New York fashion week requires bravery. You have to set a grim look over your mug and walk like you know rustic. You are rushing between venues, Rodarte right after Marc Jacobs (plaid, plaid, plaid) and then there is a tree branch there that possibly wasn’t there and possibly actually isn’t even a branch. Is it a twig? Is it a limb? A limb of a person? A dead person? An undead person? Could it be the coyote that chased us the evening before, causing us all to have to double back the long way as it was growing darker, because it started trotting towards us all up the hill and then we all had to run and what if that is what the twig is going to do?

On closer inspection, it appears that it’s possibly a rock. It is not making a sound. It could have been a rock but it probably isn’t so there is quaking. If he was wearing boots, cooler, edgier, Alexander Wang boots in a vegan leatherette that are a staple for a timeless wardrobe for fall, they would have been quaking. Quaking most definitely, but without the right boots it is frozen standing in one place and not moving a muscle. Because of spookiness. It is fashion week and it is spooky and there is a danger every single place you look.

Fall 2014’s forests are bare from leaves and everything even sounds different. Tinny, not muffled, because the sound travels straight across the bare glens like an arrow shot towards your forehead. The subway runs under the sandy wash and the noise it makes is excruciating, like a vole screaming out it’s last breath when the coyote snaps it in two. The boney deer that are still barely alive creep around, them and the teenage runway models with their hip bones poking out, they think we can’t hear them but we do. Just the other day one of their bones poked Ruby in the eye, was sticking out so far. Now she can’t see nothing out that side. If a hungry puma jumps out of the tree, she’ll never even know it was coming.

Otterpop runs back down to inspect and confirms he’s crying wolf. She’s no dummy, she right away knows if the invisible problem is a predator. Spooking at a dead leaf provides shape and movement, structured inside a boxy silhouette. Everybody goes hungry in the drought, unless some storms come in. A GIRL CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY JACKETS, that’s what she tells him, but Gustavo still doesn’t move. Not that she would handle the situation any better if it wasn’t a false alarm. A badass can still be a knucklehead. Otterpop is the one who would stand up to the coyote, in jewel toned metallics and a leather wrap around belt. This would be a mistake. She has a little bit too much meat on her bones.

Eventually, Gustavo makes it to the next venue, but it’s the same old problem. Another twig, another branch, another rock, all potentially going to kill us all. He just wants to live. It might have been the Stella McCartney houndstooth. Surely smells like coyote pee. Eventually we had to leave him there and move on, but as soon as we got to the top of the hill he unfroze, ran by us, and was back into the lead again. Jason Wu was showing asymetrical fox pelts, and we didn’t want to be late for that.