Fashion's Night Outing

The Fashion’s Night Out bash last weekend at the Bravern in Bellevue was such a smash I scarcely minded being shamed by Elise magazine’s Borian Tchernev.

Fashion don't: Appelo. Fashion do:Tchernev.

Borian, fluent in three languages (four, counting fashion), gently said my 1999 Hugo Boss Einstein suit — slender in its day — was, basically, a flapping bag of fabric. Now suits must be imperially slim, like Borian’s. But he approved my plan to keep it until it’s fashionable again in 2019.

At least I had better taste than the owner of the Lamborghini parked in the Bravern’s driveway. Really, if you had $350,000, would you buy a lime-green car? Better taste prevailed elsewhere, such as Eye Society Vision Gallery, where I admired two pairs of remarkably lightweight sunglasses that reminded me of Porsches (Porsche cars, not Porsche sunglasses).

“They’re by IC! Berlin and Mykita,” the salesperson said. “They used to work together, now they hate each other. But they’re both great designers!” The Mykita’s temple hinge has no screw, just stainless steel sheet metal that bends in defiance of physics. I want.

The prettiest thing on display was the Bravern itself, an unusually outdoors-oriented mall. “It’s like another planet,” said C.J. Swanson, an artist hired to paint totes and tees for the event, which doubled as the Bravern’s first birthday party. “Like a spaceship. It’s all perfect, it’s all new. It’s not like Ballard.”