Fashion editors going to fashion shows is a little like high-school kids taking drugs, drinking, wearing slutty clothes, or jumping off bridges: They do it because everyone else is doing it. And while fashion insiders like to compare show week to a wartime situation where people dress well instead of carrying guns and grenades, I’m not allowed to think like that because I work for the New York Times. And because we write about real wars daily, we aren’t allowed such self-indulgent fashion hyperbole. So not only do I have to engage, three solid weeks every few months, in something all my peers think of as a wartime situation, I have to be a martyr about it and not complain. And we all know how good journalists are at keeping things to themselves.
The way shows are most similar to wartime situations, or at least to wartime-situation movies, is that heroic acts are likely to be punished. The same way the guy who volunteers to go a little beyond the call of duty in a war movie is quickly dispatched, doing anything more than the other fashion editors are doing during the time in which you’ll see roughly 200 shows is frowned upon and fills you instantly with regret.
So besides being bitterly resentful for adding a new unknown to my schedule this morning because I’m friends with the publicist–I should say friendly–I have also agreed to keep a daily “Diary” of the fashion shows for Slate. Which makes me feel like I should be (instead of zoning out behind dark sunglasses, which is what fashion editors normally do) collecting stuff outsiders to the fashion-show circus enjoy. Like model gossip (supermodel Carmen Kass broke her hand bowling, but she still appeared on the Donna Karan catwalk yesterday), trend reports (clashing colors, shiny leather, skirts to knee), and media dish. I’m not expecting anything for my heroic efforts, except to be executed in the third act.
Fashion editors actually look forward to death. It will be the only time in their lives when they won’t have to wear painful Manolo Blahnik shoes and when people won’t comment about their hair. And in their caskets, they can wear the back of their dress open for the first time in public.
Actually, fashion shows (except for the ones that put a heavy bass over Grace Slick like Tommy Hilfiger’s did yesterday) are fairly Zen experiences. Much like airplanes flights, (before the Concorde and cell phones), the fashion-show schedule is an unalterable block of time that just must be succumbed to uninterrupted. Shows can be as much as two hours late (especially if they involve the presence of Naomi Campbell, who is not at the New York shows this season), and there are some that can’t be missed no matter what (see above: All the other fashion editors are there). So during this week I’ll carry a little reading material that can’t be looked at (because it’s like an airplane flight where you know everyone on board), and like all the other 500 or so fashion editors and store buyers who attend, I’ll wait. Sometimes you wait because a model like Giselle, the new superstar of the season, has to get from one show to the next. Sometimes you wait because a promising young designer like Susan Cianccolo, who showed yesterday, needs to crowd everyone into the Andrea Rosen gallery and has to do everything all herself. And sometimes you wait because a designer who indulged in far too many drugs in the ‘70s loses muscle control and starts drooling buckets all over themselves, and has to have his shirt and tie changed. (I know this only because I witnessed it backstage.)
But what you wait for, mostly, because it’s your real job, is some little spark of artisanship or some irresistible tang of glamour that might be appealing to readers who need a little of both in their lives and the dance review column didn’t deliver that day.
Saturday night, Sean Puffy Combs delivered with his man-fur and man-diamonds show, which the New York Times Magazine’s men’s fashion editor, Robert Bryan, declared (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) were “perfect for our readers.” And Diane von Furstenberg showed her chic little wrap dresses with tiny pouffy fake fur vests, as inevitably everyone who was crowded into her townhouse for the show ignored the models and talked about how great she looked. Tommy Hilfiger, laying that heavy bass over Grace Slick, showed a collection equally heavy in plaid–even plaid leather skirts–that had a cool easiness to it. It looked like the beginning of a comeback to preppy basics, which were the start of Tommy’s career and which preppies never gave up on anyway. And Donna Karan’s cheaper line, DKNY, had great red leather stuff, as if someone smeared Porsche fingernail polish all over it, glossy and shiny and “polished” as her production notes said.
But the best show for me of the six I attended yesterday was my friend Tony Melillo’s. Fashion editors should not make friends with designers (see above: heroic acts), but Tony was an editor at Esquire, and he switched over to the other side on me. The great thing about this show was that his last one wasn’t so good. So everyone there got to revel in the roller-coaster triumph of his comeback-kid collection, held in the eccentric, cat-pee-smelling apartment of Hunt Slonem, an artist who paints parrots. And must do well by it, because the apartment had a certain over-the-top fantasy that starving artists would have a hard time evoking. Tony’s clothes, low riding trousers and bulky Peruvian-knit sweaters in soft colors, feel unisex and sexy at the same time. No one’s really done that well since Perry Ellis. So my first day of New York shows ended with a triumphant dinner for Tony at Il Cantonori–or I should say, for Tony Jr., since his parents were there. And they corrected us, just as I’m sure Perry Sr. or Calvin Sr. or Ralph Sr. would have done 20 years ago.
