The Asylum
Authors: Simon Doonan
also by simon doonan
Gay Men Don't Get Fat
Eccentric Glamour
Wacky Chicks
Beautiful People
(originally published as
Nasty
)
Confessions of a Window Dresser
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2013 by Simon Doonan
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doonan, Simon, date.
The asylum : a collage of couture reminiscences / Simon Doonan.
p. cm
ISBN 978-1-101-59421-6
1. Clothing and dressâHumor. 2. FashionâHumor. I. Title.
TT507.D585 2013 2013015426
746.9'20207âdc23
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author's alone.
FOR JONNY
Â
when bossy bitches roamed the earth
balenciaga could sew with either hand
thierry mugler's flying shoulder pads
anna's wondering why we haven't started yet
toxins are the new cargo pants
the olsens vs the phoenix suns
willi smith was a right-on sista
zips up the back with no bones
Â
AH! FASHION.
A nuthouse? A refuge? Or maybe both. Yes, an asylum in both senses of the word. A place where unemployable crazy people are always welcome.
Every seasoned fashion personage has his or her favorite stories of folly, aberration, derangement, kookiness and excess.
These are mine.
In most instances real names are used. I have tweaked the identities of certain individuals to protect their innocence and cherish their fabulosity.
Have I embroidered or embellished? Let me answer that question by quoting Diana Vreeland: “Exaggeration is my only reality.”
âS. D.
Get on to Princess Anne's people and tell her that everybody there will be mentally ill. Tell her we'll sponsor her to wear a designer dress, okay? And make sure she realizes that if she doesn't wear it those little children won't get anything.
âEdina, planning a fashion event on the first episode of
Absolutely Fabulous
CATHERINE DENEUVE
is walking around West London with a skinned rabbit in her purse. A decaying skinned rabbit. She is in a zombified state, twitching and hallucinating. In Polanski's legendarily bizarre movie
Repulsion
, Mademoiselle Deneuve has clearly lost her mind, and yet . . . has she ever looked chicer? With her pale understated clothing, her luscious blond tresses and her fabulously blank facial expression, she is the epitome of sixties French preppy cool.
Fashion and madness. Strange bedfellows. Or are they?
I have a close friend who works in a nuthouse, let's call her Lizzie. While I skip about at fashion shoots and whoosh into the front row of runway shows, my hardworking psychologist pal toils in a seriously grim public mental asylum.
Over the years, Lizzie and I have kibitzed endlessly about work. The yawning chasm between our respective professional milieus has always provided us with much conversational fodder. Logic dictates that these two glaringly contrasting worlds would have about as much in common as Big Ang and Mrs. Petraeus. What could be farther apart than the pampered artifice of fashion and the gritty melancholy of daily life in a public psychiatric facility?
And yet . . .
Time and again we find eerie similarities between these two worlds. Comparing and contrasting the goings-on in the world of fashion with the shenanigans of the folks at Lizzie's house of horrors proves both surreal and illuminating.
Having come from a long line of lunaticsâmy genes are liberally accessorized with manic depression and schizophreniaâI have a special interest in madness. The fear that I might follow the family tradition and start carrying a skinned rodent in my purse, even metaphorically, began in childhood and has dogged me my entire life. Perhaps one day I will wake up and be overcome with
Weltschmerz
like Grandpa Doonan or drunken Uncle Dave and simply off myself. Or maybe I will lose my noodle like Uncle Ken and end up strapped to a board, receiving electric-shock treatment. Or a lobotomy, just like Granny. These nagging dreads have produced in me an abiding interest in psychiatric disorders, which itself borders on psychiatric disorder.
Lizzie has always reciprocated my interest in her asylum with an equal curiosity about my world, the realm of style. Like many a single gal living in Manhattan, Lizzie regularly succumbs to the transformative charms of La Mode. I fuel her growing passion by giving her my old fashion magazines, which she enthusiastically devours over lunch in the mental hospital's cafeteria. As often as not, she has questions about what she reads.
First and foremost, Lizzie is repeatedly struck by the concept of “trends.” Perturbed, you might almost say. She tears out pages and waves them at me in a nutty, hostile manner.
“It says here that, quote, âEveryone is wearing fishnets . . . again.'”
“It's a big trend for spring.”
“No, it isn't. You are hallucinating. I haven't seen anyone in Manhattan wearing fishnets, except the old tranny hooker on my block. How long have you fashion people been harboring this particular delusion?”
“Calm down.”
“You need to realize that my hospital is full of people who imagine crazy shit. They see patterns where there are none.”
