Occupy Wall Street Plans Fashionable Fashion Week Protest
It's surprising that Occupy Wall Street hasn't yet paid a proper visit to New York Fashion Week, that sparkly distillation of all things 1%. That will change tomorrow, when Occupy Wall Street marches on the last day of Fashion Week, and perhaps attempts to shut down a Calvin Klein show.
Occupy Wall Street plans to arrive at the Calvin Klein show at West 39th St. tomorrow at 2pm, after a long march from lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. There, they hope to convince 99 attendees of the first of Calvin Klein's two shows to wear dripping red eye makeup, highlighting the plight of the 99 percent in appropriately fashion-y fashion. The red eyes are meant to show solidarity with those students drenched in pepper spray at UC Davis last year, Occupy Wall Street organizer Justin Stone-Diaz told me in a phone interview today.
Occupy Wall Street will have a booth for sympathetic show-goers to get made up. They'll also stage their own Occupy Wall Street fashion show outside Lincoln Center, set, we imagine, to the pounding beat of a drum circle.
But: If protesters don't reach their 99-people-in-red-eye-makeup quota for the 2pm Calvin Klein show, things could get much more heated during the 3pm one.
"If there aren't 99 people at the two o'clock show, we'll decide how we're going to close down [the three o'clock show]," Stone-Diaz said. (And as we've found out, it's not as hard as you might imagine to infiltrate a fashion show.) Occupy Wall Street is always organizationally complex, and in this case the actual shutting down of Calvin Klein will be accomplished by an autonomous entity called the the Queer Transgender Direct Action group, if it happens, according to Stone-Diaz.
The goal of tomorrow's action is to bring the conversation about the 99 percent to the fashion elite, Stone-Diaz said, because the fashion world is too obsessed with the few celebrity designers who show at Fashion Week or appear on reality TV.
"As occupiers, we don't really understand that world the way the people in the fashion industry do," he said. "We know there are people in the fashion world who are going through the same problems we are. A lot of our friends in fashion don't have health insurance, they're working in weird situations."
Occupy Wall Street is a bit last season at this point, but maybe this will spark some interest. We'll be there, to document the meeting of Fashion Week and Occupy Wall Street, two groups opposed in every way except their affinity for tents.
[Image via Getty]