VICE’s Charlet Duboc shows you Fashion Week like you’ve never seen it.

I recently attended a screening of VICE.COM’s new series Fashion Week Internationale at the Tribeca Grand. I knew nothing about it except that it was run by VICE and about fashion. So my expectation was some kind of fashion week spoof consisting of NYFW models ingesting cocaine, puking up everything else and vamping for the camera…mixed in with making fun of people who were badly dressed. What I saw was something altogether different and unexpected.

Charlet Duboc  (pictured above) was an intern sitting in the VICE office one day Googling “fashion week” and discovered that apart from the big four (NY, London, Milan and Paris) there are several other fashion weeks in the world. And not just where you’d expect or already know like Berlin and Tokyo, but off road like Pakistan and Colombia. This gave the VICE team impetus to train hop through disparate cultures and their fashion week worlds– all seen through the eyes of Charlet, our intrepid guide.

First stop – Islamabad, Pakistan. In a world where male and female models don’t interact off the runway, modeling itself counters this overtly repressive culture.
Second Stop – Full-Figured Fashion Week in New York City where fuller figured women glory in their girth.
Third Stop – Medellin, Colombia where very specific ideas of beauty are seen as a way out of poverty.

In all the shows the fashion week “stories” are wrapped in the larger cultural and political landscapes. While the episodes reveal the uniqueness of each culture, there seem some universal impressions. Everywhere there is a desire for beauty and self-adornment, a celebration of the human form through fashion. Yet lurking below (and above) the surface, the entire world seems to be freaked out by the natural female form. I know that sounds odd but I’m not quite sure how else to phrase it. How else to explain that in Pakistan they think women need be buried in their burkas while in Colombia 17 year olds start modifying their bodies with plastic surgery, and here in New York City starving models are fetishized while size 14 and above females don’t exist? In the face of all this, the series success is that these countries catwalks become a place of celebratory subversion or subversive celebration.

In any event, Charlet explains the series like this: Since Eve bit the apple, everyone has to get dressed in the morning, no matter where you’re from. When you watch this I hope you’ll feel you’re seeing a bit of the world you’ve didn’t know existed. Each episode is a 30 minute foray into what makes these varying younger generations tick- something often denied to us in the news. The fashion weeks we cover act as a vehicle for a broader story about these communities, with any luck painting an unseen picture of what’s really happening around the world. Fashion Week Internationale does exactly that. It’s entertaining, informative and thought provoking which is a brilliant combination.
You can see these three and more here fashion-week-internationale