FASHION WEAK

WHY I FEAR THE WORLD OF FASHION

(Above: “Issey Miyake Fashion: White and Black,” by Irving Penn [New York, 1990, printed 1992]. The Smithsonian.)

Milan’s Fashion Week begins on February 20th and ends on the 26th following Fashion Week here in London which began on February 16th and ended on the 20th which followed Fashion Week in New York which began on February 9th and ran till the 14th. Paris Fashion Week begins on February 26th and ends on March 5th. None of these weeks is 7 days and yet the industry itself is arbitrarily in every other respect one of specific numbers - sizes, profit margins, a model's height and weight, designer salaries, marketing budgets, price points, a conglomeration of spread sheets that have themselves no need for thread counts. I can hear Kay Thompson in Funny Face - who had fashioned herself so fabulously into an elongated version of the ever-longing Diana Vreeland - saying, “Why don’t you … do away with the very concept of weeks, the weak sisters of the calendar, and simply live in moments and months and maybe years since it takes the year to understand the lengths we feel when we yearn and what is fashion but the yearning for lengths?” Listening to Vreeland could be like that, little cryptic yelps strung together in which the sharpness of pain was replaced with shades of the shamanic in a yearning to understand the yearning of others so needy to belong that one could costume them and it, both the yearner and the yearning, to cover it all and call it fashion. There is, no doubt about it, an artistry in it - the field is filled with artists - but its own yearning is one for customers who affirm its creations with credit cards. It’s more about bottom lines finally than it is finely upholstered bottoms.

I have always been slightly fearful of it all - the cutters and the cutting comments, the strict adherence to seasons as the stricken, striving seasoned repeatedly have to find anew their well-shod footing so as not to get swept under by the current of what is current - and I costume that, in turn, this fear, in the poetically stitched together cynicism of this sentence as well as the paragraph above. And yet some of the nicest people I know have been fashion designers. I grew up as a young man making my way in the New York of the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside friends Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford and slightly later with Thom Browne and John Bartlett. Quite a likable quartet. Calvin Klein was part of a world in which I found myself that had nothing to do with fashion really but a shared clutch of confidants. Diane von Furstenberg has long been dear to me and she and Barry Diller even gave me a book party and dinner at Indochine when I published my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy. I have for decades now been friendly with Steven Kolb, CEO of the CFDA, and have written for its informative, visually stunning website. Style icon, the visually stunning writer Amy Fine Collins, who is also an arbiter of it in her role heading up the International Best Dressed List, is a dear friend and has mastered the ability to be fashionable without stinting on her deeper sense of style. I consider Jeffrey Banks a true gentleman. I did big profiles of thousands of words each on Michael Kors for both Vanity Fair and Travel+Leisure and have long enjoyed being in his presence and, more important to me, sharing an appreciation for theatre. I have written cover stories for several fashion magazines and was always keen to see the next British Vogue cover so keenly curated by Edward Enninful. The late Patrick Kelley, a fellow sissy from Mississippi, has always culturally fascinated me. Perry Ellis and I loved the same man.

And yet.

( Above: From CFDA Chairman Thom Browne’s show that closed NY Fashion Week. It was an homage to Edgar Allan Poe, particularly his poem “The Raven” which was read by Carrie Coon in accompaniment to the collection.)

I have traversed and navigated lots of cultural and artistic worlds in my life since I moved to New York when I was 19 but the fashion world is not one in which I put down my stakes. There was just something about it - ironically a world populated by sissies of all stripes and patterns - that made me feel like that little sissy on a Mississippi playground not quite understanding the games being conjured so knowing not to participate because no one wanted someone who couldn’t quite understand the rules on their imagined field of play. Fashion to me is kick ball when I’m standing over to the side with a racquet in my hand wondering why I feel so unchosen. I still never feel quite cool enough for it, or worthy of it. I can’t seem to drop the racquet even when I’ve discerned enough of the rules to know it’s not needed. My admiration for Conde Nast Artistic Director and American Vogue’s Editor in Chief Anna Wintour, like that for Kors, is based more on her love and support of theatre. But I also am fascinated by Wintour’s devotion to tennis. She knows when to hold that racquet. So maybe it is that aspect of the fashion world that I can’t quite … well … grasp … knowing what is, in fact, appropriate to grasp at the exact moment it is needed without being grasping. That’s it: I feel as if I’m wrongly grasping when I’m around the game of it all.

