It’s the clothes, of course, that differ from show to show. At Valentino the collection soon settles into a look—clothes in colors that the regular guy might describe as “sort of brown,” although a fashionable person might call them chestnut, chocolate, beige, coffee, and bronze. The sequence of styles is fixed. Day wear comes first, then what are still called, touchingly, cocktail dresses, and then evening wear. Usually a wedding dress comes last, but Valentino replaced it with a long red chiffon sheath. As the models come out, almost everyone in the room begins one task of translation or another. The press has the simple job of translating the descriptions of the clothes, which are written in fashionese, into ordinary language. Valentino’s program was relatively taciturn compared to most. Lacroix, for example, later in the week showed a “‘cold dawn’ shot razimir spiral sheath dress with ‘apricot’ and ‘melon’ kick pleat”). Still, even Valentino’s “Mordore silk laminated ottoman pinstriped pantsuit, gold lace polo T-shirt, black cashmere shawl bordered in gold lace” became, in the margin of one journalist’s program, “beige slacks.” The garment industry people are looking for something—a range of colors, a shape, a new line—that they can translate from cashmere and laminated ottoman into cottons and synthetics and sell. They sketch shapes, which to the unpracticed eye all look more or less the same. A tight bodice with a big skirt represents evening wear; a short, tight jacket with big pleated flowing pants stands in for day wear. The few unattached, noncommercial, nonbuying spectators in the room are waiting for what they call a couture moment—a moment, the newcomer is assured, that is roughly equivalent to the moment in opera when the clouds of shlock lift and something crazily artificial becomes transporting.
Only the top fashion editors—at whom all the expense is in a way directed—cannot sketch or make notes, for fear of seeming rude. They leave that to their underlings and try to look interested and amused as each costume passes by. A haute couture defile is an oddly heart-lifting occasion, inflected with hope. The fashion editors are hoping that one of the models’ dresses will give them a point, a theme, something to write about. The fashion merchants are hoping that one of the models’ dresses, suitably adapted, will make them a fortune. The aficionados are hoping that one of the models’ dresses will supply a couture moment. The photographers are hoping that one of the models’ dresses will fall off. The press scribbles. The photographers hoot. The ladies fan.
Most of the collections are shown either in the ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental, which is long and narrow and mock grand siecle, or, like the Valentino show, in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, which is high and circular and Second Empire. On Sunday afternoon, though, every fashionable person has to find a taxi or get a lift all the way out to the periphery of Paris, where John Galliano is showing his fall collection for Givenchy at the Stade Francais—the old French indoor sports arena. What no one at Givenchy has considered, though, is that holding the show in a stadium means holding the waiting period before the show outside the stadium—in the open air, where few fashionable people are inclined to spend a lot of the day and, as it happens on this Sunday, in a steady Paris drizzle too.
Things get ugly fast. “It is insupportable!” one distinguished-looking dowager is crying as the rain pelts her perfectly constructed face. “I have been a Givenchy client for decades, and now I am being made to stand outside, exposed to the wind, naked to the rain!”
“In the rain! In the rain!” the lady next to her cries out, and she goes on, “I too have been a client for a period of time.” She resists saying “decades,” despite its obvious pathetic force; she is a little younger than the first lady. “The thing is insupportable.”
“No! It is worse! It is a scandal!” the first lady cries, definitively. Insupportable is a bitter word in French, but scandal is a fighting one. Even the Givenchy guards at the chain-link gate, in their double-breasted jackets, are beginning to get uneasy. When the crowd gathered outside the Bastille, the trouble began after some old lady said the thing was a scandal.
At this point the fashion editor Andre Leon Talley comes up, pushing people aside on his way to the ritual “No, you see, I’ve been invited. What! You mean these people have too?” moment. Andre Leon Talley is a big guy, and for a second or two it seems likely that the guards are going to let him in. This makes the dowagers, standing behind me, plain crazy, and they charge, blind to the consequences. We are storming the Givenchy gates when the guards just give way: They open the gate and let everyone walk across the lawn toward the stadium. We file in, feeling vindicated, and take our seats. At least thirty more minutes pass before anything happens.
The Givenchy show, appropriately, takes as its subject the ever-popular fashion themes of decapitation and mass murder. Inside the stadium Galliano has constructed a Fragonard-like forest of feathery trees and dark ferns. Then, instead of sending the models one by one down a runway, he sends them out in groups, to wander around the artificial forest. The setting is meant to recall eighteenth-century French aristocratic life, and the dresses what became of it. The dress worn by Ines de la Fressange, for instance, is frankly described as an “ivory lace Empire Trench with blood pre-guillotine velvet sash.” All the girls are meant to look as if they were on their way to the tumbrels, and in fact the Revolutionary-era Empire dresses, with their long, columnar lines and soft, clinging bodices, in beaded ivories and reds and champagnes and olives and emeralds, are quite unreal in their loveliness. They are by far the most memorable “pure” design of the week and, toned down and deblooded, the obvious tip to become this autumn’s look.
Haute couture, everyone says, no longer has much to do with what normal women normally wear. The besetting sin of haute couture, though, is not unreality but corniness: not that it looks like things no women would actually wear but that it looks exactly like what your aunt Ida always wears “for best”—that shiny black thing, say, covered with sequins and accompanied by a little shoulder-hugging jacket.
This is a thought that occurs on Monday afternoon, at the Ungaro show—a collection of pantsuits and long dresses so standard and uneventful that it gives you a lot of time to think. There is a reason, you realize, that even women who could afford to do not wear what the models in Ungaro are wearing: dresses of floor-length flowing lace. The reason is that fancy clothes look fancy, and fanciness now looks primitive. So many of the clothes, in their elaborately ostentatious materials, just seem regressive, overrich, brutally obvious. In feeling, they date back to a time when a complicated display of expensive materials was meant to be crushing evidence of wealth. Now wealth, wanting to crush, likes subtler evidence; that’s why more wealthy women buy Brice Marden squares than haute couture evening clothes.
Ungaro, though, has intelligently taken his show off the runway too and put it on the floor—in principle, so that you can see the detail work on the clothes, but with the side effect that you can also see a lot of the models inside them. None of the big-name girls are here—not Linda or Naomi or Claudia—but it is the B, or nonname, models who are the most thrilling to look at. This is partly because the name models are phoning it in; Linda Evangelista, at the Givenchy show, had exactly the smug “I don’t have to do this for a living anymore” look that Shecky Greene and Buddy Hackett used to have when they “dropped in” on Merv Griffin. The B list models, on the other hand, work: They throw out their hips, they flirt with their eyes, and when the photographers call out to them to smolder, they smolder. A great deal of time is spent—by regular guys anyway—explaining to themselves why the haute couture models are not really as desperately beautiful as you might think when they are even more beautiful than you can imagine. The trick—or, to put it another way, the consolation—is that their beauty has become so familiar that it is not so much a commodity as a commonplace. Looking at Kate Moss modeling Givenchy, you don’t think, There’s a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. Instead you just think, There’s Kate Moss. The projected fantasy bangs up not against her inaccessibility but, paradoxically, against her familiarity. She offers not a limitless horizon of love and elegance and great clothes but the reality of a known life. (You would have to avoid talking about Johnny Depp. You would have to tell her how thin she looks, or, rather—for it is the New Kate—how zaftig.)