After the last overcoat turned jumpsuit with crotch-and-bum cutouts left the Alexandre Herchcovitch runway, our strenuously maintained emotionless masks gave way to blinking, speechless incredulity. We couldn't believe what we'd just seen. Woven sun hats? With veils? Shirts made of actual garbage bags? Had we accidentally taken the wrong exit from the subway and gone completely through the looking glass to a world where the crotch seam on pants extends to the knee and people wear blue-dipped sheaves of wheat on their lapels? Were we forever trapped in a Twilight Zone episode titled "Little Hefty Bag on the Prairie"?

Unsure how best to verbalize all those feelings, we peered over at the BlackBerry of the dazed man next to us, who wrote to a friend, "Wow, I need a DRINK."

One of the only familiar faces in attendance was socialite Birdie Bell, who seems to be working overtime to make the rounds so far this season (we alone have seen her at BCBG and Ruffian as well thus far), and her efforts were rewarded with a concentrated blast of insanity that left us wondering if Herchcovitch had indeed taken one too many hits off a tractor's exhaust pipe in his youth. Sticking giant checkered lapels onto a blue plastic-bag dress isn't exactly the vision for fall we hoped we'd see; God help us, we were almost hankering for a nice, sensible legging, because at least we’re already immune to the sight of impressionable young idiot clotheshorses like Sienna Miller scampering around in those.

And yet, the whole mad, bad spectacle was also kind of brilliant. Granted, for ages now Mary-Kate Olsen has been dressing like she coated herself in glue and then rolled around in a dumpster, but it takes brass balls for a designer to debut a bunch of pinafores made out of what we are 99 percent sure were real garbage bags. It's basically like sending your clothes out and saying, "Yes, it's true: My stuff is trash." —The Fug Girls

Watch a slideshow of the Alexandre Herchcovitch collection.