Tales from the Back Row (7 page)

Chris is a graphic designer who has a side business selling T-shirts and pillowcases emblazoned with Warhol-esque images of pop culture and fashion icons like Princess Diana and Britney Spears. He wears everything from tight all-black outfits to baggy Vivienne Westwood jeans tucked into those puffy blue-and-white sneakers that look like marshmallows. Accent jewelry is, remarkably, his friend. He lives in one of Brooklyn's most hipster neighborhoods and brings a Missoni towel to the beach. Practicality is not high on his list of concerns. He is an impeccable shopping partner because he always suggests things for me that I wouldn't consider for myself otherwise.

As soon as we walked into American Apparel, I went to the section I always hit first: lamé. I am drawn to shiny things. This must be one of those traits that goes back to evolution—you know, cavelady survival strategies. How much easier would it be to get the hottest caveman's attention in gold lamé leggings and a shiny purple leotard than some drab old buffalo skin? I believe this principle still holds. Pop stars wouldn't be the attention magnets they are if they weren't shiny.

“
Ooooh
, shinyyyy,” I cooed over the racks. “Should I get something shiny? I'm so depressed.”

“Um, no.” Thankfully, Chris dismissed my lamé longings. “You should try this on.” He held up a short dark red T-shirt dress with zipper detailing on the sleeves.

“I don't know; that's too short,” I said.

“Just try it on! It'll look really good on you.”

I agreed, because no woman can resist the urging of a gay man who wants to see how she looks in something.

When I came out, Chris looked me up and down.

“You have to get that,” he said.

The dress was so short that I'd never be able to wear it without tights. But he was right: this dress made me look good. And nothing I ever picked out for myself ever made me look good.

“Wear that when you see him. You'll get back together,” Chris said.

“It's sixty-five dollars, though,” I pointed out.

“Just get it. You only live once. You'll look back on your early twenties and regret not buying that and all the shortest, tightest dresses you can find. Trust.”

I wore the red American Apparel dress to see the guy. Chris was right: we got back together.

• • •

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who wear leather pants and those who do not. You probably wouldn't own leather pants unless you had a place to wear them. Like a casino in Europe. Or Fashion Week.

That is because trends are environment-driven. Of course, the people working in the fashion industry wear the weirdest-looking stuff—they exist in a hot tub of eccentricity where material personal effects are what most immediately separates them from Not Them. Having spent a number of years in fashion media by this point, I own and wear leather pants now. Once I started working
for
Cosmopolitan.com
in the Hearst Tower—which also houses the employees of
Elle
and
Harper's Bazaar
—it seemed like a non­option. Leather pants are to the Hearst building what cowboy hats are to Montana: a part of the landscape.

You might think we have fashion designers to thank/blame for the nonsensical apparel that people can pull off only in the presence of other fashion people. It's true: we do have fashion designers to thank/blame for the trends that trickle down to fast fashion stores like Forever 21 and Zara, where everyone shops and everyone can be made to look like a dumpier version of a fashion show model. A few designers, like Marc Jacobs and Miuccia Prada, hold such outsize influence that whatever they show one season everyone copies the next. When Marc Jacobs puts models in Amish shoes, and everyone declares him a genius, I smile and nod the way I would when someone shows me photos of their baby. I can understand that this means a great deal to the parent and other people in that parent's inner circle, but I cannot—will not—ever “get” it. Other people's baby photos are just never going to mean the same thing to me as they do to people who just like babies. The same goes for most fashion. If it did, I'd be Carine Roitfeld. She is a magical fashion-world nymph who makes humans feel embarrassed to be human. I am the girl who makes other people feel better about themselves by existing.

The truth is, there is an even Higher Power than fashion designers. They are called
trend forecasters
, and they are the weather people of fashion. While the weather people check climate trends, wind patterns, ocean currents, and so forth, trend forecasters monitor the length of our hemlines and the height of our heels. They predict the dress of everyone everywhere, and no one even realizes it. Walk by Ann Taylor and see what's in the window. Pass
through a grocery store checkout line and see the latest red carpet fashions to make the covers of the tabloids. These are, at their core, the results of the decisions made by trend forecasters.

