Where a Little Star Power Always Goes Over Well
Women’s fashion week started off with a big bang Friday night at a party in the spectacular new Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West.
Even guests’ outlandish outfits (coats that looked like shag carpets, underwear worn on the outside of pants, etc.) took a back seat to the $210-million center, which media and store buyers got to preview before its Feb. 19 opening.
The seven-story glass building embraces the Hayden Sphere, an 87-foot diameter globe containing a re-creation of the museum’s famous Hayden Planetarium. Encircling the sphere is a ramp, dubbed the “cosmic pathway,” that takes visitors through 13 billion years of heavenly history. The ramp’s spiral effect is reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.
Guests sipped champagne from miniature bottles with straws and perused exhibits demonstrating concepts that are, for the most part, foreign to the fashion world: gravity and humanity’s relative unimportance in the scope of the universe.
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Trend news flash: The pashmina is not dead. How do I know? Mine was swiped at the BC Ethic show.
It took a minute for me to appreciate the irony. After all, the editors and writers who sit runway-side are often the world’s worst fashion victims, falling hook, line and sinker for every fleeting trend--like the pashmina. (But I bought mine because it’s warm. Right.)
Women here are still wearing pashminas (mostly as scarves), except for the hard-core, front-row-at-every-fashion-show crowd. They have moved on.
Their look is disco diva--straight dark denim jeans, fur vests or short coats, Fendi baguettes and shoes or boots with spike heels (yes, even in the snow).
The whole scene reminds me of sorority rush, and not just because everyone dresses alike. Admittance to runway presentations is by invitation only. The invites are usually brightly colored and sometimes gimmicky (Betsey Johnson’s was on a matchbook; BC Ethic’s on the back of a Matchbox car). And, like Valentines in elementary school, the more you get, the more popular you feel.
Once you RSVP, or, better yet, have your assistant RSVP, you wait for a callback for your seat assignment. There is a serious pecking order to the seating plans, and if you are not in the first couple of rows, forget it: You may as well not be there at all as far as the fashion pack is concerned, because you’re not in the “in” club.
At L.A. designer Jenisa Washington’s show, I had a seat in the second row.
As I waited for the show to start, I couldn’t help but notice the front row bench across the runway had several empty spots. Those people are probably not going to show up, I thought. So, after 15 minutes of internal debate, I scurried across the runway, sat down in the front row and tried to look as if I belonged.
Unfortunately, everyone who was supposed to be sitting there did show up and the bench had to accommodate one extra person: me. So the A-list magazine editors had to take notes with their elbows crammed together? Hey, they’re thin enough.
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Everyone’s buzzing about: “The Sopranos’ ” Dominic Chianese’s turn on the catwalk at Sicilian-born haberdasher Michele Savoia’s show . . . Laurence Fishburne, Billy Zane and Stephen Baldwin modeling jewel-toned suits by British tailor Oswald Boeteng . . . a hilarious “mockumentary” produced by Spike Lee for the Marc Ecko menswear show that features the two men discussing which models they should hire to walk the runway, then joking that Sean “Puffy” Combs already has dibs on everyone. Combs showed his own line, Sean John, on Saturday . . . pop singers Missy Elliott, Mary J. Blige and Duncan Sheik among models on the catwalk at Tommy Jeans . . . Anna Nicole Smith modeling plus-size lingerie at the debut of Lane Bryant’s lingerie line.
Reach Booth Moore at booth.moore@latimes.com.
