Slaves of Fashion
It isn't
just the widening international scope of the fashion industry that makes
clothing design everybody's business these days. It's the shows, which are ever
more fantastic, and the press coverage of them, which is ever more hysterically
serious. It certainly isn't the clothes. If you look around at what men and
women are actually wearing in the big fashion cities--Paris, Milan, London, New
York--you'll see very little evidence that runway fashion has any impact at
all. The extreme garments created for the shows may be worn, occasionally, by
people in fashion, showbiz, or society. But the only way the public has of
relating to these items is to gasp at them and applaud them, swoon over them
and deplore them, laugh at them and compare them--and it's not even the clothes
that evoke these responses, it's their likenesses transmitted by the media.
On television, we see
close-up interviews with designers babbling tensely just before the show and
gasping with relief and fatigue afterward. This lets us know how epic the
designer's personal ordeal has been, how heroic his endurance. The other epic
elements of the show are insistent music, striking lighting, and a piquant
setting, perhaps a skating rink. But these are beside the point. The central
focus of everything is the bevy of unbelievable models and the way they work.
Clothes, no matter how outrageous, don't register by themselves. It's the girls
parading around in them that make the show, dazzle the audience, magnetize the
cameras, and entrance the world. Them, and the obscurely thrilling knowledge
that they are paid enormous sums to do it.
In Paris last week I attended the Vivienne Westwood fashion
show. Several palatial chambers and corridors in the 18 th century
Hôtel Crillon were given over to the operation; they were packed with rows of
golden chairs leaving a serpentine passage for the parade, and surrounded by
banks of lights and ranks of camerapeople. The audience was an untidy mix,
milling and chattering in several languages and photographing each other during
the long wait, some dressed in startling Westwoody costumes. A tape of Baroque
music began, the mumbling stopped, and on came the procession of ravishing
visions. They passed inches from me, stalking and swaying, pausing
occasionally, casting friendly looks on one and all. They were very young and
very slim, 6 feet tall and distinctively beautiful, each wondrously clad in a
wide range of strong colors and textures that were cut and fitted or draped and
buttoned to mold the body and occasionally expose the bosom or upper thighs.
(In this show, Westwood again demonstrated her talent for employing authentic
historical styles to achieve shockingly modern erotic results.) The girls all
had fluffy, multicolored piles of hair and bee-stung lips and wore very
high-heeled boots or shoes, so they looked like a team even though each costume
was different.
Such ensemble work is
crucial at fashion shows. On television the camera rests fleetingly and
incompletely on a single outfit. But in life the important thing is the
mesmerizing sequence of models. At the Marc Jacobs show for Louis Vuitton, the
girls all had bare legs and flat mules and their hair hung down perfectly
straight. They wore no makeup at all. The clothes were unshaped and the colors
restrained. But everybody was 6 feet tall and slim, very young and very
beautiful, and paraded with the same pleasing, well disposed manner and well
paced gait through the perversely austere production.
At Lanvin, there were many nipples visible through
transparent fabrics. At Guy Laroche, there were glittering red sheaths below
huge wigs. At Issey Miyake, there was stiff fabric sculpted around the bodies,
as always. At Jean-Paul Gaultier, everybody was muffled up in boots and long
skirts with caps and sweaters, hoping to suggest the Left Bank in 1948. Through
all such intensely concocted efforts, year after year, set ablaze by fierce
lights and lashed at by loud music, rows of tall, beautiful, amiable young
women stride and pause and turn, obligingly decked in strands of rope, piles of
feathers, patches of metal, mountains of taffeta. Every once in a while, one or
another will endearingly stumble.
It wasn't always like
this. Mannequins have paraded in designers' collections since the turn of the
century, but until World War II their status was low and so was their pay. They
were employees at individual designers' studios, and their job was to resemble
store-window dummies or the sketchy figures in fashion drawings. The sexual
charms of prospective customers were on no account to be upstaged by those of
the model. Mannequins were nameless, their standard good looks as uninteresting
as possible, their erotic selves effaced. At Paquin around 1913, models wore
flesh-colored coverings on arms, back, and bosom when they showed décolleté
evening wear, so their bare skin wouldn't be distracting.
It has remained true that the fashion model's only job is
to appear in clothes; indeed, in the atmosphere in which they shine as
individual stars, it's all the more important that they have no other
distracting talents. The appeal of these female platoons is ancient, potent,
and forbidden. They are like rows of whores or slaves, odalisques or
concubines, servants in Astarte's temple, Satan's demons as myriad sirens. They
don't offer intricate performances that took years of severe training to
perfect; they don't sing, speak, or chant; they don't earnestly appear for a
cause; they aren't eagerly joining in a festival. They have no will. They
parade their fresh charms in seductive, borrowed plumage for our judgment, but
only for the greater glory of the sultan, the high priest, the whoremaster, the
ringmaster, the devil himself, the designer and his backer who have bought them
as toys to play with. It's one of the oldest erotic fantasies, recurrent in
legends and fictions of many kinds, lending itself well to traditional ballet
and cabaret--see Scheherezade , La Bayadère , Les Folies Bergères,
the Copacabana.
We don't allow ourselves to
perceive fashion shows as variations on this particular theme, because it would
force us away from the comfortable notion that fashion is the mirror of our
time. But we do know that deep beneath our surface approval of the wholesome
worldwide tide of luxury commerce that keeps the fashion business
afloat--boosting economies, promoting employment and cultural exchange,
enriching the media with new material and the visual arts with new scope--it is
all about sex of a very old-fashioned and dirty-minded kind. What we secretly
like about fashion is seeing it perennially exposed in daring, costly,
ridiculous, delicious, televised runway shows full of mobile, passive, perfect
girls. Anyone looking for a further proof of the return to barbarism at the end
of this millennium could probably find it there.
