New York Fashion Week Anything but French
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Fashion Week when I ascended, with studied elegance, the stairs of Bryant Park to the white tents above. I suppose I should have anticipated a great deal of vanity—with myself as its first culprit. I couldn’t help but be secretly pleased and surprised by the way the teenagers were staring at me, salivating from behind the velvet rope. I may as well have been dressed in Galliano with Jake Gyllenhaal on my arm. Suddenly, it seemed, I had reached that stage of life when I had been inducted unwittingly into New York high society. I can pinpoint the exact moments: January, the Antiques Show at the Armory, followed by the Auto Show at the Javitz in February, the MoMA’s Benefit for Charity in June, and now, crème de la crème, Fashion Week in September. I had become—my father was pleased to announce to his colleagues and friends, as I looked for the nearest table to duck under—a debutante. I was making my New York debut. A few years too late.
Strangely, this “see and be scene” quality of New York that draws so many to our nation’s culture capital was precisely what drew nonconformists like myself to Paris. Paris seemed, from the moment I arrived, so indifferent to it all, assuming elegance, sophistication and of course, magnificence, without effort or statement. (And indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac). The platform of the metro, in select arrondissements, may as well have been a runway, with a red carpet and photographers in tow. Men my age wore scarves as naturally as pajamas – truly, they looked like they had rolled out of bed wearing them. And the women, well, it didn’t matter how they tied their scarves, or what label they preferred on their jeans, or with what degree of calculation they had chosen the width of their stripes. Their tiny French frames looked good in everything.
Leave the calculation to New Yorkers then – calculating is what we do best. And nowhere was the strategic art of self-promotion more transparent than within the coveted Bryant Park tents, where the models could easily be confused with their spectators. Women wore mini-skirts or tiny shorts, all leg and heel, (or platform, in this case). And while the men were infinitely more subdued in their accoutrement, I spotted several in hats of the 20s variety, and one man in a pirate costume—everyone seemed to be putting on a show, before the show had even begun. Having never had occasion to visit Fashion Week in Paris, I could only imagine what the French would think. Would they find this kind of spectacle appealing, even glamorous? Or would they find it, as I did, un peu trop?
It was when the Sass & Bide show ended—a barrage of emaciated 16-year old girls wearing vacuous, drugged expressions, seemingly clones, robotically marching down the runway—and the Lacoste Show began that I realized spectacle, done the all-American way, was what Fashion Week was truly about. The lights dimmed and the music came on and suddenly, an array of color, of fabric, of diversity. The models, fuller-figured and considerably more appealing than those I had previously seen, seemed handpicked from every remote corner of the globe—Tahiti, Estonia, Zimbabwe, Hawaii. Responding to this variety of race and ethnicity were fabrics and fashions of exotic origin, undulating with the flair of the Indian, Middle-Eastern, Latin American. Funny, I had always thought Lacoste to be the look of the “super prep,” but the styles I saw before me were so much richer: women wore flowing tunics, and men solid, bright uniforms in the colors of Gaugin. The consensus was clear. In Manhattan’s Fashion Week of 2007, white, in cloth and color, was a thing of the past.
An expat friend of mine who lived in Paris at the time I did once declared, to my horror, that she simply didn’t like French fashion. “There’s a certain conformity to it,” she said, commenting on the ballerines and Vanessa Bruno bags sported by every young woman in the Saint-Sulpice vicinity. “In New York, you get everything. Anything can be chic.” She did, in fact, have a point. New Yorkers may be blaring in their showiness: we speak too loudly on our cell phones, and in restaurants, and on subways. We have inverted our private selves and taken on public personas. But there’s courage to be valued in this. We put ourselves out there, for everything, and anything, we are.
The French may have invented fashion –from Chanel’s sophistication and feline beauty to the playful jouissance of Cacharel – but Fashion week, in its energy, vitality, and finally diversity, is a phenomenon capable only of Manhattan. Mais justemment.
