There’s a carnival along the catwalk
TROMPE l’oeil bikinis and kitschy Carmen Miranda turbans. Preening haute couture salons and street kids in T-shirts and plastic sandals. Rio de Janeiro’s breezy hedonism and Sao Paulo’s monochromatic mayhem. Brazilian fashion is many things all at once.
But on a soggy May evening in this restless megacity, Brazilian fashion is a man named Namie Wihby, who’s sashaying around in a pair of black high heels at the Wannabe modeling school. A lanky figure of Lebanese-Trinidadian extraction, with hair cropped as close as a U.S. Marine’s, Wihby is in charge of molding the raw talent at Wannabe, which claims to be the only school of its kind in Brazil.
In this country, fashion has become a very big business lately, attracting a clutch of gifted young designers, ambitious promoters, photographers, critics and, of course, hordes of aspiring catwalk divas. It’s Wihby’s job to show these young, mostly female models how to strut in pumps like Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. How to touch their bodies in ways that are provocative but not prurient. How to exude that peculiar blend of nonchalance and carnality that is to successful models what overweening self-confidence is to successful politicians.
Sometimes he has to show the youngest girls of 13 and 14 how to use silverware properly because they’ve never eaten at a restaurant. “You have to be a little bit of a psychologist,” Wihby, 36, says of his fairy godmother role.
Little by little, he and his partner, former model Lilian Gomes, 39, do their best to transform these gawky adolescents into the poised, exotic beings that have made top models like the ubiquitous Gisele Bundchen (Leonardo Di Caprio’s ex-squeeze) into Brazil’s hottest export since bossa nova. “Half the business is to teach the girls, and the other half is to find the girls,” Gomes says. “We have to make them believe that it is a personage, this is not themselves, this is something they are creating.”
Fifteen or 20 years ago, when Brazil was still shaking off the dark days of military dictatorship, the idea of opening a modeling school might have struck most people here as delusional. But contemporary Brazil is a self-confident and aggressive country that’s eager to be seen as a major player in hemispheric affairs. With half a continent’s worth of natural resources and more than four times as many people as South America’s second-most-populous country, Colombia, Brazil can produce most of what it needs, from synthetic fabrics to soap operas. Like China and India, it sees itself as a country of the future.
Though hardly free of racism, Brazil revels in its luxuriant multiethnicity. It has more Roman Catholics than any other country but also some of the hemisphere’s most liberal gay rights laws. And despite its enormous social problems -- poverty, crime and congestion in the big cities, ethnic and environmental clashes in the Amazon -- Brazil is buoyed by a youthful self-image that’s constantly finding expression in popular culture.
Music, cinema and the national religion of soccer all are undergoing a renaissance here. Brazilian fashion, fueled by the country’s robust economy, is drawing curious stares from the world’s couture meccas. Fashion colleges and modeling agencies are proliferating. Young star designers like Alexandre Herchcovitch and Isabella Capeto, along with veteran stylists such as Gloria Coelho and her husband, Reinaldo Lourenco, are selling their creations at stores from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. Some of their recent influences are a characteristically Brazilian mishmash of high art and pop culture: classic Disney animation (Herchcovitch); the kabbala (Coelho); grand opera (Lourenco); and the enigmatic outsider art of the late Henry Darger (Capeto), with its weird visual lexicon of naked little girls.
Binding it all together is Brazilians’ Grail-like quest for the body beautiful. “People here in Brazil take care a lot of their bodies,” says Herchcovitch, whose Jewish grandparents emigrated from Poland and Romania. “They work out, they make diet, and they make plastic surgery a lot. So here we are experts in making like tight clothes, like to show the right things and hide the right things.”
Youth no barrier
Brazilian fashion’s most precocious talent is Pedro Lourenco, son of Reinaldo Lourenco and Gloria Coelho, who’s avidly following in his parents’ well-shod footsteps. At the improbable age of 12 he became the designer for the Sao Paulo women’s wear label Carlota Joakina. Two years later, he shares a workshop and office space with his mother in a large retrofitted industrial building.
On a recent day, the seasoned 14-year-old showed off samples from his first collection, which he said was inspired by motocross racing, a personal passion. He likes mixing shapes and fabrics -- leather, wool, velvet, lace -- the way a hip-hop DJ might sample swatches of old James Brown beats. A dress from the collection expresses this philosophy with crisscrossing diagonal zippers and a softening see-through layer of white gauze below the ribs. “I think the rest of the world, they’re bored with their [way of] living, so they come to Brazil and see new things,” says the country’s newest boy wonder designer. “I think Brazil is growing up, in music, in fashion.”
