Don't Get Too Comfortable (12 page)

The romantic David she knows. That's the problem. If forced, I suppose I can remember the
kind
of T-shirt Margaret is talking about, but horror at what must have been my technical limitations coupled with my youthful infractions of taste prevent me from being able to conjure up an actual image. The mark of a true friend is someone who remembers you from sophomore year and doesn't hold it against you that you painted a huge copy of van Gogh's sunflowers on the wall of your dorm room, for example. But you don't expect friends to keep the artifacts of your shame. Unless, of course, you've been bossily distributing the evidence for years yourself. It had never occurred to me that the latent content of the things I've made would serve as a visual record of my state of mind, more oblique and therefore more telling than any diary I might have kept. The thing that Margaret described in particular sounds like such a bald and unguarded glimpse into the yearning of the hayseed I used to be, that I wish she had thrown it away. I remain shocked that she didn't, seeing as how she's indicted just by association. It means that she, too, was once—I hate even to type the word—young.

THERE WAS A
photo spread when I was very young in
Life
magazine, I think. It was a series of pictures of an autistic girl. It must have been one of the very first glimpses into the disorder. In one photograph, the girl is standing, her back against the kitchen wall. Her arms are out from her sides at forty-five-degree angles, and her hands are a blur, like hummingbirds. Her face is a mask of utter serenity. The caption mentioned that, according to her parents, she found great enjoyment and relaxation in this action. It made perfect sense to my seven-year-old brain. I, too, had felt that pleasurable sense of isolation, that calming silence, the deep and regular breath when I moved my hands that quickly, whirring over objects. It wasn't until many years later that I found out that “autistic” wasn't just some alternate spelling of “artistic.”

IT
'
S A LOVELY
moment when I watch people unwrap the things I make, but I don't much care if they keep them out of any sense of artistic ego. And I really don't want to think about the object overstaying its welcome, or somehow becoming the physical reminder of the contempt or pity in which I am held. Here's how it would go: thirty years hence, our connection long since sundered, these people are sitting around with their families, the gift in question is spotted, and all of a sudden time melts away and I am conjured up on a wave of pitying laughter that washes over the room. Their grown children lean over to
their
children and say, “Listen up, you'll like this story,” and then a tale will unfold of the fellow who “made us this thing and came to our wedding and got
so
drunk. I wonder whatever happened to him?” they will ask, not really wondering and caring even less. I had thought that the more controlling position was donor, not recipient. And it is, until the moment you give the thing away, and then, as with most everything in this world, it is out of your hands.

I CAN'T GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE

I
n
Mahogany,
Diana Ross, playing the world's greatest supermodel-turned-designer, has stayed entirely too long at the fair and is sick to death of all the falsehood and decadence. Her affair with mercurial photographer Tony Perkins is on the skids. At a party, surrounded by her brittle, beautiful, shallow friends, she drips melted wax onto her torso, laughing mirthlessly all the while. I watched rapt, having been taken to see it by my best friend Mark Satok and his family. That same year, while handing hors d'oeuvres around my parents' living room, I said to a friend of the family, “That's a nice dress. Is it an Albert Nippon?” It was a rhetorical question. I already knew that it was. I was ten years old.

My knowledge of fashion hasn't really advanced much in the intervening thirty years. At this point, I am less informed than the average
InStyle
reader. Still, I have been chosen to go to Paris to cover the couture collections for a fashion magazine, armed with little more than a notebook and my febrile, movie-fueled imagination that keeps on sending the same derivative scenario sloshing across my brainpan: an impoverished seamstress, her fingers bloody from hours of painstaking needlework, is being dressed down by an outraged couturier.

“I asked for camellias. These are not camellias,” he says, ripping out the stitches. “Do it again.” He flings the garment at her, an errant bugle bead catching her right in the eye. She weeps softly. The designer's teacup poodle, Sal Mineo, yaps agitatedly throughout.

