Editor’s Note: Introducing The Etceterist, the byline for the new style-world infiltrator for wowOwow.com, who will post deliciously anonymous weekly musings vis-à-vis the glamorous goings-on in the worlds of fashion and culture. Who is The Etceterist? Some may guess, but we prefer to stay silent, except to pronounce that there is no more inside insider in the worlds of art, beauty, society and culture.   

“Tribal chic,” Christian Dior designer John Galliano told the press, explaining the African drums, the high plaited hair at his show. “A faded sweetness at Nina Ricci,” declared the International Herald Tribune of the collection designed by Olivier Theyskens. The spring/summer 2009 fashion collections that began in New York two weeks ago moved on to London, then Milan, and are in the home stretch in Paris this week.

How queer, in the ancient sense of the word, it must feel to sit in the front row while the financial world implodes. How weird? Via mobile, we asked Vanessa Friedman, Manhattan born and Princeton educated, who for the past dozen years has covered the collections and the retail and consumer business affairs as fashion critic for the Financial Times.

THE ETECETERIST: Where are you now?

VANESSA FRIEDMAN: I am walking on the Rue de Seine on my way to the Ann Demeulemeester show.

ETC: The Financial Times is not a newspaper known for denial. What is it like for you as the newspaper’s critic to attend the shows, considering what is going on in the world this week?

VF: It is surreal, but it is surreal for everyone. I was just at our Paris office and one of the editors asked, “How come no one is panicked?” I think we are all proceeding as business as usual probably because no one else knows what else to do. Do you throw up your arms in the air and say no more skirts?

ETC: Are you able to enjoy any of the collections at all? See things that you like?

VF: Yes. I mean, despite everything there have been some pretty great collections — Balenciaga was great, Junya Watanabe was beautiful, Yohji Yamamoto was very nice, in Milan I liked Marni a lot, Prada and Fendi — but with so much else going on, the enthusiasm isn’t reaching critical mass. Every time you leave a fashion show, you are reminded of the real-world situation and things go flat.

ETC: You wrote recently that “just writing 2009 seems a bit weird, who the hell knows what the consumer world will look like five months from now, when these clothes arrive in store and big executive payoffs have ended.”

VF: When you talk to the global luxury business executives they will tell you that everything is fine. By which they mean, their last quarter results were fine but clearly that is going to change as the reverberations of what happens in the United States continue to impact all the markets and they experience turbulence and fall. No one knows what is going to happen. But then, just a few days ago, I reported a conversation I had in Milan with Jimmy Choo executive Josh Shulman who said that their Los Angeles and New York stores are having better sales than ever right now.

ETC: The holidays will tell the tale, don’t you think?

VF: Maybe the luxury customer won’t buy a mink coat but she will buy a mink bag? Clothing is a constant. You need it as you do food and shelter. But how will people adjust, how will they spend? No one really knows.

ETC: Do you have any professional advice?

VF: God, no.

ETC: No, because you are too polite, or no because you don’t know?