Goats and Charles Manson Kick Off New York Fashion Week: Men’s

Sometimes an observer can be forgiven for thinking that New York Fashion Week: Men’s may be a satire scripted by Tina Fey and filmed undercover for Netflix.

You wake up, for instance, on a hot summer Monday, take the train to an industrial studio space in the far West Village, and find a paparazzi mob clustered around a heavily tattooed man with an Eraserhead hairdo, a navy blazer, a pair of dropped-crotch shorts and an Instagram following numbering 464,000. Cameras are going off madly, the shutterbugs behind them photographing this man’s footwear.

You register to obtain an all-access wristband from a vacant young fellow holding an iPad and wearing a little too much eyeliner, and then step into a ground-floor studio where a group of models lined up perp-style against a wall is exhibiting a collection of what look like ladies’ pajamas and culottes.

The models are men, of course, because this is the first day of the revived New York men’s wear presentations — a format not seen here in over a decade and a nod to the growing importance of male consumers to an industry that mostly ignored them for decades.

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The models include some of the hottest runway names of the moment, among them a towheaded 17-year-old Englishman namedCharlie James, a Karl Lagerfeld favorite whose trademark is what, in this viewer’s teenage years, was known as metal mouth.

Along with his dental braces, Mr. James was wearing shiny blue trousers cropped to midcalf, a shiny crinkly orange rain slicker and a shirt printed with a goat-and-tire-trucks pattern resembling the curtains in a toddler’s bedroom. His outfit, as its designer, Jackson McKeehan, explained, was inspired in a general way by family values — specifically, the von Trapp and the Manson families.

"I love the idea of turning curtains into play clothes!" said Mr. McKeehan, the designer behind Boyswear (one of five labels showing in the morning), as Mr. James sang along to a recorded track playing "The Sound of Music."

"I was into ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ theme" from that movie, Mr. McKeehan added — hence, the many goat motifs in the collection — referring to a tune with the notable lyric refrain "Lay-ee odl lay-ee odl-oo."

Further design inspiration for what was, after all, an imaginatively oddball collection that ran heavily to culottes and cropped boxy shapes and overalls that buttoned down the front and was titled "Manson Family Singers" came from the Charles Manson tune "Garbage Dump."

A spoken word refrain on that little ditty goes as follows: "Oh, but it smells / Oh, pew... yew."

Honestly, you could not make this stuff up. Or, maybe you could, if you happened to be the wizard behind a comedy series featuring an indefatigably cheery woman who spent 15 years imprisoned in an underground bunker eating beans out of a Florida Marlins cap.

"Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" was rescued, as everybody knows, and came to New York. And it would be no surprise at all to find her wandering around the showrooms and runways of another New York Fashion Week, gawping at the spectacle in childlike wonder.

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