The beginning of my time as the Fanfair Editor at Vanity Fair coincided with the beginning of the 1990s. My first Fanfair section to oversee was for the March 1990 issue. I wanted to make a real statement on its opening page so that readers would know a new editor was at its helm. Tina Brown, then Vanity Fair’s Editor-in-Chief, had hired me only a few months before to be a Contributing Editor, but when this position opened up she offered it to me since I’d been the Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview. Tina told me I had a kind of carte blanche to create a magazine within the magazine. She only reserved the right to say no if I pushed the envelope a bit too much.
I thought I might as well put that to the test right away. I not only wanted to announce that a new editor was in town, but also pronounce that the 1980s were dead. Long live the 1990’s, which I sensed were going to be much less ostentatious. At least, I was going to do my part to proclaim them so by using the platform Tina had granted me to start such a narrative in the media. I had found the 1980s rather vulgar on lots of levels so I set out to redefine vulgarity itself. Reclaim it - as the 1990s were to do with grunge and “heroin chic” and cargo pants. I came up with the concept of asking the chicest model of the Paris fashion demimonde - not one of the emerging American super models who were becoming more famous than the clothes they modeled and were to mold the upcoming decade with their decadently well-scrubbed one-name appeal, Naomi and Cindy and Linda and Christy — to pose nude except for some bijou and a strategically placed Chanel handbag. I wanted the opening image to be shocking but not vulgar. It really was a naked attempt to redirect the eye away from the need for excess as a fashion statement, a cleansing of the aesthetic palette to start afresh as the decade dawned. I even knew the title I wanted to attach to it: “Unadorned Chic.”
So I went to Tina and pitched the idea - a naked model wearing nothing but some Chanel heels and holding a Chanel handbag with maybe the byline accompanying the text being a kind of accessory. “How about David Mamet?” I asked her. After a pause - absentmindedly pulling on a strand of her blonde hair which meant ironically that her mind was racing away in its many lanes - she laughed and told me to go for it. “Give Ben a call. He can tell you which model we should use for this. He’s still connected in Paris,” she said, mentioning my colleague Ben Brantley, who was yet to become the theatre critic at The New York Times and had until recently been the Paris Bureau Chief for Women’s Wear Daily. “But David Mamet?” she asked. “Is he capable of irony? See if he’ll do it. But not sure he should.”
Ben suggested a Brazilian model in Paris who not only would be perfect for it, but also be willing to do it. Her name was Gisele. He was right. She was perfect and she said yes. So did Mamet. I thought he might work as the writer because his plays had a spareness to the dialogue that matched the spareness in my concept and he could even turn vulgarity inside out with his refashioning vulgar language into a kind of poetry. But when he faxed me his copy - another relic of the 1990s now, fax machines - I realized Tina had been right as well. The rat-a-tat-tattiness of Mamet’s dialogue in his hit plays of the 1980s didn’t translate into the fashion copy I needed to describe the 1990s. I called him to try to get him to rewrite his little essay. He refused. I gave him a kill fee. I couldn’t believe I was turning down a piece turned in by David Mamet but I realize now that too was about leaving the 1980s behind. Based on the David Mamet of today, I even look back on my rejecting him in those first few months of the 1990s with a newfound fondness.
But who was to write it? “Get Jim,” Tina said, mentioning Vanity Fair’s go-to guy, James Wolcott, a writer and wordsmith of the highest order. “He’s quick and he’s brilliant. He has wit. And he’ll, no doubt, love the photo.” Tina was right. Jim turned in the copy that brilliantly and wittily - and presciently - summed up the decade about to occur.
“Socialites - they stare at us from the captive pages of fashion magazines with ghostly grimaces as if their crypts had been unsealed with a crash of sunlight. Why this strained, startled, stalked look?” Wolcott began his own little essay. “Because by the end of the eighties it was no longer fashionable to flaunt. Almost overnight the rules were rewritten. Now a traipse of fur makes animal activists furious. A collage of jewelry earns wipeout in the pages of Women’s Wear Daily. Ostentation is out. Dynasty is dead. What to do? What to do?”
He went on to rave about Gisele there in the nude photo by Fabio Toscano wearing “just enough Chanel,” as the caption told us. And then he went in for the windup: “Gisele has found a way to accessorize in an era of Higher Austerity. Dancing cheek to chic, her uncamouflaged curves connote the sloping essence of the scaled-down nineties. One must chew on one’s pearls at home. To cut a swath today, one must be unswathed. So ladies who lunch - lose those mummy wraps. Yo, arbitrageurs - loosen those cummerbunds. Who needs all that frou-frou? Gisele has cracked the code of the nineties. Less is moi.”
Fun, though we now know more about Mamet than was known back then.
We're so over David Mamet. At least I am.