 A Betsey Johnson design. |
A magazine like Vogue has more power behind the scenes than a journal in almost any other industry. Designers preview their collections with Vogue editors, who are not shy about telling the designer what is likely and what is not likely to make it into the magazine. Given that designers also advertise in magazines the relationship can be, shall one say, intimate.
Vogue can create a "must-have." A must-have is something like the Marc Jacobs thermal sweater a year ago. It sold out everywhere. Another must-have is the Manolo Blahnik stiletto. Andre Leon Talley explained that this is an absolute fact of fashionability. "You must have a Manolo Blahnik stiletto. That is the shoe. That is the shoe for the woman who wants an elegantly turned heel and sex appeal," he said. (Wintour said with a chuckle, "Manolo and Andre are extremely good friends.")
Talley tells the Galliano story. It's a tale of the power of the fashion press, and of Vogue magazine in particular. John Galliano a few years ago was a Paris designer going nowhere fast.
"He was sleeping on a floor in a sleeping bag," Talley said.
But Talley loved Galliano's collection. He went to his boss, Wintour.
"I said, 'Listen, darling, this is it. This is the collection. This will take fashion to a new level.' "
And Wintour said, "Go do what you have to do."
So Talley paid for Galliano to fly from Paris to New York. He put Galliano up in the Royalton Hotel. He took Galliano to a birthday party, thrown in Talley's honor, at Mortimer's. At the party Galliano met the Park Avenue fashion set, including, for example, Catie Marron, a Vogue contributing editor (and friend of Talley's) whose husband, Don Marron, is a big shot at Paine Webber. Sufficiently impressed, in January Paine Webber agreed to bankroll Galliano's collection. That enabled Vogue to feature Galliano prominently in its pages. He became an international phenomenon. Talley says he did not "discover" Galliano, however.
"Talent is something you don't discover. You embrace it."
The Isaac Mizrahi show had the most dramatic venue, a cavernous hall on Wall Street, with pillars all around and a coffered ceiling far above. The runway was an oval, like a stock car racetrack. Half the audience sat inside the oval, facing outward, while in the dead center of the room was what passed for a backstage, the dressing area delineated only by racks of clothing, the models dashing to and fro as they changed from one outfit to another. Nudity is a fact of life at a fashion show the women, called "girls," are no more bashful than mannequins.
 Bloomingdale's Kal Ruttenstein, left, chats with Isaac Mizrahi. |
This Miller sister identified herself as Marie-Chantal. I dimly recalled that she had married some kind of nobleman or king in Europe somewhere.
Double-checking, I asked if her last name is still Miller.
Without the hint of a smile she said, "Actually, now it's 'Of Greece.' "
Todd Oldham got celebrities at his show Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, Sandra Bernhard, and isn't that Julia Roberts?
Donald Trump also showed up a couple of times, remarkably without making any attempt to turn the collections into a book signing. His latest memoir, The Art of the Comeback, had just hit the stores. He also has a daughter, Ivanka, who has become a runway model, if perhaps not quite an immediate sensation. Trump confided that his book is "going through the roof." An instant mega-bestseller, he said.
"I'm bigger than ever," he summarized.
He is certainly, by Fashion Week standards, a fat man.
Finally we have to make mention of Lauren Ezersky. She was all over the place during Fashion Week, and is basically the extreme case, a form of fashion creature analogous to the giant tube worms that live around deep oceanic hydrothermal vents.
Ezersky is something of a media star, writing for Paper magazine and appearing on radio and cable TV. She wears monstrously thick makeup and jokes that she applies it with a spatula. She's 43 and divorced. In truth she is married to her own image. She's frenetically fashionable. She says, "I happen to be a designer label queen."
She has an entire closet devoted to Galliano. Adores him! At the fashion show she wore a Galliano striped two-piece suit and tie one day and a black leather sadomasochism sort of thing the next.
She was thrilled to provide a brief tour of her closet-intensive apartment on Central Park, which is decorated in the style of Louis XIV. Her bed has a canopy, the furniture is delicate and decorative, and two tiny dogs, Gomez and Tallulah Consuela, chirp at her feet. Gomez is brown and Tallulah is black, though she refers to their coloring as "fawn" and "noir," respectively.
"Fashion is all about self-esteem," she says. "It's about wearing the label. It gives me more self-esteem. I know that's kind of stupid."
What she's really after is visual stimulation, a cranked-up environmental intensity. She refers to herself as a freak of nature and does not consider that a negative statement. Her obsession is not a new development.
"I was born with it, honey. I came out of my mother's womb wearing six-inch stiletto heels. I'm a clotheshorse. I would eat at McDonald's seven days a week if I could afford to buy $1,000 outfits. It's a passion. It's a sickness. It's an illness."
She is so passionately fashionable she has flirted with actual hideousness. She's the equivalent of the Green Bay Packers fan wearing a giant wedge of cheese on his head. But it's her choice. And if she has enough confidence, she can pull it off.
Joel Achenbach is a reporter for the Style section of The Post. He is on leave writing a book about extraterrestrial life.
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