^ That last bit is true. I can remember many times when I first joined tFS where he was criticized for using the runway strictly for presentation, or to feed his ego or whatever, but then ultimately you'd go into the Dior boutiques and the clothes were pretty boring, and for the most part they were (this was also back during the J'adore Dior t shirt/Dior Rasta/Dior Logo phase, so there was a good dose of trashy and tacky along with the boring). Now he's sort of cut out the middle man and puts the boring, marketable clothing directly on the runway, only it's got a whole different vibe to it. It's geared towards a completely different person, not only in age, but in taste as well.
It's too bad though because the truth is that he can make cool, edgy, interesting clothes that are completely understandable hanging on a rack without the set, hair, makeup and any other drama from the runway. I constantly go back to his F/W 06 collection, because the clothes in that collection were both "wearable" and creative. What wound up in stores was pretty much undiluted from the runway. But I think his reputation for using the runway to sell the marketable merchandise in stores is kind of unfair. It was only a short period of time where the RTW collections became truly over the top, as opposed to simply looking over the top but containing a lot of really salable clothes that were still really new and different. In my mind there were really only two collections that I can think of where there had to have been a great deal of editing done to the clothes and where the show overwhelmed the product, and those would be F/W 03 and F/W 04. Those are the only two collections I can think of where a good 60% of the clothes couldn't be pulled right of the runway and sold as is.
