When did New York Fashion Week get so boring?

This is the most boring New York Fashion Week in recent memory.

Too many designers are making nice trousers and sort-of-interesting tops for upper-middle-class women on the go, who find meaning through owning a few vases special enough to be called “ceramics.”

Too many designers are making Fortuny-inspired skirts and dresses, blazers just oversized enough to convey “mystery” rather than “Berghain regular,” and extravagant peasant dresses for women who pine after Elsa Peretti and think of American expat and progenitor of Cotswold cool Amanda Brooks as the cognoscenti’s Gwyneth Paltrow.

How many of this woman exist in the world? To me, the number seems laughably small. Yet, looking at the homogeneity of New York’s runways, you would think there are zillions of 30-, 40-, and 50-something women with zillions of dollars to spend on just the right understated skinny-but-still-wide-leg trouser. She’s intelligent! She likes beautiful clothes that don’t make too much noise! She’s discerning! She has good taste. Not “taste” - her own weird whims and passions she can’t help but love even though they’re kinda hideous - but rather, she is plugged into the covert language of the right table linens, the best understated white sofa, the jewellery brands that make Tina Chow-ish glass bead necklaces and earrings in Alexander Calder-ish shapes.

On Friday, the line-up of Calvin Klein, then Fforme, then Ashlyn felt like watching the same movie over and over again. There is also: TWP, Tibi, Maria McManus (although we must single out McManus here for her almost radical commitment to sustainability), Altuzarra, Kallmeyer, Toteme, Proenza Schouler, Diotima. They all showed: Light fabrics. Lean silhouettes punctuated with oversize ones. Some models even carried little ceramics. There was silver jewellery in abstract bean shapes, a la Peretti. Same, same, same.

(I can’t speak on the specifics of Khaite here, because I was pointedly not invited to Catherine Holstein’s show in response to my February review.)

Many of these brands make beautiful clothes and pieces that can be worn again and again. Good! But does that warrant a fashion show? And if this woman is so discerning, is she really going to buy all these clothes?

Bluntly: Do we need this?

You look at something like Calvin Klein, where Veronica Leoni showed her second collection as creative director, and the clothes were a marked improvement from February but are still lacking and often silly. (A gown of woven Calvin Klein underwear waistbands, suits that look too self-consciously fashion-y for real life, a self-serious bathrobe coat that just looks like a bathrobe.)

Major celebrities like Rosalia and Lily Collins are in the front row, which costs a lot for hair, makeup and tailoring alone, and you look at all these clothes and think: For what? Who will buy these clothes? Especially when there’s something like McManus or Fforme (which are the two worth pulling out for their superior design and ideas), and she’s already shopping at Europe’s Lemaire and the Row?

Designer Adam Lippes, now famous for dressing Melania Trump, does this right: a casual presentation in his ornate salon, where you can run your fingers over the silky knit lining of a sequin top that ensures you feel a supple caress instead of the prick of a sequin’s underbelly. Not everyone has Lippes moola, but the woman who is really nuts about how seams are done, which colours blend and whether the moire fabric is a print or the real McCoy will shell out for his clothes, and do, and they don’t need a runway show and celebrity placements to tell them to do it.

You wonder whether retailers should work with designers (as Printemps did with Willy Chavarria, and Moda Operandi often does with newer designers) to speak directly to this customer instead of turning Fashion Week into the New York Taste Wars.

At any rate, the onslaught of brands pandering to this woman is oppressive and misleading. If you walk around New York, you see people wearing all kinds of great stuff: cowboy boots, skinny jeans pulled low with doubled belts over exposed underwear, layered neon tights and wackadoo hats.

The upshot here may be that more smartly designed or sophisticated dresses, trousers and workwear will then float down and out to the Everlanes, Zaras and Uniqlos of the world. But Zac Posen is already waving his magic wand at the Gap and Old Navy, and Clare Waight Keller is installed at Uniqlo. Cos has in its store right now clothes that look like what these brands sent down the runway yesterday. (And Cos did a runway show Sunday. Ay!)

If Ralph Lauren, the biggest and only global name in American luxury, looks similar to the brands that are trying to stake a claim on the very well-off, discerning customer with a special knowledge of fashion and rarefied taste, you know we’re in trouble.

No one knows how to make New York Fashion Week appealing or vivacious, though certainly the Council of Fashion Designers of America has tried. A start would be getting the avant-garde heavy hitters either back into the game - Marc Jacobs, Telfar and even Carolina Herrera, which this season decamped for Spain - or in the mix for the first time, like Eli Russell Linnetz and his temple to Californian sleaze ERL.

And the CFDA probably needs to shell out money to get more international journalists in the mix. Sorry to sound like a Henry James narrator, but exposure to the international opinion widens one’s view and improves the posture.

New York hasn’t all been taste and waste. The two standout shows of the weekend, Anna Sui and Eckhaus Latta, went way more niche, which when done with authority is more universal.

As I observed last season: Sui is an American icon of fashion, the patron saint of creativity and charm. She started this collection by rewatching a film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She thought of Lawrence in Taos, then realized Millicent Rogers popped in and out and remembered Dennis Hopper also came to the New Mexico town around the time he married Michele Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. What an adventure! Her mix of western and prairie jackets and details, 1930s ditzy prints and boudoir pieces was inspiring, spunky and just plain delightful. Sui reminds us that this fashion stuff is supposed to be fun.

Later Saturday afternoon, Eckhaus Latta showed what will probably be the best collection of New York Fashion Week: the uniform for today’s New Yorker. Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta have never spoken with such a big, authoritative thwack; you think of their customer as a supporting character in New York or LA. But actually, as cities big and small become overtaken with capital and corporatization, there are a huge number of people who don’t want to dress like consultants or stand in a three-hour line for gussied-up overpriced food or whatever else mainstream consumer culture means today.

Think about all the money that has been spent at revitalizing these monumental American brands to shake up the cosmopolitan uniform - there was the failed tenure of Peter Do at Helmut Lang and now Leoni at Calvin Klein - and then look at how simple, wearable but modern 14-year-old Eckhaus Latta looks. Now that people are returning to the office, but also not really, Latta and Eckhaus know there’s no “desk to dinner” - it’s just looking good and feeling good all the time. (The brand is nominated this year for a well-deserved CFDA award for menswear designer of the year.)

The other name to watch here is Nicholas Aburn, who made his debut at AREA on Friday. There was some sloppy stuff (cheapo ropes of rhinestones sculpted into dresses, gift ribbon gowns) but there were also some freaky ensembles that may make the MTV Video Music Awards red carpets look less silly. Hey: At least Aburn is not afraid to make silly, nasty clothes. So tasteless - in the best way.

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