Why Opening Ceremony’s Falling Models Were the Best Thing About Fashion Week

The first look at Opening Ceremony’s spring 2016 show. Photo: Getty Images.

When the first model teetered on her high heels and fell flat on the floor on Opening Ceremony’s runway tonight, the crowd gasped and clutched its collective chest in concern and sympathy-embarrassment. When, moments later, a second model wobbled and went down, I thought, “guess OC won’t sell many heels this season” and also, “I should Tweet this” (let no one tell you fashion people don’t care).

A kind of electricity rippled through crowd, as people started to murmur, breaking the normally-stony fashion show faces. “Did she fall too?!” a stylist asked. “Is this some kind of stunt?” my Yahoo Style colleague whispered. The Refinery29 editor to my right texted her friend seated on the other side of the lush, tree-covered set, and quickly got a response: “They’re falling over here too. It’s on purpose,” just in time for a third model to take a dive, and rise to her feet with a dramatic leap, then a pirouette, and a deep backbend before strutting on. The crowd visibly relaxed, relieved to be in on the joke — this wasn’t an embarrassing disaster. It was performance art, darling.

A model/ballet dancer on Opening Ceremony’s spring 2016 runway. Photo: Instagram/@framenoir.

And so it went: models (some of whom were actually New York City Ballet dancers, we later learned), strutted down the runway, every fifth one tumbling, rising in a jeté, and prancing. At the end, the model/dancers did their synchronized choreography down the runway, making the “final dance” now a thing.

Typically, at runway shows, the crowd doesn’t emote much. Newbies and standing-room attendees might bop to the music or nudge a friend to marvel over the designs. But insiders maintain a poker face or even a scowl — think Anna Wintour behind her sunglasses — as though they are not seated comfortably while beautiful people in luxurious clothes parade for their amusement. Tonight, after the joke was revealed, they smiled, they bopped, they watched with rapt attention. Well, okay, The Sartorialist still used down moments to check his Instagram comments, and some people kept their stony faces. But for lots of us, it was a revelation. When you puncture all the pretense the surrounds it, what’s left is the pure joy of a fashion show.

A model/ballet dancer on Opening Ceremony’s spring 2016 runway. Photo: Instagram/@nicholasjamesm.

There’s an old episode of This American Life called “Fiasco.” It’s about how, when things go wrong — not just a little wrong, but really, disastrously wrong, it causes the normal social order to break down, and in its place a kind of chaotic comaraderie between strangers takes over. It’s probably too early to declare it the end of fashion’s iciness. But with tonight’s show, OC flirted with fiasco, giving us all a taste of the electricity and excitement that happens when shit goes really wrong. Then it let us in on the joke, and gave us a primer on how to give life’s tumbles a triumphant ending.

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