But they are perfect! A twelve-year-old American boy who was visiting Paris that week had come equipped with his skateboard, and, to his shock, discovered in Paris not a skateboard hell but a paradise of broad, flat avenues and, at the place du Trocadero, vast, flat concrete plazas. “How do you find Paris?” he was asked.
His eyes went round and reverent.
“Smooth,” he said.
I find the models smooth too.
One new girl in particular is so perfectly beautiful that she seems a composite of various imaginary smoothnesses. I later learn that her name is Honor Fraser, that she is English, and that she is being tipped by the fancy as the Next Great Model; she will be Miss England in next year’s Pirelli calendar. I feel like a novice horseplayer who has just picked the Kentucky Derby winner.
When the shows were over, I spoke with her about what it is like to be on the runway, instead of watching what happens there. She turned out to be a poised student of her own craft. “I love modeling couture,” she said, with a passionate eagerness. “It’s the only pure expression in fashion—the one part of the fashionable world where there are no commercial compromises at all. There’s something terribly moving about being an element of it—being its vehicle. The purity and the exactitude that the designers devote to every tiny detail of your clothing and accessories, as though they were working from some image deep in their minds, which they’re trying to approximate with you, the way people exhaust themselves in pursuit of an ideal—it’s really very moving. It’s quite extraordinary to be backstage, being made up for two hours, being transformed from who you are into this ideal of beauty that the designer keeps in the back of his mind.
“I love couture modeling too, because you have such a pure feeling of control and power when you’re out there. For a tiny period of time—three or four seconds—you have the chance to hold the entire room. This may seem like a strange comparison, but I’m fascinated by comedy, and I imagine that modeling couture must feel very much like being a comedian; it’s just you out there, having to win over an audience, with nothing except yourself and your attitude to do it. And then I, for one, find the clothes so lovely—those Valentino colors that aren’t quite colors and yet register as though they were. I feel lucky to have been a part of it.” I had never before come across someone who was articulate and knowing about her craft, was big enough to start at power forward, and looked great in a black velvet military coat with rhinestone buttons, black satin trousers, and a black silk top embroidered with black jet. (She had been wearing that, for Valentino, the first time I saw her.)
Tell about the pathetic collections. A certain number of the collections seem intended to be pathetic. Olivier Lapidus’s is my specimen pathetic collection. The house is full, and the B list girls do the modeling, and Olivier, who is the son of the designer Ted, looks like a very nice guy. But it is held at the Carrousel du Louvre, a place designed specially to hold collections—it is big and well lit and clean—which means, naturally, that absolutely nobody wants to show there. Olivier Lapidus comes onstage to point out that his collection is a mixture of past, present, and future and includes the first solar-paneled jacket ever made. He shows it off. You can control the solar panels, turning the heat up or down, and it also has a built-in plug that could brancher you right into the Internet, the first haute couture garment equipped to go on-line. The poor model has to take the plug out of the pocket and show it to the audience. Then you hear the theme from Star Trek. Nobody knows which way to look.
Tuesday night is Christian Lacroix. The show is held in the ball-room of the Grand Hotel, and it is by far the most intently attended defile I have seen yet; even Mme. Chirac is here. Lacroix is of the moment. I associate his clothes with the tasteless things about the eighties, the Ivana Trump era—clothes to wear for the big settlement. Tonight, when the lights go down, Linda Evangelista comes out in the ugliest dress I have ever seen. Even the program’s words can’t disguise its ugliness: “silk-crepe dress stamped with a mauve-and-ochre-green ‘reptile’ design.” I am settling in for a good long bath of contempt.
But then something happens. First, the music begins to take hold. In most of the collections the music is either generic “sophisticated” soprano and synthesizer pop—the kind you associate with the singer Sade—or classical chestnuts, like Albinoni and Mozart. Lacroix, though, has had someone (the program credits a Laurent Godard) with an uncanny eclectic ear arrange his music. We begin with the breathless, chimelike sounds of the Swedish group the Cardigans and switch to Joe Jackson and then, without missing a beat, land in a Bellini aria. Lacroix works through his day wear and moves into the cocktail dresses and then the evening wear. In the program he announces that he has been spending all his time lately “with Vermeer.” He seems to have taken a wrong turn in the museum, for what you see is Goya: Goya’s duchesses, in their mantillas and black satin dresses, but wildly remade, as though for a Balanchine ballet of the life of Goya. There are lots of satins and silks in dark colors—navy blue satin and vermilion satin and black chiffon. The layering is ecclesiastical. For once, the program description actually describes the clothes: a long, lined black crepe sweater-dress tucked up over a crepe underskirt with a fuchsia faille bustle at the back, accented by a pistachio satin knot. The crepuscular colors mute the ostentation, so that it doesn’t look like ostentation at all but, rather, like art, like old painting. The music turns to the Beatles’ baroque period: the string part from “Eleanor Rigby” and then a long cello and harp version of “For No One.” The lovely sad yet modem tunes, the twilight, and the dresses themselves create, against all odds and probabilities, something touching, and even—Honor Fraser’s word is right—moving. The dresses aren’t really dresses at all; they are little buildings of crepe and silk and taffeta. The girls look out from them, like Spanish ladies looking out from a second-floor window. When a model named Victoria appears in a black satin corset with Elizabethan sleeves of tulle and worn over a deep lavender-blue skirt flecked with black lace—she looks like an actress dressed up as Viola for an impossibly beautiful production of Twelfth Night—the audience applauds, genuinely, not politely. When Karen Mulder comes out in a silver lace dress with an iced pearl bodice, I make exclamation points in my program.