go out and do anything. People come home from work and either stay home or go out in their neighborhoods. Or they just never leave their apartment. If you’re a transplant, this is unacceptable. What are you doing? Get outta here.

Anyway, I decide that I need to go to this thing, and I get to OAK by 8:00. I walk in, I wander for 5 minutes, I ask a girl who does not work at the store to grab a t-shirt for me, she gives me the shirt, and then an OAK employee yells “ALRIGHT GET YOUR SHIRTS EVERYONE” or something like that, and all hell breaks loose. The party-goers bum rush the wall and start tearing the shirts off the wall.

Oh, so the t-shirts? They were taped up on the wall which allowed Smurfo to do his graffiti magic. Everyone who got a shirt has a piece of the overall artwork. It’s a pretty slammin’ idea. 

My timing couldn’t have been more perfect; fighting through the crowds on Broadway and wading through the filth was worth it just for that t-shirt.

So Fashion’s Night Out… it’s less about fashion. It’s more about commercialism. It’s more about materialism. It’s about drawing consumers in with the siren’s song of free stuff that few people are lucky enough to get. It’s about “limited edition” Fashion’s Night out items with a high markup. But mostly, it is about trash, which “fashionable” people seem to produce a lot of, without knowing how to use a garbage can. It’s also mostly about people being annoying and not knowing how to walk properly or walking without purpose, which makes the least sense of all because there is no way I was the only person on Broadway and Houston who went into the fray with a goal in mind. 

And with all of that said, what I am ACTUALLY trying to say is “Na na na na naaaaa na, I got a free t-shirt, ha ha ha ha haaaaa ha.”