You posters out there screaming about the unreality of the clothes presented in many of the fashion shows are missing the point. The goal of these shows is to attract attention from the editors of major magazines who will then publicize and hype the work in a system where merit is often based on who's designs are the most creative, daring, captivating, outrageous, etc, etc. This is performance art, people.

It should also be stated that the overwhelming majority of revenue for most designer names comes from perfume sales and their ready-to-wear collections, not the stuff you see prancing down the runway. How do RTW lines garner sales from their image conscious customer base? From the press that the name or label receivee from their runway, and from the image that their shows establish.

Lindsay's big problem is that she failed to put on a piece of theater. There are a lot of messed up people in fashion; if she had pulled off a successful collection, nobody would've batted an eye. Unfortunately, what she (and Ungaro, who should really take most of the blame) did was to put out a bunch of eminently wearable and uncreative pieces that one could easily find at any point in the past six years at any mall in middle America. In a nutshell, they failed to be innovative and daring, and therefore they failed to entertain and amuse the fashion elite.