The Asylum (10 page)

I ONCE INTERVIEWED
the legendary fashion designer Sir Hardy Amies for
Nest
magazine. Not long after our cozy chat, Sir Hardy kicked the bucket. He was ninety-four years old. Did I kill him?

As I look back on the brief time we spent together, I am aware of a vague lingering sense of responsibility regarding his death. This results from the fact that, during the course of our conversation, I caused him to become somewhat agitated. I sincerely hope I did not hasten his demise in any way. Murdering a knight is a horrid thing to do.

Full disclosure: Hardy Amies is not my only maybe-I-had-a-hand-in-it celebrity death. I also suspect that I might have played a role in the snuffing out of Mr. Show Business himself, the late, great Liberace.

It all happened at one of his final concerts at Radio City. I was excited, turned on, if you will, by the unbridled richesse of his costumes. (Liberace floated on stage wearing a bejeweled purple ostrich cape.) During the curtain calls, I lost all inhibition and bum-rushed the stage with a lady friend named Henny Garfunkel. Henny has multiple ear piercings and a brazenly overpainted lip line. She bore no resemblance to the other female blue-hairs who were crushing toward their idol. She looked more like a bohemian kitchen witch.

There is no question that we—me with my rabid enthusiasm and my pal with her unconventional appearance—startled the gorgeously sequined old pianist. When confronted with our fan-worshipping ardor, Liberace drew back and his eyes popped wide open. Clearly he was freaked. His visage assumed a startled look as if he were experiencing a white-hot rectal shooting pain. A few weeks later, he too was pushing up the daisies. Did we kill him? I hope not. RIP, Lib.

Back to Sir Hardy.

Before I describe what transpired between us, permit me to give you a little background on Sir H. This accomplished and caustic-tongued fashion designer is best known for two things: First, he created the futuristic costumes for Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Second, and more important, he is the bloke who is credited . . . drumroll . . . with having conjured . . . trumpets, confetti cannons . . . Queen Elizabeth's iconic look.

“What ‘look'? Does the queen even have a ‘look'?” I hear you ask, with gasping incredulity.

“Of course she does!” I respond, with equally gasping incredulity.

Think about those boldly hued, dyed-to-match outfits; think about a bright pink dress, bright pink coat and bright pink hat, worn with those comfy beige John Lobb strolling heels. And that white purse. Voilà! Her look!

And then there is the signature cut, the bust darts, the knee-grazing skirts. These too were envisioned by Sir Hardy and over time became synonymous with Brenda. (We Brits often refer to our queen as “Brenda.” Similarly, Madonna was redubbed Madge. It's about replacing the pompous with the quotidian.) That unprovocative frumpy Amies fit is as timelessly and unmistakably associated with Brenda as are her corgis. This is her time-to-meet-the-plebs look and the queen has rocked it consistently throughout her spectacular reign. This is the ensemble she wears while shaking hands and asking, “And what do you do?” or “Have you come far?”

Yes, some of her frocks were designed by other dudes, like the brilliant Sir Norman Hartnell. But Sir Hardy is the bloke who created the look which set the tone. These were the outfits which, to quote Sir Hardy, were “immortalized on a thousand biscuit tins.”

The first time I saw the queen all Hardy'd up in person was back in the early sixties on a wind-lashed pier on Belfast Lough. We were enjoying our annual sojourn with toothless Grandpa. QE2 emerged from her Rolls wearing a matching blazing yellow silk coat, dress and hat. The sun popped out from behind a cloud and hit Queen Brenda. She lit up like a gorgeous blazing shantung canary.

This particular appearance took place before the sectarian violence re-erupted, so nobody was too worried about bombs. We peasants were waving and smiling, and smiling and waving, and squinting at the yellow birdie in the distance. Yes, the queen was miles away and could not see us. But it did not matter, because
we
could see
her
. And we knew it was her. In her chrome yellow dyed-to-match Hardy Amies ensemble, she was unmistakably, irrefutably THE QUEEN.

In the intervening years, Brenda has really stuck to her sartorial guns. Nobody could ever accuse the queen of being a trend surfer. She looks the same today as she did half a century ago. In the current age of global fashion and red-carpet masturbation, it is commendable that HM has clung to her iconic frowzyship with such amazing tenacity.

