FASHION FOLLIES

You know there’s a perception problem when a fashion show sells you ice in winter

Here is how nutty fashion can make you. Racing home intent on tuning in to the Super Bowl football match, this reporter clicked the remote just in time to see Tom Brady being sacked by Michael Strahan, and the first thought that came to mind was not, “The Giants might actually win this thing.” It was, “Those uniforms look just like Martin Margiela’s collection for fall.”

And they did.
Here is how loopy fashion can sometimes seem. For the first time in history, a woman has a plausible shot at becoming the president of the United States, and far from building collections around anything so prosaic, designers found inspiration in Bianca Jagger in her disco goddess incarnation (Badgley Mischka), Olive Oyl (Zac Posen) and a naughty boarding-school girl (Ruffian).

“The No. 1 thing a girl learns is a lip,” Brian Wolk, who designs Ruffian with Claude Morais, said. Morais added: “Our girl is, like, a boarding school girl upstate, and she’s experiencing that first woman’s moment. She leaves home all cute and made up.”

But on the school bus, Wolk interjected, she hikes up her skirt, opens a blouse button and messes up her hair. The Ruffian girl is evidently not someone on her way to solve the world’s problems at the Model United Nations. But who says she’d have to dress like a geek if she were? Wasn’t that the basic point Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, was making when she griped in her recent editor’s letter that Senator Hillary Clinton should loosen up and stop dressing like a man?

Not only is that not going to happen, it cannot, because in no place outside the fashion bubble are women given licence to costume themselves as fancifully and often absurdly as magazines devoted to the subject propose. The truth is, hardly anyone goes around wearing the flapper dresses and hobbling footgear promoted by people who work on the 12th floor at 4 Times Square.

Here, then, is the basic premise of an image business: perception and reality shall not converge.

In reality, the month is February and the season winter. These facts would seem to argue against holding a fashion show at night in an unheated concrete garage on the Hudson River, but no.

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For the Y-3 show, the show’s production designer, Etienne Russo, built a wall inside the space made from 100 tonnes of ice.

The perception is that the personnel, at least those occupying the front rows at a fashion show, are all best friends—if not forever, then at least for the 20 minutes or so that a fashion show usually lasts. The reality is … well, let us cite a moment from the Diane Von Furstenberg show on Sunday night.

“First of all,” said a meticulously groomed glamour puss as she leaned across a row of folding chairs to greet the actress Rose McGowan, “The movie was genius.” She was referring, perhaps, to Planet Terror, a Robert Rodriguez film about an accidentally released bio-weapon that renders people zombies. McGowan seemed to register this compliment, if at all, in a daze.

“Really, just hi-lar-ious,” the woman continued, as McGowan adjusted her blue gown and turned her back without uttering a word.

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“O.K.,” the woman said, talking to herself by then. “O.K., let me leave you. Love you. Speak soon.”
-GUY TREBAY (NYT)