In Paris, I will learn a great deal over the course of the week. I will see the reality behind the glamorous façade. I will learn about cut and sewing and artistry. Most of all, I will learn that the old pronouncement attributed to the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson—one of the world's worst people ever—is, not surprisingly, wrong. It is distinctly possible to be both too rich and too thin.

The boondoggle starts before I even get there. The magazine is flying everyone business class. The front cabin before takeoff is a flirty cocktail party in full swing, but the joviality conceals a slightly nicked sordidness. The sofa is starting to show some wear—the upholstery on the arms and back is shiny and worn—and the seat belts between the cushions and heavy metal bolts securing it to the floor of the aircraft kind of ruins the
Playboy After Dark
effect. Ditto the bar stools, which taper down to industrial-sized rivets in the carpet. It gives the place a minimum-security-prison feel, as though it was designed to withstand some potential upset over and above mere flight. Someone getting liquored up, breaking a flight attendant's arm, and defecating on the drinks cart, for example. I scan the crowd for a likely candidate. As we begin to taxi, all those felicities of groundedness—the vase of flowers on the bar, the magazines fanned just so on the coffee table, the shining racks of gleaming glassware—are whisked away and stowed. The speakeasy converting to a revival meeting moments before the cops rush in.

The first-class purser, a very handsome young man, comes by and kneels beside me. “Hi, I'm Nigel. I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to come and say hello!” he says with a tone of incredulity, not that he should be busy but that it should prevent him from greeting me,
me,
after all we've been through. This kind of friendly service from someone as painfully good-looking as Nigel just makes me feel shy and unworthy. I barely glance at him when I mutter hello. He probably thinks I'm an asshole, although he couldn't be friendlier as he hands me an extensive menu. I can order anything from it at any time in as much quantity as I like. It's all about unchecked plenty here. I probably won't avail myself. Given the fact that I'm somewhat obsessed with food, eating in front of other people is always somewhat embarrassing, like being caught in an illicit moment of arousal. And I am paranoid about spilling. My usual uniform of T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers will not do at the shows, apparently, and in order to limit my luggage to a carry-on, I have boarded the plane in my suit. I will have to wear it the next day, and many days after that, too, so I am trying to stay wrinkle and stain free. I sit up straight, dressed like a mortician, rigid as a corpse in what would otherwise be a really commodious seat.

At about 3:00 a.m., I am startled by a great yawp of laughter from a man who has been drinking way too much. In his midsixties and dressed in the charcoal-gray fleecy pajamas provided for him by the airline, he is trying to make time with a young woman with a spiky bleached 'do. This might be his lucky night, because she slouches toward him and loudly confides, “I thought I'd sleep, but I guess I'll just get pissed instead.”

A flight attendant steps forward and tells them that she has bad news, the bar is closed. Unfortunately, international law dictates that they have to stop serving four hours before landing, she explains. The man is too drunk to call her out on this patent lie. The blonde seems not to care and staggers back to her seat, her manifest destiny of skankiness suspended for the moment. Scanning the man's face and body language and persuaded that he is not belligerent, the flight attendant walks away, leaving him standing there still trying to formulate his response.

MY FIRST ACT
of rationalization: I will be on a very steep learning curve, attending multiple shows each day, all in different places around Paris, a city I do not know. The driver they have given me for the entire week is really a necessity, not a luxury. Olivier drives fashion people almost exclusively, so on the trip from the airport he gives me a quick survey of the differences between couture and ready-to-wear. Some of the stuff I already know, like how couture is made to order, while ready-to-wear is produced in factory multiples. Other stuff I don't, such as how proper couture shows traditionally have fifty garments per collection. They begin with daytime wear, move into evening, and generally end with a wedding dress. Also, when they say that couture garments are entirely handmade, they mean every single aspect: the cutting and edging of buttonholes, the sewing of seams, the lining of sleeves. None of it can make use of anything more automated than a needle and scissors.

