Don't Get Too Comfortable (13 page)

People are kissing friends hello, pointedly avoiding others, and scanning the crowd for celebrities, although one doesn't have to scan very hard. The arrival of anyone famous is heralded by a sudden turbulence in the waters of the room. Little crowdlets of piranhalike photographers jockeying for position form spontaneously. People speculate who might be at the center of the cluster of lights. This week, the immediate and unvarying first answer is always a hopeful “Gwyneth?” She has not shown up at Dior, but Elle MacPherson has, as have Steven Spielberg and his wife, who is sporting a bosom of unyielding, architectonic prominence.

Although it's as dark as my hotel in here, many of the women keep their sunglasses on. Why is that, I ask Natasha. “Well, darling, suppose your husband has just announced he's taken a mistress and you cried just a little bit on your way over.”

The show begins after an hour of waiting, which I will find is a fairly standard interval. Even though I have seen the clothes the day before, I haven't seen them in their intended order. Costumes are augmented with props like handcuffs or mouths gagged with shiny red tape. Taken as a whole, there really is a narrative of sexual trauma. In Galliano's lubricious take on the haute bourgeoisie, there are a lot of dirty girls and boys in service. The chambermaids flash their panties, the nurses show leg while brandishing big hypodermic needles, and the filthy chauffeurs are constantly on the brink of running out of gas in the middle of nowhere. The actress Marisa Berenson plays a composed matriarch in mauve; another woman in an embroidered silk kimono carries a huge wooden cross; Marie Antoinette canters down the runway with a huge windup key protruding from her back. All told, the parade lasts seventeen minutes.

Consensus is that the show was a success. I surf along with the crowd as people climb up on the runway and make their way backstage to congratulate Galliano. Posted on a wall I see the last-minute instructions to the models. They should remember to embody fully the roles they have been given, whether proud and elegant or severe and kinky. Finally, it says, “Be confident, you're beautiful!” Anywhere else, this would seem an empty self-help exhortation to focus on one's inner worth and to let it shine forth. Here, it is merely a statement of fact.

Actually, the striking thing about the runway models is that they're not that beautiful close up. What they do possess—and what contributes to the sense of occasion—is presence, at least part of which can be chalked up to having mastered the Walk: that characteristic slouching, ball-bearing-hipped sashay. Not long prior to my arrival in Paris, I learned how to track animals at a wilderness survival camp. One of the methods used for identifying a species' prints is in calculating the animal's straddle, the distance of the hoof or paw out from an imaginary central line. Only one species has negative straddle, where the feet actually crisscross over that line: cats. And runway models. And absolutely no one has better negative straddle than Carmen Kass, an Estonian—again, hugely successful, not that gorgeous—who walks with such a percussive rimshot swagger and an unsmiling Clint Eastwood look that it just dares the photographers to go ahead and shoot her.

No mean feat to stare down that anarchic mass of arms, cameras, and flashbulbs at the end of the runway. A lot of the models play a pissing contest with the photographers, refusing to slow down to give them a more sustained pose to shoot, or a view of the back of the dress. The girls simply keep walking, ignoring the collective, impassioned pleas to “Stoppe!” or “Geau bacques!”

The photographers are a vocal mob. Once, when one of them was denied entry to a Gaultier show, they walked out en masse and had to be mollified with a champagne reception. If things are late in getting started, it is they who begin the rhythmic applause. They are also audibly appreciative. At the Ungaro show, one of the model's breasts pops out from her gauzy top, if “pops” can really be used to describe the movement of something so subdued in structure and size. After almost a week of seeing barely concealed and sometimes completely exposed tits, they still hoot and holler. The model covers up and smiles at them with indulgent exasperation. The honors student secretly pleased with the attentions of the cool kids in the back of the class.

A SIGN OVER
the door at the Chanel offices has a quote,
La création n'est pas démocratique.
I take that as my cue to sink into the background, perfectly content to be invisible enough to overhear, “Belts. Think belts!” which garners a thoughtful “Yes . . .” then a pause, and a “Why belts now?” asked with all the inquiring seriousness of a young Siddhartha seeking enlightenment.

