Tonight I attended the MILRSO fashion show. MILRSO stands for Minority Industrial Labor Relations Student Organization. They put on a fashion show every year. 

I heard about this fashion show through an e-mail, and it sounded interesting. I was particularly intrigued when I read in the promotion that the famous fashion designer Donna Karen would be there. So would some famous comedian from New York City. Since I like fashion, and I wanted to see the Donna Karen, I figured I’d go. So I talked my friend Charles into going and we went. Of course, I was making sure I wrote my favorite DKNY (Donna Karen New York) shirt.

The doors were to open at 7pm, so Chuck and I arrived around 6:45. Around 8pm, the doors opened. We sat there for a while and around 8:30 the fashion show began.

Let me start by addressing the models, because that was probably the factor that pissed me off singularly more than anything else. Basically, they sucked. Now, I know they were only students, but you would think that if they had volunteered (or worse, been chosen) to be models, they would have at least practiced, or known what the hell they were doing.

Let me back up. Most people probably think that being a model isn’t rocket science. What do you do? You put some clothes on and walk down a runway, right? Not too tough. Now, I agree that it isn’t rocket science, but it is harder than it looks.

First, there’s the walk. You have to do the walk right. Almost none of the models tonight did the walk right. I think there was basically one or two women who had it – none of the men got it right. It’s all about the hips and the one foot in front of the other. Anyone who has spent some time watching the Fashion Channel (like myself) knows this.

Second, there’s the attitude, or lack there of. This is a subtly that I only now realize after seeing how bad models can be. A good runway model has attitude, but at the same time seems utterly emotionless. A good runway model should not draw attention to him/herself. His/her personality should be unknown to the observers. They are not modeling themselves; they are modeling the clothing. At tonight’s show, the models almost exclusively had one focus – themselves. They did not care about the clothes; they cared about how “cool” they were acting on the runway.

This is bad for a couple of reasons, the most important being that it is distracting. When someone is trying to evaluate a new fashion design, s/he does not want to be distracted by the model doing something stupid, like pulling a scarf from inside his pants. (Yes, this happened.)

Finally, most of the models up there had no business modeling. Now I don’t want to sound like an asshole here, but some of these girls were just too large to make the clothes look appealing. In fact, there were only one or two female models up there who had any business modeling clothing on a runway. The men, on the other hand, were all built quite well for modeling. As a result, there was a bizarre disproportion between the male and female models. This made things even more distracting. Again, if someone has to look away as a result of the size of a girl’s ass, then this is distracting him/her from the fashion. It also caused some of the designs to look like giant table clothes or tents rather than dresses.

That’s probably about all I have to say about the models. They were simply horrendous. I could have done a better job up there. There was literally only one model, who happened to be a female, who looked like she knew what she was doing up there and belonged.

The designs? Some were good, some were bad – much like any fashion show. The men’s designs were generally uninteresting to me, but there were a few nice suits. There were a number of good dresses, on the other hand. As far as the designs are concerned, my biggest complaint is that there were not enough. There were only like 3 or 4 sets. The actual designs probably took up thirty minutes of time. The rest of the time was spent with various dancing groups performing and doing mindless shout-outs to the minority fraternities and sororities and the various classes.

All in all, I would have to say that it was a fairly disappointing night. I love fashion shows, but I think that I could have put on a better one with my eyes closed. How sad.

Oh, about that famous NYC comedian and Donna Karen: Neither showed up. (Lucky them.)