Seeing patterns where there are none. In Lizzie's profession, insisting upon the existence of patterns of any kind constitutes a diagnostic red flag, a symptom of a fairly serious psychiatric disorder. But not for me. I have long since habituated to the idea of trends and have always taken great pleasure in catapulting them at Lizzie.
Fluorescent colors are happening
right now
. I'm seeing them everywhere.
Black rubber trench coats? Who isn't wearing one?
Angora is BACK! Everyone knows that.
Snakeskin hobos! Don't mind if I do.
For me, these trends are little more than innocuous ejaculations. To Lizzie, they seem quite sinister. If somebody starts seeing trendsâseeing patterns where none are objectively verifiableâthen that particular somebody might need to be “sectioned.”
“You're seeing fluorescents everywhere? Lots of our new arrivals say stuff like that. Usually they're schizophrenic. But sometimes they've just come off a glue-huffing binge. It takes a while to figure it out.”
Grudgingly, I am willing to admit to Lizzie that we fashion people can be a tad dogmatic. Yes, the trends that shriek at the reader from the pages of today's magazines are somewhat overstated and repetitive. Military coats! Futuristic footwear! Couture pouf skirts! Boho caftans! Again! How, I often ask myself, can leopard print constitute “an important new trend” when it's been “an important new trend” for the last ten years?
One can just see the harried fashion editors, aided by legions of assistants, laying out the forty million runway images from any given season and, based on an arbitrary and statistically insignificant sampling, starting to “see patterns.”
“Look, here's an orange skirt at Céline. And look, an orange purse at Prada. Hold the presses! I'm seeing a pattern here . . .”
“Yes, but we told our readers that orange was
the
trend last season . . .”
“Zip it!”
When the trends of the season are unfurled online or in magazines, they can seem forced or a tad bogus. But are they an indication that somebody needs to be strapped to a board and given electric-shock treatment? Not really. What seems like madness to Lizzieâseeing patterns where there are noneâis really just a sincere attempt to impose a soupçon of structure. The fashion landscape is, after all, a wacky and ever-expanding place which can seem daunting and quite bloblike, as in
The Blob
, the idiotic fifties sci-fi movie about a giant growing amoeba which tries to eat Steve McQueen and engulf the world. Those trend reports are nothing more than a gung-ho effort to provide the hordes of jolly fashion consumers with a few helpful guidelines. Is that so wrong?
Some mental health professionals will tell you that the exact same process is going on in the mind of a psychiatric patient. The imposing of patterns and rules, no matter how strange or illogical, provides a buffer against all the blobby chaos. Take that, Doctor Lizzie! I can play shrink too!
As you can probably tell by now, Lizzie and I are locked in an irrational-but-enjoyable big dick contest. Whose world is more demented? The world of the insane or the world of the insanely fashionable? On some occasions we are out to prove that our own world is saner. More often than not we are hell-bent on one-upping and out-crazying each other.
The denizens of both our worlds often suffer from a bad case of
folie de grandeur
. Whenever I regale Lizzie with an instance of preposterous fashion grandiosity, she is always able to top it. I once complained to her about some asshole designer who constantly referred to himself in the third person and brayed on about his global brand domination. Lizzie responded: “You think your fashion freaks are getting too big for their bustiers. Pah! That's nothing. Today I chatted with a patient who told me he was totally exhausted. When I asked him why, he said that he was tired of running both the FBI and the CIA.”
Not only are Lizzie's patients grandiose, they can be quite snarky. I am frequently taken aback by their inclination to play fashion police and express disdain at the appearances and style choices of others. They are, as it turns out, just as prone to making cutting remarks as any blogger or Fashion Week attendee, if not more so.
Entering a group therapy session, Lizzie is invariably greeted with a series of subtly lacerating comments about her personal appearance.
“Dr. Lizzie, your skin is looking better today.”
“But you are getting a bit thick, Doctor.”
“Don't listen to him, Doc. Yes, you're looking a little thick, but I like my bitches that way.”
Individual therapy sessions bring forth an even more fearsome candor. Something about the intimacy of these settings seems to give Lizzie's patients carte blanche to be downright evil.
One particular lady stands out. Let's call her Patient X. Homeless and OxyContin-addicted, Patient X arrived at the hospital in a state of abject physical and mental disintegration. Within days, thanks to medication, food, and shelter, she made startling improvements in all areas, especially her critical faculties. And by critical, I do mean
critical.
“It's great to see you looking so well.”
“Thanks, Doc. Right back atcha! By the way, nice boots!”
Lizzie had recently splurged on a pair of platform boots after being advised by yours truly that they were a current trend. The compliment served to alleviate some of her misgivings about whether the boot trend might have been real or imagined.
