Whatever... Eurotrash: Carolina Herrera

Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief

Badgley Mischka, fall 2010

I remember sitting on the terrace of our student residence in Florence that muggy pomeriggio in July, chain-smoking and passionately discussing our latest creation: eurotrash. OK, we obviously didn't invent the word, but we slaved night and day on that terrace to wrest it from the derogatory connotations of kitschy Brünos who listen to euro beats and whatever comes up when you enter the search term "eurotrash" on Google Images. Yeehaw!

Although the prospect of ever fully disclosing the secret to being OUR definition of eurotrash is an unlikely one, considering it's taken us over six years to hone, once in a while we like to let our readers in on some of the things that were said on that terrace.

For this eurotrash girl, being eurotrash meant envisioning her life like a huge book of pictures in which various scenarios called for a certain type of sunlight, a certain street, and a certain outfit. It didn't matter what was happening in the pictures; what mattered was how it looked when it happened. How her black scarf contrasted the hints of blonde in her hair picked up by the sun reflecting off the shop windows along Bloor St or how at 6pm her crisp white juicy hoodie transformed a long day out at sea into a tan as she stepped onto the dock.

Tippi Hedren in The Birds

This fall, it seems that some designers have taken their inspiration from the 'how it looked when it happened' handbook: Alfred Hitchcock movies. Sure, it definitely mattered what happened in these famous murder mysteries, but every time I try to remember the plot of The Birds I first picture Tippi Hedren's pea green suit and bleach blonde hair, and only then does it all come back to me. Here are some Hitchcockian leading ladies and the fall ready-to-wear designers who know a thing or two about the eurotrash subconscious: