All the downtown kids showed up at Bryant Park for Tuesday’s 9 p.m. Heatherette show. I mean all the downtown kids. If things were running normally, the show merely would have been an unbelievable zoo; the Heatherette designers, Richie Rich and Traver Rains, have developed a hype-friendly candy-delirious look that draws the worship of both nightclubbing freaks and celebs with a healthy taste for trash. But word was that someone had printed up 6,000 counterfeit invitations, so the boys in security brought in more muscle and the girls in PR called out for more clipboards. Between the parade of ambitiously decadent oddities who were meant to be there and the desperate swarm of pretenders, the block outside the tents looked like the Limelight in its golden age. I can’t imagine the range of sexual favors getting proffered in exchange for admittance.
At 9:30, those of us in line for standing room were told that no one else would be getting in and that if we had a problem with that, we could take it up with the fire marshal, whose rules were already being fabulously mocked. Just then, fashion writer Lynn Yaeger rolled up from Narciso Rodriguez. The girls with the clipboards could do nothing for her, and we had a pickle: Yaeger (who writes strikingly intelligent pieces for the Village Voice, Vogue, and the New York Times), is the doyenne of downtown fashion journalism. It wasn’t exactly as if Pauline Kael were being refused entrance to a festival screening of Taxi Driver, but you get the idea. How might this be resolved?
Yaeger stood around, felt humiliated, and decided, “I think that’s fabulous that people went to the trouble to make fake tickets. That’s what it’s about.” She let a fan take her picture, wondered what would happen if someone really important were to show up, and said, “The boys will see what they can do.” The boys, Yaeger’s pals Mickey Boardman and Peter Davis, were also being shut out, but Mickey is an editor at the hipster pamphlet Paper and Peter is a scenester, and they’re hard-core. They scampered back outside to a side entrance. Yaeger patiently picked up an espresso and followed.
Some wheels were greased, and some doors you just breeze through. Yaeger took a left and was backstage, where Tinsley Mortimer, an uptown socialite who was modeling in the show, had a kiss for her. Tinsley wore a striped sweater around her neck and carried a big tennis racket. (Next season’s Heatherette girl is a dissolute country-club brat on a tropical holiday.) Also serving as clothes hangers were the singer Kelis and a matched set of Hiltons. And there was Snooty Handler! The confrere of the Paris Hilton impersonator clutched a comb and a can of hairspray and was fussing over a black model’s platinum-blonde wig while standing within the vortex of the real thing.
Backstage is a civilized place to watch a show: You see each model get a final check and see the designers watch the action on a closed-circuit TV feed, their expressions pulsing with a special combination of relief, anxiety, and controlled glee. You get to see Paris very nearly go out on the runway with her Sidekick, or whatever, in hand. The clothes? Well, how do you feel about gold lamé? Leopard print? The occasional tutu?
The show ended—”Now it’s fucking party time,” came a female voice from Yaeger’s left—and well-wishers started cramming backstage. “I think it’s cool,” Richie Rich said of the counterfeiters. “Everybody else was upset, but I loved it.” Then he turned to lend his ear to a young lady who wants him to design her prom dress.
