I can probably count the number of fashion shows I’ve been to on two hands. I’m not going to pretend I’m some kind of authority; I’ve only been around since 2008, and I readily admit that the clothes side of fashion doesn’t really get me excited (and yes, there are other sides to fashion). In fact, I used to think of fashion week as being a bit of a spoiler that stopped the online flow of editorials. What I do remember from attending these shows and spending time with the journalists and editors who attend them, is that they all have real opinions that they loudly voice as soon as the show is over. “That was awful! Ew, did you see those jank bracelets he made them wear? That was all styling—there was no design aspect. Let’s go to La Perle for a bière.” In fact, the arguments people have on tumblr about Raf being overrated and Riccardo being hit-and-miss are eerily similar to the conversations had by editors of very important websites. Every fashion week, the one recurring motif was the bombardment of complaints that “everything is going downhill; nothing is original; it’s the same every season; I can’t think of one stand out” etc. I agreed, since I only truly liked a handful of the collections I saw, until this fashion week (read: month). I haven’t really done the whole study-up-on-the-past bit that’s apparently necessary to put everything into context, but I’d like to say that this menswear fashion week was the best I’ve ever seen. It was consistently extraordinary, from the music, to the bags, to the hair, to the shoes, to the padding (which, we’ll get to later). So let this be my first official series of reviews, starting from the best.