Street v Catwalk fashion

I've always wondered about the relation between street fashion and catwalk fashion.

If you're a hardcore clothes type (ie too cool even for the word fashionista) you'll have been to some fashion shows and seen first hand that the catwalk is part fine art, part dance, part theatre, part rock'n'roll and 100% fascinating. It's a much underrated art form, in fact - there should be write ups of fashion shows in the reviews section of the broadsheets.

But while the catwalk is an incredible thing for a someone like me to observe - (a neighbourhood kid, doing minimum wage jobs and never seeing the inside of an aeroplane until I was 19) - it's not all there is to clothes. As kids we enjoyed getting tracksuits from market stalls and t-shirts from supermarkets, and later as teenagers getting the latest pair of Adidas or Nike. Now, makes like that (and then all the skate labels too) don't do catwalk (that I know of...) so there then becomes a disjunction between street gear and designer gear. Or does there? In the 21st century I see the catwalk as becoming more than a place to show off collections - it could become a place to show off postmodernism itself.

Do you prefer catwalk sidewalk duds? Let us know in the comments kids!