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, “What can you write that hasn't been written already?”

He's absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with at that moment is that Lagerfeld's powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn't. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, and seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin overrisen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How's that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?

THERE SEEM TO
be two varieties of applause. The first is the appreciation of peers, professionals who clap for beautiful sewing, for the outrageously good swing of a caviar-beaded skirt. The second kind of applause comes from the Ladies, whose polite ovations greet outfits they feel they could actually wear. At the older designers' shows, like Oscar de la Renta for Pierre Balmain, they busily make checkmarks on their lists when the gold silk skirt and jacket trimmed in parrot-green fur parades by, their eyes wide with soon-to-be-satiated hunger and relief.
Oh, thank
God
I don't have to put this $20,000 back into the bank!
But the shows that skew younger can be confounding experiences for them. Donatella Versace—looking like a small bondage sausage, a tight and meaty cylinder of bronze flesh packed into black leather—makes her victory lap after her show of sleazy dresses. The long-anticipated Gwyneth, looking very pretty but far too blond, and Jennifer Lopez and her boyfriend-at-the-time Sean Combs, seated across the runway are all very enthusiastic, but the Ladies sit on their hands for the most part. At Alexander McQueen's show for Givenchy they find even less worth contemplating.

We are all driven to La Défense, the area outside of central Paris where they have crowded their modern skyscrapers, thereby preserving the historic perfection of the city itself. McQueen wants to show clothing that blends high and low, “like a downtown New York party where uptown people go and mix.” We are in a huge arena space with seating on four sides. In the center is a small brick pavilion, with the Givenchy name spray-painted on its sides. Two women saunter in clutching bottles in paper bags, and knock on the door. A man holding a drink exclaims in joyous greeting and pulls them in and the door closes. Silence.

We sit a moment briefly doing nothing before the walls lower to become part of the floor plan of an apartment filled with revelers. I am sitting directly facing the bathroom. The music blares, a go-go boy—more of a go-go man, really—very admirably makes no effort to suck in his stomach as he stumble-dances around in a pair of tight white shorts. The models come in, show their dresses to all four sides of the audience and then just join the party, bobbing affectlessly to the music and having what appear to be real drinks. One young woman comes in wearing a wig that looks like a square boxwood topiary and sits down on the toilet, another wears a coat of multicolored rabbit-fur sausages and a Penelope Pitstop helmet in avocado. It's all bleary and blunted and strung-out.

“So
irr
itating,” drawls one of the more prominent Ladies, a dowager with hair coiffed into an unmoving iron-gray clamshell. They make their way back to their waiting cars, walking across a stark round plaza that looks, appropriately enough, like the amphitheater in the movie
Logan's Run
where they killed all the people over thirty.

Yves Saint Laurent must be a welcome antidote after such a large dose of muzzy, druggy youthfulness, despite the designer's own very public history with chemicals. His show is the pinnacle of couture week. It is the only time people are asked to turn off their cell phones. The acknowledged master, he has announced his imminent retirement and people are gathering reverently around the hospital bed. Across the aisle sits Tom Ford, the young tyro to whom he is handing the ready-to-wear reins. There is actor George Hamilton, tandooried to a fare-thee-well, and beside him Lauren Bacall, looking not much older than the digitized green-velvet image of her on that Gaultier dress. The designer's good friend, the eerily preserved Catherine Deneuve, is front and center. Who knew
The Hunger,
her film about ageless vampires, was a documentary?

I wish I could describe the clothes, but somewhere around outfit number sixty-four of a staggering ninety-two, the heat in the un-air-conditioned room starts to get to me and it is all I can do to stave off the twin impulses to pass out or throw up on the poor women from the
International Herald Tribune
in front of me. I would have to cross the runway to get out of this ballroom, so I am reduced to trying to strip down to my T-shirt without anyone noticing, while blotting myself with a handkerchief I am rolling into a cylinder and dipping into my Evian with my head between my knees.