“Thanks. I'm glad you like them.”
“You know what, Doc,” said X, leaning back in her chair and snapping her gum. “When I get out of this dump, I'm going to buy myself a pair of moderately priced boots . . . just like yours.”
When Lizzie later regaled me with this story, I was less than sympathetic, assuring her in no uncertain terms that this kind of double-edged noncompliment is very common in my world.
“I love your Pucci leggings. But for the office? Maybe better for the weekend. Or Halloween.
Non?
”
Back to boots.
Boots have, for some reason, caused Lizzie to be the brunt of endless gibes. In the course of assessing one particular patient's ability to think abstractly, she asked him, “Do you know the expression âYou can't judge a book by its cover'? What do you think it means?”
Slowly and thoughtfully, he looked Lizzie up and down. Then his eyes alighted on her boots, which, as chance would have it, were extremely beaten-up.
Without moving his gaze, he said, “It means you can't judge someone by how they look on the outside . . . but sometimes you can, if you know what I mean.”
His gaze remained fixed on those scuffed boots.
“That's all I will say for now. I've got to go.”
Next time Lizzie saw this particular patient, she purposely wore boots that were unscuffed. They were, in fact, the “moderately priced boots” referred to earlier.
The patient eyed the fresh new footwear and spoke. “Doc, I think you're starting to put your best foot forward, if you know what I mean.”
When summer rolled around, and boot season was just a distant memory, Lizzie anticipated a break in the critical onslaught. 'Twas not to be.
“Hey, Doc, I like your sandals.”
“Thank you.”
“Where did you get them?”
“I forget. Somewhere Downtown.”
“Thom McAn! For five dollars!”
The patient then walked away laughing to himself.
Eccentricity and extremism are common in Lizzie's world. They are also the foundation of great style. The bold avatars of fashionâthe Daphne Guinnesses, the Michelle Harpers and the Tilda Swintonsâpropel the evolution of fashion forward by daring to enrobe themselves in a way which may well look clowny and loopy to the Katie Courics of the world. Then, five years later, the Katie Courics are wearing some version of that original wackadoodly ensemble.
Unlike regular folk, mental patients have a strong, albeit unwitting, tolerance and affinity for avant-garde style. Schizophrenics often concoct headwraps that are reminiscent of Comme des Garçons, Lady Gaga or Erykah Badu. Bipolar folk love yellow eye shadow just as much as Nicki Minaj does. The hallways of Lizzie's hospital are a veritable runway show of experimental flamboyance.
Lizzie's young interns were so blown away by the unconscious fashion daring of the arriving patients that they were inspired to invent a game called “Inpatient or Williamsburg Hipster?” The typical patient might have a beard down to his waist, a shrunken flannel shirt and ill-fitting suit pants.
Et voilà !
“Inpatient or Williamsburg Hipster?”
Lizzie is best able to observe the avant-gardism and stylish verve of her patients on “grooming day.” When I first heard that one day a week is set aside for a little on-premises vanity and primping, I was anxious to help. I believe in the curative powers of what my mother used to call “getting a bit tarted up.” When people get depressed, the first thing to go is their vanity. There's no question that a little lippy, or a fake lash or two, can act as a mood elevator.
I mentioned Lizzie's grooming day to my friend François Nars. He too became enthused and committed to helping Lizzie's patients. The next day a luxurious assortment of Nars maquillage arrived on my doorstep. I forwarded it immediately to Lizzie so that she would have it in time for grooming day. When I saw her a week later, I was anxious to find out how it all went.
“The patients loved the Nars makeup.”
“Do you have pics I can forward to François?”
“I don't think he would be too happy. Most of the lipstick ended up on their foreheads and the backs of their legs.”
“François is a creative fashion dude. He would probably find it inspiring.”
“You people are sick.”
There's that undercurrent of competitive hostility again. Whose world is the more freaky? The nuthouse or the runway?
Once, I called Lizzie from a photo shoot to say hey. I told her that we were photographing some of Barneys' fall merchandise for a direct-mail catalog and that we were taking our inspiration from
Grey Gardens
. When she told me she hadn't seen it, I launched into an enthusiastic gush about this legendary seventies Maysles brothers documentary about a mother and daughter who lived in Havisham-esque decay in East Hampton.
“It's so major. You won't believe the styling. These two broadsâcousins of Jackie Onassis!âare called Little Edie and Big Edie, and they should have been editing a groovy alternative fashion magazine or designing clothes. They are the ultimate stylists.”
The following weekend Lizzie rented the movie. I waited for her feedback with white knuckles. My phone jangled late on Sunday night.