The trick to fashion is doing it before anyone else can. The trick to music is hearing it before everyone else does. So when InStyle magazine sandwiched “neo-electro music” between glow-in-the-dark ice cubes and lime-colored Tic Tacs on its list of 10 “Way-Hip Must-Have” items to acquire for a complete fall look, the desirability quotient of electroclash plummeted. The pet project of NYC clubland fixture Larry Tee, the 12-date Electroclash Tour is a a merry-go-round of inflated personalities, porn-shop politics and pre-programmed beats.

The electroclash movement has rocked split agendas from the get-go, pushing buttons in the fashion/art world as well as inside DJ booths. It gives hipsters an excuse to layer ruffled socks with pumps, consume inordinate amounts of booze and do the running-man with glowsticks. Electroclash is, in essence, an attempt to legitimize the fanny pack.

Not that Tee minds. Surely beneath the bald head and Buddy Holly glasses, he knows electroclash is a fashion brand, not music, and its constituents are models, not musicians. Tee fancies himself a contemporary Andy Warhol, a clairvoyant of vogue, an unstoppable train with a caboose of vapid freaks in tow. But compared to his entourage of glammed-up drag queens and glossed-over eurotrash, Tee is a timid host, squirming onstage as he ushers in each new act. The Philadelphia bill boasted Chicks On Speed, Peaches, Tracy + The Plastics, W.I.T., and 2 Many DJs—perhaps the true kings of clash—spinning in the basement.

Tracy + The Plastics started the gruesome affair. Wynne Greenwood (a.k.a. Tracy) stood stock-still, stage left, gawking at the audience like a fifth grader forced to give a presentation on the mating habits of the chinchilla. She blubbered dime-a-dozen apologies like Cat Power as prologue to her smart, feminist and queer discourse with video sidekicks Nikki Romanos and Cola (a.k.a. the Plastics). Whenever the eardrum-scraping electronics built to climax, Greenwood interrupted with a cunnilingus joke or a sheepish apology. Her vulnerability was endearing, but her unprofessionalism was not. Throughout the group’s herky-jerky video footage and sing-shriek lyrics, you get the niggling feeling you’ve seen it all before, when in fact, you have. Greenwood is a dead ringer for Kathleen Hanna, and the random videography of ketchup bottles with facial hair and balloons being inflated is a Le Tigre live knockoff. Good for karaoke, bad for integrity. But even as her impression of Karen O attacking Jenny Hoyston in a back alley grew tiresome, her performance was genius beside the artificial lackeys who took the stage in her departure.

Billed as the icing on Tee’s party cake, the three members of W.I.T. slunk across the stage in black cat suits with plunging V-necks. Icing indeed: loaded with sugar, easy to spread and vacant of all nutritional value. W.I.T. (Whatever It Takes) is fronted by Melissa Burns, a spineless Debbie Harry wannabe with feathered Farrah Fawcett hair, rouge swept across her cheekbones and lips fixed in a permanent pucker. The torturous half-hour set saw Burns and her train of tattooed and coifed glamourpusses shimmy across the stage in contrived choreography complete with slow-motion slaps across the face and electric guitars strung with two strings (you didn’t really think they played an instrument, did you?). Burns and Co. ripped off Kylie Minogue beats and whored their way through a wince-worthy cover of the Cars’ “Just What I Needed,” freezing like mannequins in a Robert Palmer video with wide eyes and swooping cleavage shots. While Tee had supplied buckets of lip gloss, he forgot to share the most important trick of the trade: If you aren’t 100 percent convinced of your own façade, no one else will be either. Burns should know better than to giggle and blow kisses when she’s supposed to be moving her lips to the words. The kittenish trio closed the agonizing set with a cooing rendition of “Happy Birthday Mr. President” to puppeteer Tee.

Munich art-school collective Chicks On Speed brought more excitement to the vendor’s table than to the stage with bold T-shirts bearing the words “THE FAKE,” ballpoint pens and full-color posters of wet pubic hair. Speedier Chicks songs like “Euro Trash Girl” and “Glamour Girl” made dancing fools out of Philly’s fashionistas but more often lost the crowd in ambient noises only coffee-house terrorists pretend to enjoy. For a group that prides itself on fusing fashion and feminism, Chicks On Speed was a fashion disaster, and remarkably unmemorable.

At the helm of the electroclash madness was Miss Nasty herself, live and in the flesh, with a disappointingly watered-down version of her legendary Berlin show. For anyone who’s seen Merril “Peaches” Nisker tantalize audiences, the Philly show felt like a half-hearted hand job. That’s not to say the Canadian rapper left her sleazy hot pants and vulgar mouth at the trailer park, either. She roamed the stage like an elusive G-spot, rubbing her crotch in the audience’s face as she begged for volunteers to diddle her skittle, fuck the pain away and give her AA-bust the XXX-treatment.

Between sets, disinterested, shaggy-haired boys leaned against the walls, sucking from rolled cigarettes pinched between thumbs and index fingers, while Tee remixed Technotronic’s “Pump Up The Jam” from the balcony. In the basement, 2 Many DJs (the alias used by Soulwax’s Dewaele brothers) threw down the spliced-and-diced remixes (sometimes called “mashups”) that have made them downloadable sensations. The veterans on the decks have defied licensing laws and melded the likes of the Stooges and Salt-N-Pepa, Skee-Lo and the Breeders and the Strokes and Christina Aguilera.

Like the pop-versus-punk collisions the Dewaele brothers so brilliantly mix, electroclash is a marketer’s wet dream: an overlap of culture and commodity. Tour sponsor Diesel—the clothing company for urbanites with money to burn—made sure no surface went unbranded. The bar counters were buried in “Fashion Rules!” flyers, reminding concertgoers to log on to purchase more electroclash goodies. In fact, if you laid money down straightaway, you could win a makeover courtesy of Chicks On Speed. Glance upward at any point during the five-hour festivities and you’d catch grainy footage from a runway show rolled over and over, interrupted every 10 minutes or so with the bright-red Diesel logo. Funny how the Chicks even question what’s fake.

—Ashlea Halpern