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Amy Spindler

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Posted Thursday, Feb. 10, 2000, at 9:30 PM ET

So, it was great to see Prince Andrew at the Ralph Lauren show yesterday. It's so boring, here across the pond, to have to treat celebrities like royalty and to deal with all the local HRH types who wield titles and have no countries. I keep getting invited to events by HRH Marie Chantal of Greece. Correct me if I'm wrong: Don't you have to have subjects to be an HRH? Even if HRH Marie Chantal of Greece took over a little tenement on, say, Norfolk Street and set up a little building of her subjects on the Lower East Side, I would succumb to her rule. But without willing subjects willing to curtsy, it seems a bit of a publicity stunt to run around sending out invitations to things as HRH. Although it seems royalty in England is a bit of a publicity stunt, too. Or there would be none turning up at runway shows in the front row. Puff Daddy, however, who was supposed to be seated somewhat deliciously two seats down from Prince Andrew, which might have caused a bi-continental tabloid harmonic convergence, didn't show. "I'm afraid it was a bit early for Puffy," one of his friends explained.

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The great thing Ralph Lauren has done is to associate himself so much with culture here that you're almost forced to think that anything that's good for Ralph is good for the country. Crocodile skirts? Good for the country. Prince of Wales dresses? Good for the country. The bodacious Giselle flouncing down the runway in a bra top no bigger than pasties? Exactly. Bravo, Ralph. Fashion show Kremlinology is often tied up in who gets to sit in the front row and who gets to look at someone else's hairdos for the hour. But another part of it is the pecking order, and Michael Kors had been second rung, waiting for that coup d'état, for an awful long time.

And the current top rung has been—proverbially, of course—getting fat and hanging out in that steam room for an awfully long time, having their flesh pummeled by willing masseurs (that would be, proverbially, of course, the press). So, I spent the first half of the show glad there was this new comer fixing up the models like Park Avenue kept women. Then I spent the second half of the show bored out of my mind. I imagine it would be a bit like having a long lunch with one of those gals, especially since the three martinis that make such outings bearable for their husbands are now forbidden. It would be great to suggest the show had the rock-star raciness of a Heather Locklear, rhymes-with-rich type, since she was there. (Entertainment Weekly once suggested an all-Heather network, and I don't think they're wrong.) But the show was much more Crystal (Joan Crawford) in The Women. Like when Jungle Red nails were the best you could do to prepare for raking your nails across some deserving trick's back. I like to think kept women have progressed from there, damn it! It was such an unironic parody of Park Avenue princesses that I can't help thinking anyone succumbing to the look and walking into Le Cirque 2000 with a felt fedora, a red shirt open to the navel, and all those ropes of whatever around their necks would be laughed out of the joint. Even Heather Locklear.