The elevator operator dreams of going to the top of the tower alone in his elevator, while the Anglo-Saxon tourist, in her heart of hearts (and he knows this; it’s what terrifies him most), dreams of an automatic elevator. When the two ideals—of absolute professionalism unfettered by customers and of absolute tourism unaffected by locals—collide, trouble happens, pain is caused. Americans long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World. The French dream of a place where everyone can practice his metier in self-enclosed perfection, with the people to be served only on sufferance, as extras, to be knocked down the moment they act up. This place, come to think of it, is called Paris in July
LESSONS FROM THINGS
(Food, fashion, and foibles teach their complicated lessons in the struggle between Administration and Civilization.)
Couture Shock
I suppose you could say that my introduction to the rites and spells of Parisian haute couture occurred early on a Sunday morning, at the Valentino show, when the ladies in the front row suddenly, and pretty much in unison, folded their programs over and began to fan themselves ferociously with the gold and brown paper. The Valentino show was being held at nine-thirty in the morning for reasons of protocol so complicated that they resembled one of those nineteenth-century diplomatic negotiations, like the Schleswig-Holstein question, comprehensible to only three people in Europe. The cream of the fashion press had turned up anyway, although Anna Wintour and Suzy Menkes and the rest had the pained, aren’t-you-a-clever-boy-to-wake-me-up-this-early smiles otherwise seen only on parents of two-year-olds. The music had begun, Stella Tennant had come out (head angled, shoulders thrown back, hips a little forward, rolling the works) in ivory wool and silk chevron trousers with two patch pockets, an ivory blouse with matching lace, and a beige cashmere shawl bordered in lace, looking game despite the hour and all that lace. Then the ladies in the front row, the rich clients, began to fan. They fanned hard, expertly—my God, it’s hot in here—just the way veteran de-fle watchers always do. And this was odd, because it was freezing cold inside the Salon Opera at the Grand Hoteclass="underline" the coldest July in Paris anyone could recall;
cassoulet and topcoat weather. But the ladies fanned as they always do, in the gasping heat of July at the collections.
I turned to a friend sitting next to me, a French television journalist, and directed at her my version of the French shrug-and-frown that means, Why on earth? She, in turn, made the French 0 with her mouth that means. Please, my friend, discard this elaborate pretense of naivete. Then she shrugged too. “They are at the collections. It is July. They fan,” she said. She thought for a moment. “It is a reflex. We watch, therefore we fan. No. I fan, therefore I am.” Then she looked around the salon and made the encompassing shrug-and-pout-and-flex-your-hands-from-the-wrist French gesture that in the context meant that the apparent absurdity of the act of fanning yourself in the cold is no more absurd than the whole enterprise of traveling to Paris to look at clothes that you will never wear, displayed on models to whom you bear no resemblance, in order to help a designer get people who will never attend shows like this someday to buy a perfume or a scarf that will give them the consoling illusion that they have a vague association with the kind of people who do attend shows like this—even though the people who attend shows like this are the kind who fan themselves against July heat that happens not to exist. It is these formulations—packed tight with contradictions that spiral around, turn in on themselves, bite their own tails, and eventually come out dressed in taffeta and lace tulle—that give haute couture its charm, or, anyway, help it cast its spell.
Participating in the haute couture is more like entering a yacht in the America’s Cup than it is like opening a Seventh Avenue showroom: The collections are overseen by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, which demands, among other things, that its members maintain a working atelier in Paris, and put on a show each season of no fewer than fifty costumes each. Belonging is an expensive, exacting business, and every year one more house just drops out. This season there were sixteen shows—about a thousand outfits, from Stella’s silky pants to the wedding dress at Saint Laurent. First an event and then a theme dominated the five days of the shows. The event was the separation of Gianfranco Ferre as head designer from the House of Dior, which was significant because it threw a major house into a “crisis,” and the theme was the crisis of haute couture. Of course, haute couture is always in crisis, like Cyprus or the New York theater. But by now the crisis has become almost existential; not even a hit will help. Even very, very rich women don’t buy bespoke clothes in Paris anymore, and the widely understood, though never openly articulated, justification for losing money in couture for the past twenty years or so—the loss leader justification—no longer works. By now, most fashionable people feel, the average woman who buys, say, a box of Pierre Cardin handkerchiefs is probably buying them less because of the glamorous association of Pierre Cardin haute couture than because of the glamorous association of Pierre Cardin socks and Pierre Cardin sunglasses. (As a consequence, Pierre Cardin, who seems to have figured this out, doesn’t even show his haute couture line in the defiles.)
Fashionable people have two contradictory theories to explain the persistence of couture despite its troubles—theories usually mentioned in succession and often in the same sentence. The first—a kind of Tang and Teflon explanation, which is promoted by the chambre—is that haute couture is the R&D wing of the fashion business, an investment in its future, since the “techniques” and “styles” that the designers wheel out today will somehow affect the kind of clothes that people wear tomorrow. (Veteran explainers offering this view can make it sound as though the defiles were taking place in a particle accelerator.) The other, contradictory explanation is that haute couture is the living memory of French fashion, where vanishing standards of workmanship, craftsmanship, and imagination are kept alive as a necessary act of filial piety. When you point out that both these explanations can’t be true at the same time, you generally get in response a kind of Paris Zen. “Ah, you are right. Both things cannot be true at once. That is the point of haute couture,” one fashion prince explained to me. Then he walked off seraphically.
The haute couture remains a rite. There are the photographers, who push to get inside, and who form, on their bleachers, a little island of happy heterosexual lust amid two seas of becalmed aestheticism. They’re the only free men at the collections; they whoop, whistle, and call out to the models anything they feel like calling out to the models. (“They could come out dressed in paper bags for all I care,” one photographer said that morning as he looked over the Valentino program. “Well, plastic bags anyway”) Then there are the models themselves, who can undress and dress again so quickly that when the show is over, they climb out of the last evening dress and are on the street, wearing jeans and T-shirts and Prada knapsacks, getting a taxi before the applause has stopped. And there are the fashionable people, lining up in order not to be allowed in. (The shows never start on time, or near it, but everybody comes to the security desk and waves the invitation anyway.)