Chris, one of my primary enablers, is a devotee of the world's premiere trend forecaster Li Edelkoort. Every time he talks about her, it's like he's just seen a real-life centaur. Because she's that magical. All she has to do to influence what cosmetics and fashion companies sell is say words like
moss
,
nomad
,
yurt
in a seminar, and then every fast fashion store ends up with a post­apocalyptic earth mother look that leads to all of us wearing Teva knockoffs and burlap crop tops for a whole season. On the upside, in addition to the comfortable shoes, we'll save time combing our hair.

Edelkoort is paid to give lectures to employees of the world's biggest brands that make everything from makeup to clothes to cars. She tells them the current mood of culture and where that mood is going in two years' time, and they use her predictions to inform their own creative work.

Chris took me to one of her seminars held at the School of Visual Arts in New York. It felt like going to a planetarium show but about fashion and beauty trends instead of constellations. And, because this is obviously more glamorous, instead of a pamphlet, they give you a bottle of Smart Water and a square of 77 percent cacao rose-salt-and-lemon-flavored chocolate.

Edelkoort is soft-spoken and wore a black dress over pants in a way only someone who works at an art school can pull off. She began the session with a brief
affirmation
of her previous predictions, confirming that the trends she said would trend did in fact become a Thing on the runways at Fashion Week. Her presentations consist of single words followed by slides of gorgeous, im
peccably curated images to illustrate her point. “Draped” was one trend, visible in a Phillip Lim sandal and a Marios Schwab gown. “Layered” followed—“another obsession,” Edelkoort said. “Very poetic.” Then came “frilled,” aka a shit ton of ruffles, which, Edelkoort explained, “means society at large is moving up again.”

She then forecasted trends that will appear nearly two years from now. The overarching theme of this collection? “Vanities,” she called it. This is her polite, artistic way of saying that assholes who take endless photos of themselves on social media are not going anywhere any time soon. Ignore them at your own peril, retailers.

“One morning on the beach in Morocco, I saw a girl. She had been running, and she wanted to take a selfie of herself,” Edelkoort said. “So she checked out the sea and she made a beautiful photo, me and the sea.”

She continued, “We are in this crazy, crazy moment where people are creating myths of themselves. They are making their lives into larger-than-life events.”

She described the archetypes of this season in, appropriately, mythic terms: the elf, sylph, and oracle were those she included in this “vanities” forecast. Others included: mermaid, Cleopatra, twins.

Edelkoort crafts a story for each of her archetypes, making the seminar like story time for adult fashion people. Mermaid, for example, isn't just indicative of blue and sequins, but rather “young women who go to bars at night beautifully dressed . . . tease the guys, have them buy all the drinks for the girls, and then they just leave them,” she explained. “They're very nasty. I think men are getting almost afraid of them.”

The druid, a “darker story,” was inspired by “pagan cults of the Celtic Druids,” who, according to the booklet Edelkoort provided
seminar attendees that explained all of these archetypes, predicted the future through bird flight and song and dwelled in the forest. “You look at the forest in the afternoon, it's shadow and light. It's using linens, it's using barklike materials.” The fashion-world druid of 2016 would invoke “magical, mystical, couture fabrics,” Edelkoort explained, including dark greens in yarn and lace paired with other shades of green and purple. Picture a princess who might have lived in a tree in the forest of your favorite '90s computer game Myst.

“It's sort of like an ecological punk; it's a very good direction here,” Edelkoort continued. “Sort of eco-warriors. I think that the world wants to go there.”

Over the course of the half-day seminar, Edelkoort told the room to stop making perfumes that smell like cake. She advised clothing makers to sell only a single garment in their stores (mono-­shopping). She proclaimed that hair is the new textile for both women and men. She lingered on a photo of a man with a bushy beard with flowers and leaves growing out of it to prove her point.

After the seminar, art directors and marketers from MAC Cosmetics, Banana Republic, and many other businesses would return to their offices and create campaigns and mood boards with Edelkoort's recommendations in mind. And this is how your “going out” wardrobe ends up consisting of blue sequins in two years. This high-level, profound, art-world reading of society is how a trend becomes a trend.