I have been thinking about the fashion world lately not just because of the scheduled worldwide march of pre-March fashion weeks but also because of the Chanel exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum here in London and the new Apple TV series, The New Look, which is about Dior and Chanel during the Nazi occupation of Paris and how they each dealt with it. One of the reasons I have yet to attend the Chanel exhibition (it closes on March 10th) is because I am a bit uncomfortable with Coco’s survival instincts that conflated with her collaborative ones with the Nazis - even though collaboration was never exactly her forté. Maybe I should just forgive her. One of the biggest fashion stories during these weeks of shows has been the critical hosannahs lavished on John Galliano’s haute couture show for Maison Margiela in Paris and the deeper redemptive narrative embedded within it of forgiveness for his recorded anti-Semitic rants that he has claimed were the results of behavior caused by his having been an addict. Fashion has always been filled with glorious monsters who manage to exist by draping the dreariness of their monstrosities with a splendor that can camouflage them and, with the glare of the beauty they can create, then blind us to such ugliness threaded through the care and the construction. Sometimes I think another term for haute couture could be grande ironie. Sorry to digress - yet that too is haute couture, a digression that leads us back to the larger explanation that is fashion.

(Above: “Kerchief Glove (Dior), Paris” by Irving Penn. 1950, printed in 1984. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

I did attend the remarkable Dior show at the Brooklyn Museum a couple of years ago and wrote about it for a fashion magazine. I have always been more a fan of Christian Dior than of Coco Chanel. I prefer his dandier demureness to her calculating élan. “Christian Dior possessed a smooth face, where only the brown eyes mused,” claimed Françoise Giroud, who was the editor of Elle in France from 1946 until 1953, when she and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber founded the newsmagazine L’Express. “Dior didn’t undress you with his eyes; he dressed you.”

Another iconic lady of France is the aristocratic now 94-year-old Jacqueline de Ribes, who has been on the International Best Dressed List since 1962, when she was inducted into its Hall of Fame. One of Dior’s most devoted clients, she told Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni for her 2014 book, Monsieur Dior: Once Upon a Time, “The first thing we tried on was the inner structure, because at Dior, the inner structure was more important than anything … They were made of double thickness tulle and had whale bones. At the back, there were only hooks so you really needed a lady’s maid or a nimble-fingered husband.”

Dior was, in fact, the first fashion designer to appear on the cover of Time. It was for its March 4, 1957, issue—he would die seven months later—and the cover story was both a paean and snide bit of snob-bashing that was itself snobbish in its overly snippy tone as it pointedly included an array of Americans and their slavish love of the designer. Its lede: “The swank Ritz cocktail lounge and the grave Plaza Athénée bar were shrill with the sound of American females emitting the ritual cries of greeting as they hailed each other from divan to divan. In the lush Victorian plush of Maxim’s, stumpy men from Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue sat heavily, resting weary feet.”

Dior famously favored grays and pinks in his collections because of how pleasingly they complimented his feminine ideal but the use of the latter hue to describe him in the story that millions of Americans at the time read was not meant as a compliment, one presumes, as the writer toward the end of the lede described him as “a plump, pink, innocent-looking son of a fertilizer manufacturer.”

“Think pink!” enthused Kay Thompson as the fashion editor in Funny Face, to bring this full circle. She referenced Dior in those lyrics by Leonard Gershe in the song composed by Roger Edens, but not such an upbringing - nor was Chanel mentioned. I’ll probably mention neither on March 1st when I’m the guest of London fashion editor and writer, Sarah Bailey, who is hosting a screening of Funny Girl for the Fashion Film Club at the Garden Cinema in Covent Garden. I told her when I accepted that I don’t know much about fashion but I could talk about Barbra Streisand since I did a cover story on her for Vanity Fair. I do know that the legendary designer Irene Sharaff, who designed the costumes for Funny Girl, was a lesbian and her longtime partner was the Chinese-American artist and writer Mai-Mai Sze and they died within months of each other when they were in their 80s. Indeed, Sharaff’s first job as a costume designer was in 1931 for a Broadway production of Alice in Wonderland starring another famous lesbian, Eva Le Gallienne.

A lesbian Alice wandering about in a hierarchical wonderland - give her a tennis racquet to grasp when the Queen demands she play a conjured game of croquet on an imagined field of play and you have a rather deft description of how I feel when I find myself wandering about in the world of fashion. The Queen - quite a card, she - used a flamingo as a mallet to play the game for which hedgehogs doubled as the croquet balls. Queenly edicts issued and a hedgehog among flamingos, that pretty much sums it up for me, my place in such a world. Took me a few paragraphs to arrive - quite a runway of a column, this - but I got here.

Oh. And Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t the only one who wrote about a raven. When I watched the video of Thom Browne’s show , I thought of this exchange in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:

Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.