Project Reject

Obey icon necklace $76, 80s Purple.com

“See that chick in the front row?” I nudge my friend Lilly, leaning forward so my toes dip into tip of my croco-stamped pumps.

“Yeah?” Her eyebrows arch, brushing blond bangs.

“That’s the second cousin of the sister of an extra’s assistant from America’s Next Top Model, three seasons ago.”

Her giggle drowns in the sea of chatter around us, a busy foam of noise swirling as people’s voices bump into bodies.

“Excuse me,” says a woman borrowing Britney’s faux Brit accent. She walks through the aisle to her fifth-row seat, her purse proudly designer stamped, but her posture of pride a knock-off.

“Excused,” I reply, stepping out of her way. I look outside the wet windows, for a smeared view of a street cramped with a generically downtown New York vibe: T-shirts reading Deja Vu are housed in a glossy store window that lights up a grimy dumpster. On the sidewalk a line of people still stand in the rain, making a fuzzy caterpillar of open umbrellas, lacking tje spine to just walk up to the door, drop a faceless name, and enter the dark, crowded space.

Dim bulbs are nestled into the room’s ceiling, but mostly light glows off the bright white runway, bouncing off wet coats and patent bags and shiny shoes, soaked up by rough brick walls. 30-something-year-old boys and girls pose in last season’s hipster hip, like kids dressed in their older sibling’s designer duds. I look at the bunches of bobbed hair in the room, and finger my own cropped cut.

I’ll ask my stylist about hair extensions next time I see her.

I reach for my mirror to imagine what my flapper fluff of curls would look like longer, but the lights blank out before booming bright again on stage, pulsing with frantic music.

A model catwalks out, all stiff joints and smooth muscle. “The body type these models project is terrible,” I whisper to Lilly. “They look healthy. If they were an ideal weight, I’d want to throw up the lunch I didn’t eat.” But I overcome my disgust and eye the clothes they wear: the shirts’ and skirts’ simple shapes are so comfortably familiar they fall short of cool minimalism. Each piece seems to circle around last year’s trends, so that the march of models becomes a line of zeroes. “What do you think?” I ask Lilly.

“Not bad,” she says. “Not good.”

“Very vanilla,” I agree. I watch another dress file out, and it looks like the combined echo of thousands of dresses I’ve seen before. “If you’re not going to strive for the best, why not f**k up really good? I’d rather ruin my life snorting coke off a model’s stomach in Monte Carlo, running myself into debt traveling the world than being B grade.”

The final breathing mannequin loops back to behind the stage. Clumps of the audience stand up clapping, and more people follow as they see the others rise. I check the time on my iPhone.

“That was great,” says a bottle blond next to me. “It was like last season’s Chloe with a little of Stella McCartney and sort of with elements of Chanel? With evening shorts as the new evening shorts? And the models’ hair was great. Like natural but not trying too hard to seem natural?”

Kind of like your mousy brown roots, I think. I yawn, and my mind stretches open for a moment with my mouth:

Maybe I should start writing about sports. Like that one with all the men playing with balls.

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