Warm, Fuzzy Feeling of New Clothes
You know how it is. The days grow shorter. The nights get colder. And the longing swells in your heart. Out of nowhere, it seems, you want new clothes and you want them bad.
We spent several punishing hours, not to mention hundreds of dollars, this week, searching for the clothes that would make us new.
Sure, lots of salesclerks ignored us, bullied us and patronized us. But isn’t that their job? (If we’d wanted nice, we would have called Ivana Trump at the Home Shopping Network.)
Finally, we found the perfect jacket and a pair of perfectly beautiful, perfectly excruciating French boots. Triumph.
“When you’re thin, you don’t have to buy as many clothes,” observed our know-it-all girlfriend. “You can just throw on any old thing.” When you’re not, she said, ostensibly about herself, it’s a lot harder.
She’s right, of course. Just try buttoning one of fall’s new higher-breaking jackets over a bust line. And see that blouse with the French-sounding label marked Large ? They’re just joking. There’s no such thing in France.
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Beyond the Catwalk: The forces that drive--and are driven by--the fashion world are explored with unremitting seriousness in “The Look,” an ambitious two-part documentary that begins Monday at 10 p.m. on KCET. (Part II airs a week later at 9:45 p.m.)
Our advice is to ignore the vaguely Marxist narration (what do you expect from British documentarians?), and let the camera pull you through this hothouse of artifice and ego, genius and greed. Ralph Lauren appears in a rare on-camera interview, but it is his competitor, Calvin Klein, who is the most compelling to watch, bathed in the warm glow of his considerable self-admiration.
Like any high-stakes business, fashion has an indelicate underbelly. Terrified women battle aggressive security guards (one fashion editor is struck in the scuffle) to gain admittance to a European ready-to-wear show. Several young weavers return to poverty and obscurity after making the fabric for a Christian Lacroix haute couture jacket. Meanwhile, Karl Lagerfeld holds court on street styles--as seen from the window of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes.
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What’s Wrong With a Letter to the Editor?: A group of chanting animal-rights activists invaded the offices of Vogue magazine last week, forcing New York City police to rescue its unhappy-looking editor, Anna Wintour. Was it something we said?
More likely it was something a trade group called the Fur Information Council of America paid rather handsomely to say--across five pages in Vogue’s October issue: “Fur . . . The Way It Reveals . . . The Way it Empowers . . . The Way It Embraces . . . Fur. More Than Any Other Fabric.”
We’re offended by that ad, too. The only empowered fur-wearing female we can think of is Cruella de Ville.
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Man of the Hour: The California Fashion Industry Friends of AIDS Project L.A. will honor New York designer Isaac Mizrahi at next year’s benefit on April 28. Following on the heels of Calvin Klein’s successful Hollywood Bowl extravaganza for the same group, the Mizrahi event is comparatively intimate. Staged at Mann’s Chinese Theatre (about 1,500 seats versus the Bowl’s 16,000 seats), the evening will be patterned after an old-fashioned Hollywood movie premiere. Very fitting, considering Mizrahi has a small part in the new Michael J. Fox film, “For Love or Money.” Mizrahi plays, surprise, a designer.
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Make Mine Paste: Mom used to keep a See’s candy box full of rhinestone earrings and brooches in her stocking and garter belt drawer, hidden--or so she thought--from the chubby fingers of prying children. At every chance, of course, we’d try the stuff on and . . . va-va-va-voom--instant Jayne Mansfield. Or Mae West, whose custom-made rhinestone brooch is featured in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Jewels of Fantasy” exhibit, opening Oct. 14.
From Coco Chanel’s Maltese crosses made in the ‘30s to Christian Lacroix’s rock-candy resin cross of the ‘90s, the exhibit traces the history of 20th-Century costume jewelry through 400 glorious pieces. With baubles that beautiful, who needs the real thing?
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Fashion Liberation: Tired of the fashion jungles of New York or Los Angeles? Try a trip to our nation’s capital--the land that style forgot. “You can never have a bad hair day in Washington,” writes Maura Moynihan in Harper’s Bazaar this month, “because bad hair is always in.” So are bad clothes, she notes, in colors like “frog-skin green” and “Kleenex yellow.”
Moynihan, daughter of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) , blames the town’s Talbots aesthetic on meager government salaries. But even well-heeled politicians habitually dress down to look like their constituents. The components of a D.C. power suit include “an oversize, rectilinear jacket with shoulder pads (still), a string of pearls, a floppy bow and flesh-colored hose.”
What, no Easy Livin’ pumps?
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Around Town: At La Mirage cleaners in Beverlywood they’ll clean your tallis (prayer shawl) for free. . . . At the Chanel counter in Bullock’s, Century City, the perfect wine-colored lipstick for fall--”Berry”--is flying out the door. . . . At Greg Jewelers in Westwood, the first Swatch watch made of precious metal will be sold for one day only--Wednesday--at noon. Tresor Magique, a limited edition platinum case Swatch, is $1,618. . . . From our ever-expanding collection of salesclerk squabbles: “Were you speaking to me in a derogatory manner?” a saleswoman asked her subordinate over a rack of marked-down Genny suits. “No,” the young woman answered, unbowed. “I was speaking to you in a facetious manner.”
