This past Sunday, I attended the Moncler Grenoble FW 2010 presentation, and being a bag person, I was immediately drawn towards the use of fanny packs. Let’s just say it was rather extensive. Models stood motionless on four levels of scaffolding; spotlights shone on different groups of them to the tune of classical and opera music. I daresay it was all very dramatic and lovely, since I’m a personal fan of Moncler, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the fanny packs.

I’ll be blunt: Marc Jacobs is New York Fashion Week. It’s the show that everyone wants to go to and no one can stop talking about, and it may have produced more activity from the people I follow on Twitter than the Super Bowl. In a way, I suppose, it’s sort of the same thing, just for a vastly different group of people.

In my mind, there are two types of designers: those that make us think about fashion and its relationship to philosophy and art, and those that make fashion accessible and wearable to the average fashion fan. Each pursuit has its own challenges, but it’s without question that Diane Von Furstenberg has the second type of clothing on lock.

Menswear was a dominant theme in DVF’s Fall/Winter 2010 collection, but it was styled in such a way that it would be totally accessible and wearable outside of an office setting.

Does anyone remember a little film called The Craft, a tale of four goth-y, snarky teen witches and the classmates that they hated? You have to think back almost 15 years, to a time when I was merely a tween exploring my burgeoning love of black clothing that I have come to embrace now, at this later juncture in my life.

Do you feel that special tingle in the air? Smell that scent – the combined perfumes of a thousand magazine editors and well-heeled fashionistas, waiting impatiently in an enclosed space? Sense the Earth itself spinning ever-so-slightly, almost imperceptibly out of its natural orbit? Only one thing can be to blame: the advent of New York Fashion Week.

While my compatriots up north trudge through the snow and wait on line for the crashers in front of them to get turned away, I’ll be lounging in my climate-controlled apartment, eating pita chips and drinking white wine that came from a screw-top bottle (I’m not ashamed).

A day before the Rebecca Minkoff Fall 2010 presentation was slated to begin, Rebecca herself tweeted, “Who is afraid of a little snow??? The show must go on!” Well, that was before “a little snow” turned out to be a full-on blizzard that was enough to close all public and private schools and universities in Manhattan save for Columbia University (thanks guys.)

Therefore, if I was going to have classes as the snow frantically swirled around the city, I was going to make it to the Rebecca Minkoff presentation.

Alexander McQueen, magnificent designer and creative role model to thousands of fashion lovers, has died of an apparent suicide. He was 40 years old.

It would be disingenuous, at this juncture, to speculate about what McQueen’s legacy will be or what impact his all-too-soon death will have, but if there is one thing I can say for sure, it’s that the world still needs Alexander McQueen.

To finish out Paris Couture Week, I thought it might be nice to have something that’s not at all intellectual or challenging. If as many of you guys go out on Thursday nights as the people in my group of friends, then Friday morning is not the time to be looking at and making sense of Difficult Fashion. No no, Friday is the time for obvious things.

To (very loosely) paraphrase the great Raymond Carver, Jean Paul Gaultier is what we talk about when we talk about couture. In a week of shows that have left me at times both dazzled and underwhelmed (Valentino, I’m looking at you), Gaultier showed up just in time to remind us all exactly why we’re here: because only a handful of people on the face of the planet are capable of so masterfully creating clothes that make us dream.

I’m…I’m underwhelmed. And a little sad, maybe. But mostly confused. Is this what Valentino Haute Couture is supposed to look like? Are they serious? I think we’ve been tricked. Fooled. Bamboozled.

It kind of reminds me of what would happen if Balenciaga and Valentino had a baby (the term ‘Valenciaga’ has already been coined elsewhere, I can’t take credit for it), and a few of the tight minidresses are reminiscent of Herve Leger, particularly with the neon inserts that were also in the previous Leger spring collection.