Love Fashion Week but only know about the big four: London, New York, Milan, and Paris? Vice.com showcases fashion weeks around the globe–in places like Colombia and Islamabad (Pakistan)–and follows full-figured women in New York as they work it on the runway, all in the new video series Fashion Week Internationale. Host Charlet Duboc travels around the globe investigating the most fabulous fashion in the world–fashion that’s outside the mainstream but still fantastic in its own way. The New York Fashion Week segment follows the first Full-Figured Fashion Week that took place in the city over the summer. The host attended not just the fashion shows but an exercise class with full-figured beauties, a sample sale, and a “curves at sea” wrap party boat ride with the woman and men who love and appreciate the atypical fashion week. Duboc also hits the Manhattan streets to ask smaller women their opinions on large and full-figured fashion, and the responses were none too kind or positive. Many of the “average-sized” women felt that high fashion did not jibe with fuller figures and curves, and responded negatively when asked how they would feel if they woke up as a size 22 the next day.
In Pakistan, Duboc and her camera crews follow a fashion week in crisis, threatened by a host of issues. Power cuts and clothes that lack broad appeal are just a few of the stumbling blocks that go along with bringing high fashion to the Middle East. (Pakistan is known for many things, but fashion has so far not been high on that list.) Throughout the segment we see Duboc roam the streets, feeling unsafe even with male locals by her side. There is also a huge juxtaposition between the hotel where she stays for Fashion Week–which she describes as looking like the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas–and a mosque where she goes to meet Tariq Amin, a stylist and Pakistani fashion pioneer. The audience also gets an insider’s view of a country more known for its cocaine than fashion as we head to Pablo Escobar’s stomping grounds, Medellin, Colombia. The hostess interviews young girls on the plastic-surgery culture that permeates not only the fashion week but the streets of the South American country. Part documentary and part pretty clothes, Fashion Week Internationale explores fashion and sheds light on the lesser known aspects of the biz.
Sources:
Vice.com
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