No duodenum-mangling Azzedine Alaïa frocks for Brenda.

No sexy skorts or camel-toe-inducing gauchos.

No Mary Kantrantzou prints or Chanel boucles.

No Westwood Buffalo Girls or basque corsets or see-through Cavalli leopard-print djellabas.

No Gareth Pugh gothic glamour shrouds or Rick Owens leather shrugs.

Betty Windsor has always remained deliriously and amazingly trend immune. She has managed to sail through beat, mod, hippie, glam rock, punk, new romantic, grunge, neohippie and twenty-first-century historical hipster with an unwavering, oblivious gaze. Long live Brenda! Long may she frowze!

I was determined to take advantage of my time with Sir Hardy and draw him out on the subject of Brenda's look. I wanted to understand the origin and motivation behind its creation. Toward the end of our conversation, I took a deep breath and asked the corgi-in-the-room question: Had he ever, in all his years of dressing Brenda, been tempted to shake things up a bit and squeeze the reigning monarch into something a little more, shall we say . . . stylish? His reaction was extreme. It was as if I had pulled out a sawed-off shotgun or snapped the pin from a grenade with my teeth and popped it into the pocket of his cashmere bought-it-in-the-Burlington-Arcade cardigan.

Sir Hardy blanched.

His brow suddenly furrowed.

He rolled his eyes, inhaled deeply and exhaled with regal irritation.

After a few nerve-racking seconds, he spoke.

“Young man! You seem not to understand.”

Suddenly I was Alice. Clearly I had offended the knight and he was about to turn into the Red Queen and demand my decapitation.

Sir Hardy's nostrils flared. My buttcrack became moist.

“Know this: To design clothes for the queen of England is to be charged with a momentous and complex task.”

Would I be forced to play croquet with a flamingo and some hedgehogs?

“The chief requirement is that Her Majesty must always appear
friendly and approachable.
She can never appear to be . . .
unkind
.”

I nodded vigorously in agreement. He continued.

“And, as a result, Her Majesty must never appear to be
chic
.”

Now it was my turn to blanch.

“Why ever not?” I asked.

“If Her Majesty appeared in public looking chic, it would be disastrous. Why? Because there is . . . a terrible
unkindness
to chic, that's why.”

The unkindness of chic!

Quel shock!

I was paralyzed with fascination. Was it possible that chicness and kindness were mutually exclusive? Surely not.

Suddenly my chic-obsessed brain began frantically ransacking its files, searching desperately for iconic visuals where chicness and kindness were somehow combined.

Mother Teresa was kind, but was she chic? Maybe in a drapey Japanese avant-garde kind of way, but not in the Chanel/Babe Paley/Anna Wintour sense of the word.

Angelina Jolie is kind to starving people, but she never dresses in a chic way when she visits them. Au contraire! When Angie is on assignment, her clothing is never chic. It's more lesbian gritty.

Princess Diana was kind to children and sick people, but was she really ever chic? Though attractive, she was hardly the apex of arresting style. She was no Duchess of Windsor . . . thank God! Yes! I am referring to that überchic cold bitch, Wallis Simpson.

Mrs. Simpson, the woman who once said, “You can never be too rich or too thin,” the self-indulgent, couture-devouring dandy who stole the heart of the man who would be king and then caused his abdication. She was the most loathed woman in England, but she was also, undeniably, the most stylish. What better example of the unkindness of chic.

One can imagine Brenda directly addressing the Simpson issue with Sir Hardy: “If I look as chic as old Nazi-lovin' Wallis, my subjects will tear me to bits. So step on it, you old poof, and let's get frumpy!”

Wallis Simpson's commitment to style trumped everything in her life. Yes, she was chic, but she was also brittle and creepy and strange. You can imagine her doing weird things behind closed doors, like spanking her husband with a car aerial or bleaching her teeth with sulfuric acid. Surely there must be somebody who was as stylish as Mrs. S. but who was also able to crack a smile, show a bit of empathy and humanity, and feed the birds, two pence a bag, two pence, two pence, two pence an Hermès bag.

As I scoured my mental Pinterest fashion-inspiration board for imagery which combined both kindness and chicness, I repeatedly came up empty-handed. From Irving Penn to Meisel, from von Unwerth to Herb Ritts, all I could find were chic-but-icy biatches. Gazing at these iconic photographs, I began to wonder what was going through the heads of these laser-eyed harpies. What, exactly, is the inner dialogue of an unkind, überchic woman?