Evidently, I missed something historic. People are ramped up as we emerge from the ballroom. André Leon Talley of
Vogue
gushes, “Hats are old and he even made a hat look decorative. Of course you would have to be at a wedding in northern Germany to wear it, but still!”

Natasha, my English colleague, is transported. “God, what beautiful cutting!” she exclaims. “You know, they offered me a present for my wedding and I'm sure they thought I was going to ask for a bridal gown but I didn't. I just wanted
un smoking.”
(Pronounced smoh-KEENG, it's Saint Laurent's emblematic androgynous dinner jacket for women.) “It was being fitted for me and I said to the man who was cutting it—whose name was Jean Pierre and of course I
loved
him because my husband's name is Jean Pierre—I said, ‘Jean Pierre, this garment is so beautifully cut it could support an army!' You know it was just like
this
.” She demonstrates by touching the pads of her thumbs to the pads of her middle fingers, and pulling down—an almost Bollywood-looking gesture. The goddess Siva lowering a window shade. “Just like that.
So
beautiful, you know?”

But I don't know. I don't know any of it. My shirt front is transparent from the more than half a bottle of water with which I have doused myself and I am feeling incredibly shaky and I no longer have the capacity to articulate anything. I like pretty things, I suppose, and things that make me feel stuff, but if there were a gun at my head at this moment, I couldn't elaborate on that thought. Suddenly it all feels beyond my grasp. My aesthetic comprehension of the entire century—why the Jasper Johns American-flag painting is so good; why it should trouble me that artists like Damien Hirst don't do the actual physical making of their art, while it doesn't bother me that Frank Gehry isn't laying his own titanium siding; why the directors of the French New Wave spawned generations of cineastes who consider
Kiss Me Deadly
a masterpiece while I just can't bear that movie—it's all running through my fingers like sand. All my fancy education and artfully crafted cant can't help me now. I am feeling linear and literal and must not be mentally taxed with anything more difficult than the sledgehammer subtle symbolism of, say, a butterfly landing on a coffin. Where was I? Oh, that's right: I like pretty things. Tell me about the rabbits, George.

It has finally happened. I am tired of it all. If I have to look at more beautiful clothing or have another conversation about beautiful clothing or feign amusement at any more adoring anecdotes about what a
caution
one of the Ladies is because, when being interviewed, she insisted upon a glass of straight vodka because, as she said, “I don't drink water—fish fuck in it,” I will start shooting. I am oversated with perfection, a deadened, gouty feeling. I want to go home and clean my bathroom, or anybody's bathroom, for that matter.

Perhaps I can find the equivalent of a dark room and a washcloth for my forehead by forgoing the crowds and standing backstage for the Lacroix show. Things are extremely mellow when I arrive at 4:30 for a show scheduled to begin at 4:30. The models, incredibly young up close and also arboreally tall, still sit around in street clothes although their makeup has been applied and their hair has been lacquered back into attenuated bubbles like the world's most gorgeous malignant brain tumors. They have split up into their respective language groups: Portuguese, Russian, English.

I talk to Erin O'Connor, a sweet dark-haired willow tree of a girl who is apparently quite famous. She lets me touch the dry spaghetti of her hair. She was a ballet dancer for eleven years. “This is much easier. No daily practice, no injuries.” In addition to being beautiful, she is lucky that she has come from the one career that makes a life in modeling look like one with longevity.

We are back at the École des Beaux-Arts, where my week started. This being an art school, the walls are wheat-pasted with broadsides that read, “Don't shit on yourselves any longer, shit on others!” and “The young make love, the old only make obscene gestures!”

The girls are dressed and undressed in under three minutes by pit-stop crews of attendants. Repairs are sewn directly onto their bodies. Between costumes, the models stand in high heels and thongs, topless. Surely this is some man's fantasy, I think. Sadly not my own, although a cocktail dress made entirely out of dyed-pink rabbit fur comes close.