Image via Complex Original
1.
Working for a company that owns and produces an international tradeshow affords me a lot of luxuries. For one, being able to live in the greatest city in the world—New York. Suck it, everywhere else! I also get to travel from time to time to cosmopolitan centers of culture like Paris and Berlin. And, once a year, I get to fly five hours to the middle of the hottest part of the country during the hottest month of the year to breathe in recycled air in ballrooms and convention centers while looking at clothes and rubbing elbows with people I see every week in more civilized and livable environments.
I’m talking, of course, about Las Vegas during market week in August.
Once upon a time, years ago, someone decided that late summer would be a great time to bring brands, retailers and editors from around the world to the desert. And so, here we are today.
Now, before you get too jealous of my impending trip, let me preface it with a quick Q&A regarding some tried and true facts about Sin City.
Is the food in Las Vegas absurdly overpriced and shockingly mediocre?
Yes.
Do the Jabbawockeez have a residency at the Monte Carlo where people presumably pay money to see them perform regularly?
Yes.
Is the greater Las Vegas area home to a menacing population of meth-addicted desert people waiting on the outskirts of town for a drunk sorority girl to wander off the strip and fall into the clutches of a vicious sex trafficking ring?
Yes.
Is Las Vegas the closest thing this lapsed Catholic has seen to hell on earth, including the time he was forced to attend a lecture given by Naomi Judd?
Definitely.
And yet, here I am on the eve of my trip, finding myself actually genuinely excited to return to this cultural wasteland. I’m such a bundle of contradictions, guys! Like a younger, slightly less muscled Sean Avery. Yes, slightly less muscled, assholes.
I suppose I have many reasons for enjoying Las Vegas in all its smutty glory. Maybe it’s the midget Mr. T impersonator I once saw asking passersby's if they’d like to blow rails of cocaine off his head. Perhaps it’s the group of British-Indian ladies on their hen night who threatened to bitch slap me if I didn’t take off my pants immediately. Or maybe it was the 6 foot tall stripper with thick glasses and an even thicker Midwestern accent who I watched search the club for her “money making scrunchie” that she accidentally sent flying across the room whilst giving a particularly vigorous lapdance. Or it could be that her stage name was Susan.
But ultimately the greatest thing about Las Vegas is that it may be the one place where the fashion industry convenes annually where it’s not only acceptable to surrender to your most hedonistic, unfortunate, ultimately regrettable impulses, it’s actually advisable. You wouldn’t catch any of these people in a two story megaclub in Manhattan, and yet, you’re guaranteed to run into people you know from work at one of the gaudy market week parties held at places with names like XS and Marquee.
Even strolling through casinos at all hours of the night, you can find high-profile buyers red-faced and chain-smoking over the craps tables, mixed in between an obese forty-year-old woman in a two-sizes-too-small body con dress and a bro with a tribal tattoo peeking out of his pit-stained “going out” shirt. You can exchange knowing glances with elder statesmen of the editorial community as they creep to the cab stand after stumbling out of a bottle-service only party at Lavo hosted by one of the lesser Kardashians.
Vegas is America, in all its white trash glory, and sometimes it’s good for fashion types to leave the relative comfort of a major metropolitan area to be reminded of just what that looks like. Mostly so we know how good it is to go home.
After all, we can’t miss you, if we don’t go away. See you next week, New York.
Steve Dool is a writer based in New York City. Follow him on Twitter.