JoAnn Berman’s Pre-Fall line is allegedly somehow inspired by Bushwick.

We’re having some difficulty parsing this write-up of JoAnn Berman’s Pre-Fall line on sustainable fashion blog Ecouterre. The designer is an eco-fashion veteran who has been cutting up old clothes since the 70s (or upcycling vintage fabrics, as we say in the teens). While she still lives in Manhattan, according to her website, her design work has a new home in a "FUN FACXTORY LOFT" in Bushwick and she is finding her inspiration right here in the neighborhood. 

Or rather in some bizarre alternate-universe version of the neighborhood. "This is all about Brooklyn and steampunk and computers and digi-spying," JoAnn Berman tells Ecouterre, throwing out four terms that would be difficult to relate even if they were not mutually contradictory. Most perplexing of all, she calls her latest line the "Real Housewives of Bushwick," her muses being some local circle of homemakers we never knew existed, "all spying on each other because it’s such a cool, small community." 

First question: does being unemployed make one a housewife? Ecouterre’s heading of "American Idle" suggests as much, but the writer also refers to Bushwick as a "New York borough," which is flattering but doesn’t inspire confidence in her ability to make sense of this. 

We won’t argue with Berman that "girls in Bushwick are a little tougher," or that "they have that Bushwick swagger," but who are these people? Are catty cliques of women really swapping cyber-espionage on our street, and do they really dress in vintage fur, neoprene and scraps of Guatemalan handloom? We haven’t been to Castle Braid in a while, so we can’t say they’re not. 

Whoever these "drama-mongering homemakers" are, we’re afraid of them and of the embarrassing language that will forever accompany the commodification of the imagined Bushwick lifestyle. We didn’t move here to live in a place where we need a Saks fashion director to tell us what to wear to Roberta’s. (Oh wait, we already do: Rag & Bone boots, naturally.)