Pedro and both his parents are showing their new collections as part of Sao Paulo Fashion Week. Though only in its 10th year, it is Brazil’s single biggest media event outside soccer and the continent’s most important couture happening, upstaging its glamorous elder rival, Rio Fashion Week. Sally Singer, fashion news and features director for Vogue, questions how much Brazilian designers can actually benefit from such a showcase. “What Brazil still does best, and what everyone seems to want, are bikinis and jeans, and bikinis and jeans are not things that need to be shown on a runway,” she says. But in the words of Britain’s the Independent newspaper, Sao Paulo is “the only real contender to join the established fashion capitals of New York, London, Milan and Paris.”
The fashion industry functions as a kind of giant infomercial for the entire country and not only the tourist hot spots of Rio and Sao Paulo. Fashion editors and photographers are tripping over one another as they flock to Brazil’s remote white sand beaches and dramatic cityscapes to shoot lavish spreads. In recent months, the influential Selfridges department store in London hosted a monthlong homage to Brazilian fashion, film, photography, music, design and sports, and French merchandisers feted the South American country with a “Year of Brazil” promotional bash.
Travel writers are penning creamy tributes to the “tanned midriffs and intoxicating smiles” of Rio’s vibrant night life and “the seductive buzz of Brazilian Portuguese” -- this from the New York Times. The international party crowd, always scanning the horizon for new playgrounds to conquer, has glommed onto Brazil’s alluring combination of beautiful bodies and (relatively) cheap airfares and ocean-view hotel rooms. Depictions of Brazil as a 24-hour open-air den of debauchery are rampant. “Many of the people I’ve met here seem to regard sex as little more than a good massage,” gushed one Conde Nast Traveler writer. “I decide to make out with three different guys in the spirit of cultural research.”
Brazilian fashion designers are used to such hyper-hormonal hyperbole, and while they certainly don’t discourage it, they gently suggest that this is only part of the picture. “The cliche, I think, is the sexuality, not the sensuality,” says Amir Slama, whose Rosa Cha beachwear label is legendary for how much colorful whimsy it can pack into two triangular pieces of cloth barely bigger than a bandanna. Folkloric characters from Brazil’s northern Bahia region may find their way onto a Rosa Cha customer’s bronzed backside as easily as biomorphic shapes inspired by Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings.
Sexual-hothouse stereotypes of Brazil are giving way to deeper, more nuanced impressions, says Slama, president of the Assn. of Brazilian Fashion Designers. Eight years ago, when he first started selling his collections in France, Slama says, French stores would use mannequins made up to look like American Indians. Nowadays, he says, his clothes are displayed alongside those of Gucci and Jean Paul Gaultier. Gradually, he believes, Europeans are coming to realize that Brazilian fashion can goose your brain as well as your libido.
“I think that we generate a very sensual woman, very sensual man, a very particular way of living and being,” Slama says. “And I think that for this millennium, that looks like a very global look, you know?”
Cariocas vs. Paulistas
A major source of this current fashion dynamism is the long-standing rivalry/infatuation that exists between Sao Paulo, the country’s business and financial center, and Rio, its physically stunning cultural capital. The cities are only a 40-minute plane ride apart, intensifying both their mutual competition and their mutual influence. It’s as if Los Angeles were next to Philadelphia, just down the interstate from Manhattan.
Over the years, fashion insiders say, Cariocas have absorbed more of Sao Paulo’s urban sophistication, while Paulistas have developed their inner Carioca by dressing a bit sexier and funkier. There’s a laissez-faire attitude toward displaying skin on Rio’s famous beaches, where it’s not uncommon to spot a 250-pound woman in a bikini or a 70-year-old man in a Speedo, unself-consciously disporting themselves among the legions of tall, tan, young and lovely.
Slama compares Rio’s effect on Sao Paulo to how L.A. style has moved New Yorkers to dress “more relaxed, more comfortable, more beach-like” during warm-weather months.
Some say the cross-pollination has reached a point where it’s difficult even to speak of a distinct Rio versus Sao Paulo designer style anymore. The red leather Hello Kitty handbags, skull-festooned sweaters and hot pink boots that Herchcovitch displays at his store in a high-end Sao Paulo neighborhood are as fresh and lighthearted (though not as cheap) as anything you’ll find browsing Copacabana’s famous Hippie Market. Constanca Basto, who started out selling shoes along Rio’s Ipanema beach, now has a store on the cusp of New York’s Greenwich Village and meatpacking district and is known for concoctions like a pair of satin and rhinestone boots inspired by the ones Halle Berry wore in “Catwoman.”
“People from Rio, they wanted to be like Sao Paulo. People from Sao Paulo wanted to have a beach,” Herchcovitch says. “So it’s a great mess. It’s a very interesting mess.”
It’s also a far cry from two or three decades ago, when social tensions induced by Brazil’s strongman regime scared off fashion investors and turned the country’s once vibrant industry into a closed market that couldn’t sell abroad. Back then, inflation was rising so fast that some exclusive Sao Paulo clothing stores gave up using price tags because a garment’s cost on any given morning might change by that afternoon.
