GO FIGURE:
Wraiths hit the runway, while hotties like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Olivia Munn, Marisa Tomei. Camilla Belle, Katharine McPhee and Nina Arianda sit front row.
GO FIGURE:
Wraiths hit the runway, while hotties like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Olivia Munn, Marisa Tomei. Camilla Belle, Katharine McPhee and Nina Arianda sit front row. (Getty Images for Michael Kors)
Such elegant makeup! Such artful coiffures! And the women looked nice, too. Everyone who looks like anything was in New York this week to join the swirling vortex of the world’s most accomplished schmatte makers that is Fashion Week Spring 2013. For a first-time visitor to this smorgasbord of starvation, it all looked deeply strange.
Here’s what stood out among the bad and the beautiful:
The editrixes and their adorable assistants in the audience know what to wear. They’re sleek and toned and ripe and pretty and luscious. Not so the “exotic-looking,” i.e. hideous, robo-models I saw at Naeem Khan in art deco muumuus and caftans concealing their regrettably sexless bodies, all planes and edges and angles, hipbones and cheekbones you could slice a tomato with. I’ve seen sexier coat racks. When the models wore plunging necklines and bottom-hugging shorts, it was just sad.
Ditto the wild clashes of prints and patterns. Horizontal stripes up, vertical stripes in a completely different color scheme down. Or ridiculous floral-patterned trousers with a polka-dot top. No, and no. Even I know this is a look too far, and it was just last Tuesday I found out you’re not supposed to wear black shoes with a brown belt.
The most violent clashes, though, were in the audience. Turns out, all the fashion personalities can’t stand one another, and all the air-kissing and “So good to see yous” are masking raging inner turmoil that makes the Sunnis and the Shiites look as tight as the Olsen sisters. Spotting a trio of reality-TV fashion stars (Julia Allison, June Ambrose, Jay Manuel), a top fashion editor remarks, “It’s like a meeting of the chromosomally damaged minds.”
Claws really came out at the Zac Posen show, where fire marshals suddenly started playing musical chairs, except they pulled 60 seats at once. Enraged style mavens acted like Lincoln Center was a sinking ship and 60 lifeboats had just disappeared, and in the ruckus, a publicist working on the show took a slap to the kisser from Jennifer Eymere, the daughter of French fashion editor Marie-José Susskind-Jalou, when the pair and another daughter had their seats taken away. The publicist slapped right back, with a million-dollar lawsuit. Is this what they mean when they say fashion is all “fierce” and “dangerous”? Gals, football players may try to break each other’s legs, but when the game is over, they shake hands.
Even when editors aren’t slugging publicists, though, for all the chugging excitement on the sound system and all the cool mood lighting, the default mood is not glamour and excitement, but seething resentment. Not only do the models look as angry as if their ponytails are caught in an invisible doorjamb, but the buyers and magazine people and celebrities can’t believe how scene-y the scene they’ve created is. More than once, I heard equally frowny and loudly exasperated editors say, “It’s a hit show.” Except they added a letter at the start of the word “hit.”
During a 10-day event dedicated to worship of the hollow-eyed legions of the immaculately emaciated, no one can be seen eating, so no one ever is. Next year they should get Oscar-Mayer to sponsor Fashion Week and force-feed hot dogs to the staff of Vogue. I’d buy a ticket to that.