First thing you learn is that you've always got to wait: No fashion show worth being seen at starts on time. Four days ago, I thought this was cliché, and now I see it's just a truism.
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StumbleUponThirty minutes is the standard gap between the ideal and the real in New York City. In Paris, the whole system can get clogged up and a 4 p.m. show will start at 5. Marc Jacobs is the current world-record holder; he has been to known to make his patrons and clients cool their heels for an hour and a half. The amazing thing is that the patrons and clients do not know how to kill time properly, or even wound it.
I've grown fond of listening to my iPod while passing the time between runway shows, and the habit would mark me for social death had I any chance, hereabouts, for a social life to begin with. Chatting, thumbing idly through Women's Wear Daily, making a couple phone calls, refolding your arms, recrossing your legs, being icy—these are acceptable ways to occupy oneself. Earphones, crosswords, and anything too closely resembling a newspaper are verboten. In four days, I have seen exactly one person read a book while waiting for a show to start; on Saturday, as Australian designer Josh Goot prepared to set his witchy tank dresses and tube skirts slinking through a Chelsea gallery space, one dude had his nose in Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels, and it made me want to kiss him on the mouth. I'm asking honestly: What gives? Is less more? Don't any of these chicks knit?
Earlier today, when I asked Glenda Bailey, who runs Harper's Bazaar, why runway shows never start on time, she gave me boilerplate in a lightly self-mocking tone: "To make the girls look so beautiful!" When I put the question to Lynn Yaeger—a veteran fashion writer who styles herself as a post-apocalyptic kewpie doll—she patiently explained, "It's fashionable to be late."
It fell to Ingrid Sischy, who runs Interview, to put everything in perspective: "The shows do start on time. It's just fashion time. It's like the theory of relativity." Which is to say that Monday night's Marc Jacobs show—the hottest ticket of the whole week—started at 8 p.m. sharp.
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