All that's missing is a sign: "You must be the height of fashion to enter."
It's fitting that New York fashion week, in full swing now, takes place in a park, because with each season the event grows more like an amusement park with a fashion theme: Welcome to Dressingland!
Fashion week once was about clothes. It offered designers the chance to show samples to store buyers, wealthy private customers and media.
For a long time, few outside the business cared --or even knew --much about it and were as likely to be bored as disgusted. Grown-ups were embarrassed to admit they liked clothes; it was like confessing to playing with paper dolls.
Beautiful fashion, like this creation by designer Christian Siriano, doesn't get as much public attention as fashion week itself.
Extraordinary designs by Christian Siriano shown during fashion week.Now the idea of fashion has become more of a draw than the fashions themselves.
It's not the clothes, the designers, the catwalk models or even the celebrities that entice crowds to gather outside the tents but rather an abstraction of an abstraction, depicted in "The Devil Wears Prada," "Sex and the City" and "Project Runway," that has made a once-humble trade show famous.
Before a runway show, adoring fans plead to pose for snapshots with Nigel Barker. The strikingly handsome Barker is a former model and successful fashion photographer, but he gained celebrity status as a judge on "America's Next Top Model."
He looks eerily like a Prince Charming character posing with tourists at Disneyland.
American Express offers its gold, platinum and centurion card members the chance to buy their way into fashion week. The lucky few sit in a glass skybox overlooking two of the tent's three runways, take backstage tours and meet with stylists and industry insiders to "experience the world of fashion like never before."
Even nonfashion sponsors aim to imbue their brands with the fashion mystique.
Tents include booths from new gourmet M&Ms ("a fashionable collection of shimmering chocolate gems") and OfficeMax ("Life is beautiful. Work can be, too") to an express delivery company ("Style. Innovation. DHL. Always in fashion.").
And, of course, the proper name of the entire event is Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.
Cry "Fabulous!" too often and people in the fashion industry stop listening. Christian Siriano debuted his line of the same at fashion week and it looks pretty. But the question remains whether the winner of last year's "Project Runway" competition can outgrow his reality show roots to be taken seriously by buyers and media.
The crowds among all this hubbub don't care if the Emperor is wearing the finest clothes ever made or if he's stark naked. They just want to say that when he paraded past, they were there
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