This show was a complete fashion disaster. And the clothes stank, too.
Fresh from helping enslave little kids in her papa’s murderous regime, Uzbekistan’s globe-trotting designing woman, Gulnara “GooGoosha” Karimova, yesterday debuted her Guli line of cunning silk and cotton blends to a third-empty house at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Even the demented designer had the good sense not to show her cowardly face.
I wonder — is this fashion? Or dark comedy? Because the second the lights went out, a hysterical slide show, which appeared to be produced by Borat, came on a big screen.
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Against strains of vaguely militaristic music, we were treated to the sight of the finest Uzbeki landmarks and industrial buildings, which sit next to the cotton fields where children as young as 13, say human-rights groups, are forced to work. The Riviera it’s not.
The Guli runway embarrassment, originally scheduled for Lincoln Center, was hastily moved across town to Cipriani’s at 42nd Street, after an international outcry rang out when The Post broke the story of just who was coming to Fashion Week.
Karimova, 39, is complicit in the murderous regime of her aging father, Islam Karimov, 73, who once boiled a political rival alive. Lately she’s flitted from fashion shows to the Cannes Film Festival, embellishing her carefully honed image of an international glamour puss. It hasn’t worked.
Back home, she’s called a robber baron, a plunderer of the poor and “the most hated woman in the nation.’’
If you wanted to wilfully forget Uzbekistan’s enslavement of children, the show made that impossible, too.
Interspersed among skeletal girl models, draped in a mismatched collection of flimsy, chiffon gowns and seedy tiger-print pants, there walked several, jail-bait-looking male models — each one clad in linen shorts. Like kids.
Was Karimova really that clueless? Or was she boasting of the children forced into labor in her home country?
Sure seems like it.
James Covert contributed to this report.