• • •

I often forget that these kinds of conversations about Fashion happen only within the industry. The fashion world is such a bubble
that it's hard to remember what's on the outside, even when you do sit in the back row. And what's on the outside is a whole lot of people who see sweatpants as an item to be worn secretly in one's own home. I was reminded, some months into my relationship with my boyfriend, Rick, that he and his parents were just those kinds of people when he invited me to dinner with his dad and stepmother. I had met his dad previously on a weekend trip to the beach, so I technically knew him, but not well—definitely not well enough for him to understand why I'd own and wear designer sweatpants.

It was gorgeous out—sunny but not hot—so I threw on the sweatpants, a white tank top, a silver cuff bracelet, and black high-heeled sandals. I thought I looked completely fabulous—casual yet dressy, cool yet not try-hard, hipster yet not obnoxious.

I arrived at Rick's Tribeca apartment where he was hanging out with his dad and stepmom. He wore khakis with a dress shirt tucked in and loafers. His dad was similarly dressed, and his stepmom wore the de facto elegant mom uniform of a slightly drapey but still figure-flattering top and nicely cut trousers with a shiny pendant necklace. (Once women reach a certain age, I've noticed, they love nothing more than a giant necklace. I fully expect to turn forty-five with a hubcap hanging from a chain around my neck.)

“Hey, sweetie,” Rick said. “You remember my dad, and this is Lorri.”

After a few seconds of smiling at each other, Rick's brow furrowed in a way that can only suggest something was very, very awkward.

“What are you wearing?” he said.

“What? Alexander Wang?”

“Sweatpants?”

“Oh, they're
on-trend
.”

His dad and stepmom looked on with nervous smiles.

We walked across the street to City Hall Grill. It's the kind of place where if you went during lunch on a Tuesday, you'd be surrounded by businessmen wearing suits. On the weekends, you get families wearing polo shirts and boat shoes. We ordered a tower of cold shellfish. I had a margarita in a tall, skinny glass. Rick's stepmom showed me her sparkly pendant necklace up close. Everyone enthused over the steak.

Everything was going great, I thought. As soon as the meal ended, Rick's dad would pull him aside and tell him how bright and funny and good at dinner conversation I am and order him to marry me immediately.

After we walked his dad and stepmom to their car, we returned to Rick's apartment.

“Sweatpants?” he said again.

“I have heels on!” I protested.

“To a nice restaurant?”

“Babe, this is New York. Everyone's wearing sweatpants now.”

Rick is a man of few words and reveals his truest feelings only when pressed.

Well, not long thereafter, he was pressed. We were in the middle of one of our first fights on the phone. He was arguing that I didn't try hard enough with his family and friends.

I was outraged! I tried
so hard
with his family and friends. I began listing all that I had accomplished with his family and friends over the six or so months we had been together.

“You wore sweatpants to dinner,” he blurted out.

Gasp!
I couldn't believe I was having a fight with a man over how I was dressing. I would never be with a person who told me
what to wear. I am a child of the postfeminist generation and I dress for myself—not for a boyfriend, and certainly not a boyfriend's dad. Trends are fun and not meant to be taken seriously. This would certainly not be the last strange thing I wore. I cried into the phone for a little bit.

“Omigod,” I began. “Did your dad . . .
say something?”

“Yes! You wore sweatpants! To dinner! At a nice restaurant!”

“But I wore
heels!
” I said.

“My dad couldn't believe you wore sweatpants. It's really disrespectful.”

I had spent a long time thinking about what to wear because I always spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what to wear. You could scrub and demildew an entire shower in the time it takes me to pick out most of my outfits.
The sweatpants were a carefully considered choice representative of my increasingly urgent need
to be Fashion
.
Why couldn't he see that?
Rick should have been happy with my sweatpants. They were the opposite of the blue-sequined mermaid attire Edelkoort described. If my outfit suggested anything according to profound art-world trend-forecaster assessment, it was that I was the opposite of those evil mermaids.