Miss Bea Heyvin: yeehaw chic

So I have a confession to make. I guess it's not so much a confession as it is a burr up my arse. Being from the U.S. midwest...the heartland of America, land of the free and home of the bib overall, I always feel that the 5th Avenue fashion elite...the folks who call the shots on what we'll be wearing next season, kind of thumb their fashion noses at us...like we couldn't possibly understand, influence or contribute to their industry...poor tasteless, unsophisticated neanderthals that we are. And I'll admit, I personally don't have the education or understanding of their industry, nor the interest in learning how to play the insider game enough to take it all that seriously. It reminds me of the monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep's character, Miranda Priestly torches Anne Hathaway's character with the following diatribe:

"This... stuff'? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff."

To quote motivational speaker Matt Foley, "Well lah-dee-freekin-dah". So as I was starting to saying, as I was reviewing the Spring 2011 Menswear runway shows, it occurred to me that whether fifth ave wants to admit it or not, the U.S. midwest has a significant influence on fashion...or at least acts as it's muse from time to time. See if you don't agree.