[ed. Wow, Sasha Weiss. What a great piece of writing.]Entering the big tent at Lincoln Center, where most of the marquee shows at New York City’s fashion week took place, you feel transported to the scene in the “Hunger Games” movie, where the Capitol’s élite gather to observe the presentation of the new tributes, dressed in their metallic and feathered finest. The figures at Lincoln Center are humans, but humans who have imagined themselves into some mirrored universe, where women walk on craggy stilts, lips are colored the darkest crimson, and nearly seven-foot-tall men in hot pants show off their legs. They drift around the lobby, eyeing one another (eyes, too, are dramatically painted here, often in gold). Occasionally, homage is paid to a particularly daring outfit by means of a photograph.
I thought of the “Hunger Games” because that scene (the most visually arresting one in the film) is designed like a satanic fashion show, the runway serving as a conveyor belt for young children compelled to enact the desires of the powerful for beauty and bloodshed. “Hunger Games” isn’t the only pop-cultural artifact that primes us to view fashion as an expression of some inner rot, as vanity, a grasp at wealth, the shallow aspirations of a classist society. Even the shows devoted to its practice, like “Project Runway” and “America’s Next Top Model,” make fashion into a ruthless competition, presided over by stern, frosty judges (mostly women).
I didn’t expect to love the shows as I did, but I found them surprisingly joyous affairs. Watching them, we’re given permission to project ourselves into idealized, adventuresome future lives—ones that involve shimmering, jewel-toned gowns, stiff metallic trench coats, and flowing pants suits screen printed with images of highways—but we’re pulled even more forcefully to imagine our pasts. The fashion show—which begins with all the calculation and jostling of regular life—ends up depositing us somewhere back in the realm of childhood: before our personalities had coalesced, when we encountered ourselves in mirrors, wondered about who we might become, and pretended.
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In New York, people stare at one another all the time, but it’s usually surreptitious: a flickering once-over walking down Spring street, checking out someone’s jeans. At fashion week, looking is the point. The waiting to enter the shows, and then the waiting for them to start, is interminable, and seems designed to stoke the study of others. Massed in a pack that reluctantly forms a line, the fashionistas gather at the entrance to a show, gobbling each other up with their eyes. (I spy, on the way into Nanette Lepore: many Louis Vuitton totes; a hideous crocheted poncho in garish colors layered over a flared leather miniskirt; a man and a woman who look to be in their eighties, both immaculately attired, the woman in black Chanel with leopard shoes.)
When we’re finally allowed to go in, the room itself is like a giant, blinking eye. At the back wall, hundreds of photographers have arranged themselves, nearly on top of one another, on rafters, creating a wall of jutting cameras. Lining the room are rows of benches and the spectators pile in (buyers, journalists, models, and the pure lovers of fashion, who one can spot because of the inventiveness of their outfits. I watched one latecomer navigate through a thicket of legs to reach her seat in four-inch platformed Oxfords, wearing stripes in all directions, to match her hair, which had one streak of white). We’re seated in descending order of importance—the well-known writers, editors, and models in the front row, closest to the catwalk. I’m in the standing room section, the better to survey the room.
A strobe-like flashing somewhere down below indicates the presence of a celebrity surrounded by cameras. I can see the fit silhouette of a woman in a haze of light. Someone near me murmurs that it’s Edie Falco. Even a crowd of that size (five hundred, easily, in the big tent’s main space) quickly becomes a hive, its lines of hierarchy drawn in thick black. The lights are low, with a glow of illumination from the stage and static of voices, and then, as in the theatre, the room turns a shade darker, the talking subsides. There’s a beat of anticipation, and the bright lights snap on.
Hundreds of well-dressed, strategizing people who have spent the last thirty minutes comparing themselves to one another incline their heads and their attention toward the runway. In this moment, they all want the same thing: to watch the beautiful parade.
by Sasha Weiss, New Yorker | Read more:
Photo: Maria Lokke
