I also blog about inspiration over at Book View Cafe. Feel free to comment here or over there.

Last weekend, I went to the Seattle Art Museum to see the “Future Beauty: 30 years of Japanese Fashion” exhibit. I went with the young woman who I mentor, who’s just entered art school. She’s young, and had never been exposed to art as fashion: She’s used to ready-to-wear clothing, not clothes as art. We were able to talk about it using the same art terms, though, and so she was able to wrap her head around it.

This week is New York Fashion week. The designers are all showing their spring collections. Yes, I’ve been peeking at the runway shows. The internets are a fabulous thing, letting me see the shows “live” as it were.

I currently don’t own a TV. That doesn’t mean that I never watch anything. Again, the internets are fabulous for letting me find shows. Such as the current season of “Project Runway.”

This week, the designers from this season showed their collections. Because of the way the show is structured, many of the collections that were shown were decoys, that is, they were created by contestants who were no longer in the running to win Project Runway. Sometimes it’s really easy to tell who are the decoys, and who aren’t.

SPOILER ALERT: All the pictures below the cut come from the Project Runway show.

These pictures are from Tom & Lorenzo, Fabulous and Opinionated. (Also abbreviated TLo)

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TLo’s name for this character/contestant is “Drag Brow” — because seriously, he has weird, overly plucked, just fly away pieces of brows on his forehead. Then he went ahead and stylized all his models to have the same weird brow.

I call this collection the “winter witch” collection. Because of the way he styled their hair and faces, and because of the clothes, I really could see this dress as something a witch would wear, to a more casual business meeting, in downtown New York. (Think “The Temporary Agency” by Rachel Pollack.

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And here is what a witch might wear to a summer beach party, kind of floaty and flowy, but still with that dark edge to it. She can’t help it, it’s just her nature to wear that kind of hard/soft sort of thing. I could also imagine a version of this in white and red, with the dripping pattern looking more like blood.

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Evening witch wear, to a fancy ball or party. Not quite red carpet, more subdued than that. But the right amount of tattering to show that the witches, while part of society, are still apart, not quite accepted, not quite understood.

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Now this is what’s known as high fashion. Absolutely not ready-to-wear. Something completely over the top. However, I suspect it could be easily translated into ready-to-wear. It depends on how it’s made, and I haven’t seen enough pictures of it to know for certain. Is that her hair primarily decorating the sheaf dress? Then it’s easily adjusted. I want there to be something more going on, though. Because this is kind of fabulous, this over-the-top, blue-witch fairy, who comes complete with her own buttercup.

So what do you see in these gowns? What sorts of stories do they inspire in you?