A normal person’s guide to a Fashion Week runway show

In one of the most dynamic runway shows last fall, Thom Browne ended his Paris presentation with a model dressed in white guiding an enormous unicorn puppet. Two dancers, padded like marshmallows, had opened the show, flitting and twirling across the wooden floor of the majestic City Hall. In between, models crept precariously atop daunting heels in exquisite attire one could never wear to the neighborhood market.

What is a casual consumer of fashion supposed to make of such a sight?

Browne does not like to explain his shows. Interpretation, he has said, is up to the beholder.

Not that long ago, the only people who would get to see such a fantastical presentation were fashion industry insiders and the journalists who cover that world. Now, however, some of the most theatrical and esoteric runway shows can be viewed by virtually anyone. Sponsors and charities enable those with a healthy bank account to buy their way into a show. Fashion houses live-stream their presentations, and journalists upload show videos almost before the designer has taken a bow – or you can see pretty much the entirety of a collection on Instagram.

When runway shows veer toward the more experimental, they can be as confounding as expressionist art or atonal music. What does it mean? What is the point? Doesn’t anyone offer the equivalent of “music appreciation” classes to help a newcomer make sense of fashion?

A few fundamentals can make the experience more rewarding — or, at least, less exasperating.

As the fall 2018 runway shows begin in New York this week, some will be a straightforward parade of models in expensive but familiar-looking clothes, presenting a simple idea: This is what I will offer for sale next season.

Most designers need to project and to exaggerate so that their message reaches the cheap seats — or at least the most oversaturated viewers. Tom Ford sells glamour and sex appeal to a confident, sophisticated customer. But on the runway, he turns up the volume. Nipples are visible, blazers are worn over bras, models wear tops but no bottoms. He forces the observer to ask: Is that acceptable? Is that decent?

Others have more complicated aspirations. Prabal Gurung says he wants to connect his runway show to the broader cultural conversation. Alexander Wang treats his presentations as parties — emphasizing the street-cool, nightlife-loving attitude of his clothes. Tommy Hilfiger has used the runway as an enormous Instagram backdrop, organizing a two-day carnival for his fall 2016 collection. Marc Jacobs crafts a mysterious fairy tale – sometimes with provocative music, or more recently with a soundtrack of silence.

But whether the shows are straightforward or avant-garde, they leave many civilians with questions:

Why don’t the models smile? (Because they are in character, and have been given directions by the designer to appear strong, confident, tough, aloof, nonchalant, whatever.)

Why are they walking so fast? (Because speed exudes energy and urgency. And when there are 10 shows in a single day, dawdling is annoying.)

What’s with all the weird stuff? (Wouldn’t you get bored looking at little black dresses?)

Who would wear that? (Plenty of folks, maybe just not you.)

“A novice should simply sit and enjoy a fashion show — not over-intellectualize it or under-intellectualize it,” says Browne. “Everyone should have their own opinion to what they see in fashion shows. A good fashion show provokes some type of emotion, some type of feeling. A good fashion show you should either love or hate.”

The mushy middle is forgettable. Dispassion is failure.

Designers have been staging runway shows in New York since the 1940s when a rudimentary version of fashion week was established by the publicist Eleanor Lambert. A new book from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, “American Runway: 75 Years of Fashion and the Front Row,” celebrates this tradition, noting the cultural shifts that have transformed the runway, and the simple mechanics of how a show works, from set construction to the models’ facial expressions.

It’s written by Booth Moore, who has covered the fashion industry for the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Reporter, reviewing countless runway shows over a decade. Still, her research left her surprised by both the amount of planning and the inevitable chaos that epitomize these productions.

“As slick as it looks online, there’s this high school musical element to it,” Moore says.

For designers determined to tell a whimsical story or challenge the prevailing wisdom, an audience must suspend disbelief, as with a novel that indulges in magical realism.

“Why a unicorn on the runway in Paris — at this moment in history?” she asks rhetorically. “You’re not meant to take everything at face value.”

Browne, she notes, “takes a certain delight in making you feel uncomfortable.” And Marc Jacobs tries “to take you out of your comfort zone, make you scratch your head and say, ‘Whaaaat?’ ” That’s why those designers don’t offer show notes to explain their source of inspiration.