Fashion Takes a Pass on the Apple Watch

If you hold an Apple event during New York Fashion Week, the fashion crowd will follow along via their Twitter timelines when they're not trawling Tumblr for shots of their own street style or Instagram for videos from the exclusive Alutzarra show.

But to expect them to leave their equivalent of CES to fly to California and look at a watch? When they would otherwise have been under a Lincoln Center tent admiring the latest from Rodarte or Oscar de la Renta? Mais non! And yet, near the stage in Cupertino on Tuesday were fashion magazine scions Emmanuelle Alt, editor of French Vogue, and Franca Sozzani, editor of Italian Vogue.

Apple succeeded in getting them, along with style icon Gwen Stefani and others, out from under those Lincoln Center tents and into its big white box at the Flint Center. Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic at the New York Times passed to keep her front-row spot at the shows. Sozzani summed it up, "[O]ne day you're at fashion shows in NY and the next morning you find yourself at the center of the universe of innovation."

But was it worth it? Well, the Apple Watch is a bit of a disappointment, from a design point of view, despite Jony Ive's breathy, overblown overview that included phrases like "the simple leather classic buckle references traditional watch vocabulary." The three versions (Apple Watch, Apple Watch Sport, and Apple Watch Edition) have mix-and-match bands and metals that go a long way toward giving it some style. The Edition, its price still undisclosed, is obviously built to lure. But even with a fancy band, an Apple Watch still looks like any other smartwatch out there. Its changeable face can be the Mickey Mouse of your childhood timepiece or a graceful animated butterfly, but the UI looks like a game of Dots. For something that will be so frequently in the eye of its beholder, it's not beautiful.

So far, the fashion press has largely declined to comment on its looks. Alexandra Shulman, editor-in-chief of British Vogue, focused on its functionality while praising the iPhone 6 as "gorgeous." Suzy Menkes, international editor for Vogue, said: "From a fashion point of view, the external aesthetic seemed neutral: neither super-stylish nor repellent. I would imagine that geeks would love it more than aesthetes." Olivier Zahm, founder of Purple, wearing the watch on Instagram, wrote "Corporate selfie with the Apple Watch." Elle magazine blogged, "Apple has unveiled the Apple Watch and the iPhone 6. So why does ELLE care?" The post sums up a few of the key features but says the "watch has a clean white band and iPad-like face." Nobody wants to hear that they have an iPad-like face.

During a Wednesday evening event in New York, Stacy London, co-host of What Not to Wear, told PCMag that she feels the merging of fashion and technology is inevitable. She praised Apple for its watch but said that she expects it to follow the path of the iPhone and improve and evolve over time. "I'll wait for the Apple Watch 10," she said.

Silicon Valley might shrug at this tepid response, but Apple knows fashion's acceptance of technology is crucial. Otherwise it would not have hired Burberry's Angela Ahrendts or Saint Laurent Paris's Paul Deneve or put on its version of a runway show yesterday.

Fashion at the highest echelons ultimately rules what so many others eventually wear, as fictional fashion editor Miranda Priestly of the The Devil Wears Prada delineates so well in a monologue about the design origins of a schlumpy blue sweater. All of Apple except for Ive could tune out during her speech except for the conclusion: "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 a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff."

For more, check out PCMag's hands on with the Apple Watch, as well as 5 Reasons the Apple Watch Is a Winner and Why I Won't Buy an Apple Watch.