I ask how much the dresses cost. Olivier cannot give me a definitive answer. In fact, the entire week I am there, no one can. Estimates are anything from $20,000 to $100,000. The main thing to remember, he tells me, is that even though much of couture is nonsense, its essential unwearability doesn't stop “the Jews of fashion,” as he calls them, from coming to shows season after season with their sketch pads to copy and produce commercial knockoffs.

Dropping me off for a power nap before my first appointment, Olivier warns me about my hotel. “It is very chic and the people who work there are very beautiful, so if you want something, you must ask three times.” The lobby is a close, red seraglio of a place. Paisley atop paisley, the air heavy with the scent of the hotel's trademark candle, available for purchase, along with the hotel's apparently world-famous dance-mix CD playing on the sound system. Even midmorning on a workday, the place is full of perfect specimens of both sexes, guests and staff alike, draped bonelessly over the furniture. A harem of Dalí's rubber clocks with all the time in the world.

Toadlike, I hop over to the front desk and check in. Into the tiny elevator, along a dark red hallway that seems to be illuminated by nothing more than lit cigarettes, and into a room that would be a highly coveted one-bedroom apartment in New York. I have a sitting room with a tasseled damask sofa, a passageway with walnut-doored closets leading to a bedroom, and beyond that a bathroom with a claw-footed tub. I count no fewer than three vases of roses. All the magazine people are staying here, presumably in digs just as sumptuous, except for the editors in chief, who are staying around the corner at the Ritz, which is even fancier. Looking out to the central courtyard filled with statues, I realize that I have crossed the parliament floor. I used to identify with the downtrodden seamstress in that story I told myself, but I have now thoroughly joined the ranks of the imperious monstrocracy.

WE TRAVEL AS
a delegation that includes the magazine's editor in chief, fashion director, and Natasha, a beautiful, funny, intelligent, aphoristic Englishwoman who works in the publication's Paris office. In addition to attending the shows themselves, we go on studio visits where the conceit of each collection is explained. Our first appointment is at Christian Dior. John Galliano, the house designer, is a runty, sexy Brit dressed in a dark wool waistcoat with no shirt and a pair of khaki clam diggers slung low on his hips, his gray underpants showing. He greets us, myself included, with incredible warmth, kisses on both cheeks for the ladies.

His show will kick off the entire couture week the next day. The place is a buzz of activity with about thirty people going about their business. Some folks are decorating Day of the Dead masks at a table, a gorgeous black model is having green-and-gold reptile scales painted directly onto her naked torso, a seamstress is putting the finishing touches on bridesmaid's dresses being worn by two little girls who walk the length of the room unsmiling. They turn, and everyone applauds.

The walls are plastered with photographs torn from books and magazines, postcards, small objects, pages of text, and scribbled illustrations. Galliano's various inspirations. He caused an uproar a few seasons ago by showing clothing made to look like crumpled newspaper. Trivalizing homelessness, some reports said. The conceptual springboard of this collection is a quote from a 1909 letter Freud wrote to Jung: “‘Recently I glimpsed an explanation for the case of fetishism. So far it concerns only clothing and shoes. But it is probably universal.' Mr. Dior was one of the first fetishistic designers,” he tells us, leading us through the dramatic structure of the show. “There's the primal scene, with a little bit of
Rules of the Game,
seeing Mommy with the chauffeur, along with a bit of
Mädchen in Uniform
thrown in. Then we enter the world of the subconscious, trying on Mommy's lipstick. An alligator eats Mommy or is Mommy the alligator? The nanny turns into a rocking horse. And clowns! Because they still freak me out.”

It doesn't feel like he's making it up as he goes along to justify the clothes, ascribing logic after the fact. Looking at the garments, it really does seem like he's mined an idea and riffed on it to its extremities. He has to do this twice a year.

“It's all savage,” says Galliano's right hand and muse, a young woman with a sleek cap of white-blond hair, wearing what looks like a brown knit sling on her arm, “but the shoes match the handbag match the skirt.”

Despite the loud military drums alternating with Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock scores playing on the stereo, and all the work there is still left to do by the following morning, it's very calm and good-natured here. No one is raising their voice, people are smiling. We go upstairs to the ateliers. There are two of them:
l'atelier de flou,
for the looser unstructured garments, like evening wear, and
l'atelier tailleur,
for suits and such. Both are white and very clean, more surgery than Santa's workshop. Everyone is in a lab coat. There is a lot of embroidery being finished. Someone is completing an image of Marie Antoinette on a farthingaled skirt, there are elaborate Chinese peonies on a saffron silk dress, silver Mexican milagros are being secured to a hem. “Sublime”
(Soo-bleem),
says Natasha to one of the artisans.

We walk out into the Paris twilight. I've resolved to stay vigilant about the precise moment all the rarefaction and theater start to seem old hat or uninteresting. I am not bored yet.

GRAY LIGHT POURS
through the sloping glass roof of Jean-Paul Gaultier's studio in a low building that sits off the street in a courtyard. It calls to mind those nineteenth-century photographs of Rodin at work. Like Galliano, Gaultier—dressed in what is his trademark Jean-Genet-rough-trade-sailor-lookin'-for-a-handjob-and-a-punch-up manner—greets us with exceeding friendliness. Tables are piled high with bolts of netting. A boom box encrusted with aquamarine rhinestones pours forth a tinny radio broadcast. On the floor are laid out multiple pairs of mules all lined in rabbit, looking like Meret Oppenheim's famous surrealist fur-lined teacup.

All I know about JPG are his costumes for Madonna videos and the Peter Greenaway film
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.
There are no cone bras on display. Instead, Gaultier has been experimenting with the way images can be broken down into their constituent dots, like in newspapers. He holds up a salt-and-pepper tweed dress and as we step back, the face of the singer Edith Piaf appears. There is a dress sewn out of square pixels in shades of green velvet that turns into the kissing faces of Bogey and Bacall in
To Have and Have Not.
It is incredibly cool. Gaultier jokes that he should offer to digitize the face of the client onto whatever dress they buy. “That's real couture.”

He takes us up to the atelier where, just as at Dior, things feel industrious without being frenetic. We stand over a chocolate-brown velvet dress being beaded with an image of Pigalle, the louche Times Square of Paris and home to the Moulin Rouge. Leading us out, Gaultier stops at the door and turns around, addressing the men and women preparing his collection, and says with great courtliness and sincerity, “Merci, mesdames et messieurs.”

STEEL BARRICADES HAVE
been set up outside the École des Beaux-Arts, site of the Dior show. Behind them are the gawkers and fashion groupies gazing covetously at what looks like old home week for the people pouring into the space. The hall is the size of a train station and its glass roof has been louvered shut, rendering the place very dark and very red, and heating up rapidly from the crush of bodies. The soundtrack is an extended loop of plinky piano punctuated by the occasional whip crack, followed by orgasmic moaning. I look around for a fire exit.

Crowd control and general ushering is handled by
les cravates rouges,
a suspiciously handsome cadre of young men who wear red ties and travel from venue to venue like the pope's Swiss Guard. Although an ignoramus, I am here with an influential magazine, so I have a very good seat. I am never farther back than the second row. The front row is reserved for high-ranking industry folk, the famous, and the clients, those fabulously wealthy Ladies who actually buy and wear the dresses. They are a small group and, as far as I can tell, not related, but it is extraordinary how many of them look as alike as sisters. Perhaps it is their universal whippet thinness, the shared knife-blade noses, or the full, pillowy mouths. Or is it the look of constant surprise in their unnaturally wide, unblinking eyes? The Ladies are an uncanny cluster of genetic coincidence, with the exception of their newest and youngest member—a sullen twentysomething Russian with a penchant for short denim miniskirts who is escorted everywhere by her much older benefactor, a raven-haired magnate with a face like raw chicken.