When Jacqueline de Ribes, as photographed by Richard Avedon, was gazing into that mirror, flanked by her two kids, was she tenderly imagining their future or was she praying that they would piss off to boarding school and leave her to get on with her maquillage?

Was Avedon's Dovima affectionately petting the elephants? Or was she coldly, heartlessly using them as a backdrop? Would she ever willingly muck out their stinky pens or administer a pachyderm suppository? Probably not.

The ability to project malevolence is, so it would appear, more critical to a successful chic career in fashion than the ability to care for large animals or to smile benevolently. This is especially true regarding fashion models.

There is no question that the most compelling and mesmerizing mannequins have always adopted a hostile and unkind look. From Jean Shrimpton to Veruschka, from Penelope Tree to Peggy Moffitt, from Iman to Coco Rocha, the thing that unites all models through the ages is an ability to adopt a cold fuck-you expression as soon as the camera starts clicking. When Linda Evangelista stares down the camera in the movie
Unzipped,
she appears wicked enough to melt your Stella McCartney vegan-vinyl stilettos. When Kate if-looks-could-kill Moss returns your gaze from a Rimmel ad, you know she's not planning on baking you some scones or knitting you a tea cozy anytime soon. All the most successful gals—Karen Elson, Kloss, Kurková, Arizona—have the ability to reconfigure their features into a mob wife expression that says, “I will come at you and I will cut you.” In this regard, the queen of England is the opposite of a successful model. She is not allowed to come at people and cut them. She must always be kind to them.

In conclusion:

To appear chic and be perceived as chic, it is necessary to adopt the mien of a remote, cold bitch. Hauteur is your mot du jour. Disdain is your main accessory. Snottiness is your lifeblood.

But what happens when you spend much of your waking life sucking in your cheeks and attempting to project bitchiness? Will you inevitably morph into a twisted homicidal witch? Will your chicness eventually devour any kindness or humanity which is lurking in your persona?

Please try not to let it. Stay wicked on the outside and cosy on the inside.

Sir Hardy was right. There is an unkindness to chic, and chicness has no place in Buckingham Palace. A chic monarch would soon find herself jiggling toward the guillotine in a very unchic grotty little tumbrel, and so will you if I catch you behaving like a bitch. So by all means dress yourself up like a wickedly chic glamour witch. Just don't become one.

Thanks awfully.

FASHIO
N MODELS MAKE
lots of money, but they are legendarily cheap. Despite being the highest-paid person in the room, the groovy model is the last one to stick her hand in her pocket. If I saw a tall, thin, attractive gal offering to pick up the tab or pay her way, I would think,
Oh, I thought she was a model. But she cannot possibly be. Look, she's parting with money. I wonder what she does for a living.

On the rare occasions when a model rummages for her wallet, it is invariably “missing.”

“OMG! I cannot believe I left my purse at home!”

I can believe it, and so can everyone else. If all your food is paid for—a river of absurdly bountiful catering is the norm on all fashion shoots—and if everyone showers you with drinks whenever you go clubbing, and some dude or other inevitably offers you a cab share, then why would you need your wallet? You
are
Holly Golightly.

All of which begs the question, If models don't spend money on day-to-day stuff, then where the hell is it? What on earth are they doing with all that “hard-earned” dosh?

The answer to this question is quite simple. The average model saves up all her model fees until she falls in love with an underpaid photo assistant who is addicted to smack. Then, mysteriously, seamlessly, drip, drip, drip, all her shekels vanish.

Lots of models are young and stupid; actually, all of them are. This should not come as much of a surprise. I was young and stupid when I was seventeen, and I'm sure you were too. But I had one huge advantage over models: I had NO money, so nobody was going to bilk me to support a drug habit. And, more important, nobody—and I really do mean nobody—was ever listening to or taking note of anything I was saying.

With models, this is absolutely
not
the case. It is, in fact, totally the opposite. If a model opens her trap, the entire room leans in to hear what she's going to say. For some reason we hang on her every word as if she were the Oracle of motherfucking Delphi. Foolishly, we persuade ourselves that the exceptional physical exterior must surely contain an equally remarkable interior.

