Designers continue their autumn parade of buzzkill video presentations—perhaps it's a bit of stylish self-loathing. Like Kenneth Anger's clip for Missoni, Proenza Schouler has found in Harmony Korine a director as likely to deride fashion as anything other subject he's tackled through the years. Korine has made a career of filming teenage despair in movies like Kids and Gummo, and hired to show off Schouler's Fall 2010 line, he sticks to what he knows, giving us a bleak narration from a young girl and seemingly undercutting the optimism that's usually necessary to sell thousand-dollar dresses. The whole thing is, in truth, a send-up of the industry, a messy critique of fashion's affair with exploitation and aesthetic poverty, and what Korine apparently believes is expensive superficiality in the face of much more important problems.
