7 Weird, Wacky, and Wonderful Moments From Fashion Week

Fashion people love to describe New York fashion week as “commercial” consisting of only wearable clothes but that’s selling the city short. While there were plenty of shows that had beautiful, grown up looks that are certain to be closet staples, there are designers who aren’t afraid to showcase their quirky sense of humor and get a little weird. Whether it’s literal food on the runway as in the case of Area and Puppets Puppets, elaborate staging at Thom Browne, or a creative use of makeup and prosthetics at Collina Strada, read on for the weird and wonderful moments that we can’t get out of our heads.

While Rodarte’s goth fairy show may have dominated your feed on the first day of New York fashion week, Collina Strada’s presentation turned out to be the sleeper social media hit that’ll haunt your eyeballs for weeks to come. Sure, there were clothes, but models received prosthetics that turned them into dogs, cats, lizards, and more. And naturally, they got very into character, with model West Dakota crawling around on all fours and receiving headpats from the front row.

Perhaps the invite, which featured hyper realistic banana plushies, should have been a hint that Area was veering away from their usual rhinestone encrusted designs in favor of a kooky take on tropical fruit. Three-dimensional bananas adorned many of the pieces while other looks featured watermelons and grapes. And while that could come off as too sweet, designers Beckett Fogg and Piotrek Panszczyk decided to also add in edge courtesy of a runway that was covered in thousands of fake flies, buzzing noises in the soundtrack, and suiting that looked as if the wearer was swarmed with insects. But the true show-stopper was the finale gown, which featured velvet and 24-karat gold bananas and seemed perfect for a quirky star like Doja Cat.

Speaking of food, Puppets and Puppets’s show took place smack dab during peak Sunday brunch time and designer Carly Mark was only happy to oblige. The set was decorated with heaping piles of food with everything from cake to sandwiches to heads of lettuce while the pieces were adorned with banana handles or sunny side up eggs as nipple pasties.

All week the cast of White Lotus made appearances at shows with the likes of Haley Lu Richardson aka Portia at Kate Spade while Beatrice Granno and Simona Tabasco sat front row at Michael Kors. But the most surprising star to pop up? Jon Gries, who plays Greg, walking at Eckhaus Latta in a Rorschach-like sweater and wide leg trousers. Place your bets as to whether season 3 of the HBO show will up its fashion cred.

Few brands inspire such fervor on TikTok as Sandy Liang, with her ballet flats, rosette scrunchies, and ruffly designs drawing a rabid following from self-professed sad girls. Her latest collection is sure to be popular with the Gen Z set, especially the balaclavas, low slung skirts, and feminine outerwear but it was the beauty look that stood out. Makeup artist Marcelo Gutierrez called it “sweet but psycho” as he smudged glimmery highlighter around the tear ducts while the hair featured an explosion of bows, both big and small.

When it comes to grand theater, no one does it better than Thom Browne. The newly minted head of the CFDA returned to New York fashion week in spectacular fashion with an elaborate show that reimagined the classic French story, Le Petit Prince. Models walked around a crashed spaceship on a dust-filled runway, with each look representing characters from the beloved book. At the end, much like the tale, an angel descends to save the Prince from his loneliness, only in Browne’s world the ethereal creature is Precious Lee, clad in layers of white fabric and looking more like the queen of the realm.

Last fall designer Elena Velez won the CFDA for American Emerging Designer of the Year but her statue isn’t sitting on a shelf somewhere. Instead at her show Velez handed it off to a model who stomped down the runway, looking as if she were ready to knock someone in the head with the blunt object. That was precisely the point — the designer jokingly told The New York Times that it was ““as though she had just bludgeoned her husband with it,”