Fashion Week begins, so does industry’s angst over its existence

NEW YORK — On Thursday evening, the informal start of Fashion Week, the first of the womenswear designers had just unspooled a beautiful collection of wearable, desirable and creative clothes, not on a runway but at a small dinner party at La Mercerie downtown, when the nagging question that haunts the fashion industry was verbalized: Does fashion matter?

What other global industry is so frightfully insecure about its place, not just in the culture but in the economy?

Of course, fashion matters — otherwise we would all be hemp-wearing drones shu±ing about in a world drained of color, tactile pleasures and self-expression. But there is no doubt that fashion is grappling with a delivery system that’s quickly becoming obsolete and a level of consumption that is grotesque and unsustainable. The recent announcement by Macy’s that it was closing 125 stores, about one-fifth of its total, could not have surprised anyone who wandered through one of the company’s department stores over the recent holidays.

The experience was painfully depressing — from the lean customer service to the downright ugly merchandise. There was little to recommend an in-store experience.

But there’s good reason to consider the work of a designer such as Rachel Comey, who isn’t aiming to dress the entire universe and who isn’t trying to cater to those cutthroat bargain hunters who believe an entire wardrobe should be theirs for a buck and some change.

She isn’t creating fashion with sweeping gestures and outré silhouettes that spark lots of hoots and hollers but not much else.

She offers a quiet and thoughtful assessment of the ways in which fashion can have deep personal — and public —resonance.

Fashion alone, some dress hanging on a rack, is mindless frippery.

But when a garment shares space with the breadth of a woman’s avocations — when it can provide desperately needed warmth during a winter march for equal justice, when it can be a loving gift from one friend to another in a moment of emotional need, when it serves as a visual keepsake of a momentous day — well then, fashion matters, sometimes more than words.