Down the runway and taking flight
New York
It must be fashion week. Where else would you see a peep show at an art gallery featuring actress Lisa Marie scantily clad as a cave woman and champing on a bone? Or Naomi Campbell doing a lap around the runway wearing nothing but a Rosa Cha string bikini and a birth control patch from show sponsor Ortho Evra?
Yes, the spring runway season kicked off this weekend with all the usual hoopla. There was a new “it” couple -- Beyonce and Jay-Z, whose front-row appearances thankfully drowned out the Beniffer wedding buzz. Wacky style statements were on display both on and off the runway (one fashionista wore a My Little Pony figurine as a hair ornament), and so was bad behavior (because, as the assistant charged with carrying Campbell’s Birkin bag, you do have license to verbally abuse anyone who stands in your way). Diet horror stories? Of course. Models, according to fashion week publication the Daily, have been known to ingest facial tissue as an appetite suppressant.
The shows are celebrating their 10th season under the tents at Bryant Park, on West 42nd Street. And for the first time, Vogue magazine is bringing some of the shows to the Los Angeles public, broadcasting them 24 hours a day on the jumbo outdoor screen on Sunset Boulevard between La Cienega and Kings Road in West Hollywood.
Of course not everyone shows at the tents. As always, there were location-specific gimmicks, designed to generate press if nothing else. Last season, instead of a runway show, Los Angeles-based designer Jeremy Scott hosted his own red-carpeted movie premiere with live images of starlets arriving in his gowns simulcast in a theater for his audience. This time, he transformed a SoHo art gallery into a peep show with 15 curtained glass rooms.
Barely dressed in white eyelet, a blond Little Bo Peep with a penis-shaped staff cavorted with two live sheep who registered their opinion at her feet by doing what barnyard animals do. In another booth, two models wearing bits in their mouths frolicked in a stable. There were pole dancers too, and for a while Scott was slithering around with them, though unlike the models, he didn’t wear crotchless underwear.
“For all of the eroticism,” said Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York, “it was really a bunch of people standing around saying, ‘Do you like this?’ ” Doonan also wondered about the audience Scott was trying to reach. Though the show seemed tailored to the fantasies of heterosexual men, he said, “Most everyone there was gay or female.”
Although he called the collection “Sexploitation,” Scott didn’t seem to be making a statement about fashion and the objectification of women. When asked how he came up with the concept, he said blankly, “I just thought, how fun would it be to have the girls be in a peep show?”
Scott wasn’t the only representative from recall country showing this weekend. After two seasons in Los Angeles, Jennifer Nicholson had her first moment in the New York spotlight. Much of the pre-show chatter focused on her famous papa. (“Is he coming?” “Are you sure he’s not coming?” “Are you sure he’s not just going to show up at the last minute?”) According to the designer, Jack couldn’t make it because he was shooting, but the show stood on its own merit.
More boldly than before, Nicholson asserted the stylish mix of sexy and sweet for which she is becoming known. The collection was a play on the contrasting themes of punk rock and French rococo, she said backstage, where her sons Duke, 4, and Sean, 7, were toddling about between makeup stations thick with the smell of aerosol hairspray.
Ridiculous themes, sure, but they worked. A pink chiffon baby-doll dress with graduated tiers was toughened up with white perforated leather straps, and a motorcycle jacket took on a softer look when it was done in white lace and finished with a bow at the waist.
“I have watched her now for a couple of seasons,” said Anna Garner, fashion director of New York’s Henri Bendel. “The first season was too vintage-inspired, the second too literal 1980s, but now I think we should buy the collection. For a younger customer, there were some great pieces.”
Elsewhere on the runways, Baby Phat designer Kimora Lee Simmons, wife of music mogul Russell Simmons, relied on feather headpieces, brightly colored fur chubbies and celebrity guests (Wyclef Jean, Beyonce and Jay-Z, and so on) to give her flat Josephine Baker-inspired collection of hot pants and mini-dresses a boost.
The aquarium-walled Coral Room nightclub owned by Paul Devitt, who also owns the Hollywood Boulevard bar-and-shoe store Star Shoes, was the perfect setting for Rebecca Taylor’s darling chiffon dresses with scalloped hems and abalone sequins.
And the label As Four may be Maxfield bound. Vincent Ehly, a buyer for the seminal Robertson Boulevard boutique, was dazzled by the designing foursome (Adi, Ange, Kai and Gabi) who live and work together and have been favorites of Bjork and other downtown avant-garde fashion adventurers here since the mid-1990s.
“It’s so nice to see something creative,” he said of the collection, a futuristic take on goddess garb that brought to mind “Star Wars” costumes and the work of the late 1960s Bay Area designer Kaisik Wong (draped, toga-like dresses created from a collage of purple, gold and pink metallic fabric, gold dusted suits with rounded shoulders and no visible fastenings of any kind; a cape constructed of long, teardrop-shaped panels, that had a gold braided skullcap incorporated into the garment).
On the other end of the creative spectrum, Amir Slama of the super-sexy Brazilian swimwear label Rosa Cha is on the way to winning the weirdest corporate tie-in award. His runway extravaganza was paid for in part by Ortha Evra (the first birth control patch to win FDA approval). But having models sporting the birth control patches with bathing suits seemed a poor advertisement for the product, considering the kind of tan lines that could result. (No, Mom, really, I’m not having sex!) Not that Slama is one who concerns himself with tan lines; several of his bikini briefs that showed rather more of the models’ derrieres than one is used to seeing.
Move over, plumbers, a new erogenous zone is born.