Every now and then, when we are trying to wrap our heads around some morsel of model-speak, we need to stop and remind ourselves how simple they are. How simple?

Once, on a Barneys shoot, the hairdresser and I were blathering on about Marie Antoinette. While we chatted, he was futzing with the model's hair, augmenting it with wigs in an effort to achieve the
grandeur de coiffure
of the legendary French queen. Marie Antoinette this. Marie Antoinette that.

The model was sitting in the makeup chair patiently listening, her eyes ping-ponging back and forth between my colleague and me. Finally she spoke.

“Is she new? Which agency is she with?”

Is it fair to generalize so brutally about fashion models?

Is it fair to mock their lack of brain power?

Of course it's not fair, but who said life was going to be fair or even remotely fact based. Isn't it more fun to exaggerate? We all know that some models are cute and kind and caring but, you have to admit, my sweeping generalizations are always so much more exciting than facts. And don't they always contain a kernel or two of truth? And, furthermore, if models get the odd bit of stick from the likes of me, don't they simply need to toughen up and learn to handle it? After all, God gave them the gift of beauty, and they never have to pay for anything. What more do they want? They should be able to stand a little light mockery.

As I mentioned above, I too was annoying and stupid when I was young. But after a while, I got smarter. This is not the case with fashion models. They become
increasingly
mentally turgid and two-dimensional as they get older. And the same would happen to you if you spent your entire life being treated differently, preferentially, because of the way you looked. Average-looking people, squat people, homely people are always much smarter, more competent and more fun than fashion models. Average people have to
make more of an effort
.

But, when all is said and maquillaged, fashion models are undeniably pleasing to look at.
This
is their saving grace.

If you go to a restaurant and there's a major model “eating” her dinner, you will always find yourself staring at her. The entire joint is surreptitiously craning. There is a force field around every model. We are all pulled inexorably into the vortex of their beauty. We worship them. I worship them.

G. K. Chesterton once said, “When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything.”

I would respectfully like to amend this: When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in models.

Kate, Naomi, Kloss, Evangelista, Raquel, Lara . . . these are our deities.

And while we are busy believing in models, what are models believing in?

Let me paraphrase G. K. once more: When models stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in all kinds of crazy woo-woo shit.

The most “spiritual” people are always those with the most superficial occupations. Isn't it always the makeup artists, stylists and fashion designers who are training to become shamans or
ohm
ing and naval gazing at ashrams? Fashion models in particular are HUGE suckers for New Age idiocies. They believe in chakras and auras and any old gobbledygook which they glean from the bulletin board of their yoga studio or health-food store. A model would never leave the house without casting the runes. She would never sign a big contract without consulting her guru. If you ever have a stash of dream catchers you need to flog, just go backstage at a fashion show. You will be able to unload the entire bunch.

And if you need to get in touch with any dead relatives, just book a fashion model. Yes, fashion models are profoundly psychic. Hold that thought.

My husband and I live in a spooky old building in Greenwich Village. Some refer to it as the Downtown Dakota, in reference to the sinister-but-fabulous apartment building on the Upper West Side where Polanski shot
Rosemary's Baby
and where some monstrous person unforgivably shot John Lennon.

For many years our next-door neighbor at the Downtown Dakota was a reclusive and ancient and lovely old broad with a delightful smile who had moved into the building before the Second World War.

One day she announced that she was relocating to an old folks' home in upstate New York. Anxious to grab more square footage, my Jonny and I snapped up her pad.

I will never forget the first time we peeked inside. The interior was dark and dusty and musty. The walls were lined with ancient peeling paper. It was creepily beautiful in a Deborah Turbeville kind of way. As we walked through the deserted high-ceilinged apartment, small chunks of paint and plaster descended like snow. Looking at the melancholy, forgotten rooms, I was reminded of those old Victorian snaps of clairvoyants and ghosts and ectoplasm. I was reminded of Helena Blavatsky.

Which agency is she with?

Permit me to clarify for my model readers.

Blavatsky was a superfreak. Fantasist, fabulist, spiritualist, theosophist and all-round bullshit artist, Russian-born Madame Blavatsky had the creepy ability to pull crazy stunts like levitate tables, produce rapping noises in remote parts of her house, cause pianos to tinkle in empty rooms and summon the wind to blow out oil lamps. Always useful.