By contrast, Brazilian fashion had thrived through much of the ‘50s and ‘60s, says Paulo Borges, founding director of Sao Paulo Fashion Week. The government was investing heavily in industrialization of all sorts. New synthetic fabrics opened new design possibilities. The trenchant neorealist films of Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and other members of Brazil’s so-called Cinema Novo movement, and the cosmopolitan pop experiments of tropicalia artists such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes and Tom Ze sent liberating ripples across Brazilian culture. Soon Brazilian designers were putting out daring, sexy, Pop Art-inspired clothes whose grooviness quotient rivaled anything coming out of Swinging London’s Carnaby Street.
Credit goes to Borges
By all accounts, it was Borges who recognized the resurgent desire among Brazilian designers to organize and develop their market and who wrestled Sao Paulo Fashion Week into existence in 1996. “When I looked back and realized that this movement existed, and that we had back then the starting of a fashion culture in Brazil, I believed that we could repeat that,” Borges says. The event now runs on a $2.5-million budget, showcases 43 labels and draws 112,000 visitors. According to Borges, the apparel industry now ranks as Brazil’s second largest, after construction.
“Sao Paulo Fashion Week and the influx of foreign labels sorted out the Brazilian market,” says Lilian Pacce, a Sao Paulo-based journalist who hosts a popular cable TV show on fashion and is writing a book about the Brazilian bikini. “Also, the globalization of labels has forced the Brazilian market to respond.”
Suitably for a country with a gene pool distilled from African slaves, European immigrants, Indians and one of the New World’s largest Asian populations, Brazilian models are reshaping international beauty standards. Bundchen, whose pneumatic figure and chestnut-brown, blue-eyed features evoke the Alps more than the Amazon, has banished the anorexic heroin-chic urchins who dominated fashion spreads in the ‘90s.
She also is a poster girl for Brazil’s stunning ethnic syncretism. Like other top models, she hails from the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, where many German, Italian and other Western European immigrants settled. While light-skinned blue- and green-eyed models are all the rage here, black and morena Brazilians are also well represented on the world’s runways. “When the Portuguese came they didn’t kill the blacks and they didn’t kill the Indians, and so they had sex together,” says Wannabe’s Gomes with a giggle.
In fact, Brazilians seem to celebrate cultural interbreeding in almost any form. The architect Niemeyer famously recast the stark modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier by adding swirling feminine curves to his structures. (His Bienal Building is the site of Sao Paulo Fashion Week, which wraps up Monday.) Contemporary Brazilian musicians are forever dicing and splicing American R&B; and jazz-funk with samba rhythms. The dazzling artistry and sinuous motion of Brazilian soccer -- what the great striker Pele called “the beautiful game” -- has gradually rubbed off on the traditionally more rigid and defense-minded European style of play.
Those aesthetic qualities -- fluidity, deftness, variation, improvisation, open-mindedness -- extend to Brazilian fashion as well.
“The characteristics of the Brazilian designers are that they are more fun-loving, expansive, freer,” says designer Reinaldo Lourenco. His own recent “opera” collection bears testament to this: an appropriately self-dramatizing lineup of tight-fitting blouses and jackets worn over long slit skirts and ankle-high boots. The collection was shown at a local fashion institute on white-outlined sets inspired by the love-it-or-hate-it Lars von Trier film “Dogville.”
Ten years ago, Brazil had only five professional modeling agencies. Today there are at least 15. Elite Model Management, the country’s largest agency, holds a yearly contest in which it canvasses some 80 cities and towns throughout the country. From thousands of entrants, it eventually awards contracts to about 25 women and five men. “Fashion in Brazil grew a lot, and I think that Gisele [Bundchen] helped it a lot,” says Andrhea Depieri, publicist for Elite, which formerly represented the supermodel. Elite’s stable of talent has included Rodrigo Santoro, Nicole Kidman’s shadow lover in those Chanel perfume ads.
Behind Brazil’s current fashion boom, many here say, lies a search for the nation’s direction after decades of stifled creativity. “People always ask us about Brazilian identity,” says designer Herchcovitch. “What I can say about that ... we are like babies in fashion. So we are like looking for that [identity], you know?”
Huge obstacles remain. Brazil is still a country of economic extremes, with wealth concentrated among a small segment of the country’s 186 million people. The middle class, as in so much of Latin America, is relatively small. Though hot new fashion styles may arise from young people hanging out at the beach, Brazil as yet has no couture common denominator, an equivalent of the Gap where rich and poor alike can go in search of cheap jeans and cool T-shirts.
But they’re working on it. “Brazil has many possibilities, in all areas,” says Borges. “And since we’re based on diversity, we’re very receptive to the new and different. Now they’re talking about China as picking up and being hot, but in a sense of the production and the industrial, and Russia, they’re talking about the market, they’re talking about oil. When they look at Brazil, they look at the ability to export humanity.”