In 1873 she packed up her bag of tricks and sailed to New York City, where she basically invented the whole notion of contemporary “spirituality” and became the superstar clairvoyant du jour.

No model she. Madame B. was a chunky Slavic version of Whoopi Goldberg's character in the movie
Ghost.
Looks notwithstanding, she tapped into the Victorian obsession with death and all things ghostly and made a bang-up career for herself. Attendees to Madame Blavatsky's séances and soirees were treated to the sight of a taxidermied baboon lurking in the entryway clutching a copy of Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
.

La Blavatsky made a living scaring the crap out of people by pretending to bring their relatives back from the dead. She was a carny and a faker, who also popularized ideas about karma and positive thinking and—hello!—the model favorite: yoga!

So, yes. I was reminded of Blavatsky. What would she have made of this macabre abode? It's hard to imagine that she would not have unearthed a few lingering souls, or at least pretended to.

Back to me and my Jonny.

The former tenant moved out, but we did not move in. Something mysterious and intangible was holding us back. Money. The place remained empty while me and my Jonny attempted to scrape together the requisite renovation shekels.

In the meantime, I had the brilliant idea of using it as a fashion shoot location. Budgets at Barneys were tight—we were in bankruptcy at the time—so why not shoot our seasonal fashion catalog in a no-cost, uniquely atmospheric location?

The day of the shooting arrived. I brushed my teeth and ran next door to see how things were progressing. The photographer was setting up his lights. Our model was sequestered in the upstairs powder room. I was anxious to introduce myself and hear anything oracular she had to say, or see if I could get her to buy me a cup of coffee, or just stare at her and admire her cheekbones.

I creaked up the rotting stairs and opened the door. Seated on the (closed) toilet and smoking a fag was a hard-faced Russian beauty. Let's call her Svetlana.

Svet wore an anxious expression. Her eyes darted about as only a model's eyes can. She spoke.

“Wha's dis place?”

“It's actually an empty apart—”

“Is haunted. Haunted bad. Very bad!”

“Well, we think with a little paint and—”

“Tell me! Somebody die here recently? Yes?”

“There was an old lady living here who—”

“I know it! I feel energy. Is violent death? Yes?”

“She is in a retire—”

“You hear her screams at night?”

“Actually she was a lovely per—”

“You need priest. I get you Russian Orthodox. The best.”

“We were rather hoping to move in next spr—”

“Don't do it! If you sleep here, you wake up next morning a raving maniac with the snow white hair.”

“Okay. Well, I think we're ready for the first shot.”

Over the next few days, Svetlana's conviction that the previous tenant had died a horrible, unspecified, supernatural death only grew. Nothing I could do would get her to reconsider her position. Svet knew without a shadow of a doubt that our former neighbor had been raped and pillaged and obliterated by demons and that the whole place was now haunted. Exorcism was the only answer.

She lost no time in making everyone on the shoot aware that “an old lady, she perishing horrible, right HERE!” The fact that the lady in question was now happily ensconced in an old people's home, enjoying a nice ambrosia salad every night, seemed of no interest to Svet. It was hard to escape the notion that she was channeling her fellow countrywoman Madame Blavatsky.

The shoot continued. Svetlana looked hauntingly lovely juxtaposed against the faded fusty grandeur of our apartment. Her spiritual anxieties lent a certain Edgar Allan Poe–like gravitas to her facial expressions and poses. The atmosphere during the shoot was quite funereal—in a good way.

Svetlana's doom-laden rantings were infectious. When they arrived each day, the crew seemed surprised to find me still in the land of the living. Between shots, there was much crucifix fondling and hushed, respectful talk. You don't raise your voice in what is essentially a killing field.

On the last day of the shoot, I stood on the threshold of what would soon be transformed into a groovy, swinging, happy, insanely colorful, Jonathan Adler–decorated home and bid farewell to the crew.

Svetlana looked at me with a sympathetic, heartfelt gaze. We embraced. She grabbed me and slammed her heavily rouged mouth up against my ear.

“Promise me you don't move in till you SAGE THE SHIT OUT OF THIS PLACE!”

When a model tells you to do something, you just do it.