The Asylum (5 page)

And the bladder fest continues . . .

Even as I write, I am hearing reports of front-row editors sobbing at the beauty of the Haider Ackermann fall collection. Ditto Raf Simons. His dénoument at maison Jil Sander sent more than a few fashion insiders lurching for their Kleenex.

What would toothless Grampy say about all this? Would he declare it all to be a boil far from his arse? Would he denounce us for our frivolous way of life and condemn us all to drink beer out of shitey rags?

Who cares! So what if we are all a bunch of
verklempt
nellies! So what if our bladders are located too near our eyeballs. At least we have all our own teeth . . . or most of them.

SUZY
MENKES'S ROCKABILLY
pompadour hairdo has been through a lot. It has seen presidents come and go. It has seen shoulder pads go in and out and then come rushing back in again. Ditto platform shoes, bustiers, jewel tones and tiaras. It has seen Jil Sander leave her company and return years later in triumph. It has seen the shock of the new and the tedium of the greige. It has seen models falling off runways and designers falling off the wagon. That legendary glamorous roll of coiffure has seen it all, the great and the good, the prosaic and the avant-garde, the power and the glory, the naked and the damned. If it could only talk . . .

If Suzy Menkes's hairdo could talk, it would tell tales of glamour and jubilation, of torn seams and broken dreams. One day I hope to get some alone time with Suzy Menkes's sausage. I am sure that Suzy will let it go out for a playdate with me. I like to think that she would trust me to take good care of her signature coiffure.

While Suzy stays at home, banging out more of her brilliant fashion commentary—she is
the
most insightful, knowledgeable fashion commentator of our age—we, the sausage and I, will ensconce ourselves in the corner of a quiet bar on the Rive Gauche. I will ply the sausage with absinthe and I won't stop until it has coughed up all its gothic secrets and mysterious memories. Suzy has always been very discreet, but I am sure her sausage will spill the beans.

I might start by asking the sausage about a near-death experience which happened back in the early nineties. I remember it well. It was a where-were-you-when moment. I was there. I witnessed the deluge and lived to tell the tale.

•   •   •

THE STORY
I am about to relate takes place long ago, before the arrival of the Bryant Park tents. Fashion designers were still showing their collections in their hot, stuffy, carpeted showrooms. Another option: if you didn't have a large enough showroom then you went off-site. On this particular occasion, Michael Kors went off-site, off-Broadway and quite, for him and for the time, Euro avant-garde. He chose to show his collection in a crumbling industrial space.

From my seat I can see Suzy and her sausage. They are seated next to Anna Wintour and her bob. I am parked in the second row on the retail side of the runway. As fate would have it, this second-row
placement
turned out to be a lifesaver . . . but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I am excited to see Michael's collection. He had shared little tidbits of inspiration over the previous summer. Michael and I are beach neighbors in Fire Island Pines. He rents an oceanfront glam palace with loungers and tinkling glasses filled with Pimm's. In keeping with his branding commitment to jet-set glamour, there are ramparts of thirsty white towels, heaps of squishy floor pillows, aerosol sunblockers and lashings of international fashion magazines.

I am in an adjacent house, or rather I am under an adjacent house. My pal Steven Johanknecht—aka Chiclet—and I have snagged what might just be the deal of the century. For a negligible rent, we are beachfront and Kors adjacent. The only downside: We are in a single, stiflingly hot, windowless room in the basement. The décor? Ours looks like the kind of place where a serial killer would keep his victims before murdering and flaying them. A black vinyl foldout couch and a wall of gold-veined mirror tiles provide the only decorative flourishes. Ike Turner meets Sid Vicious. In no time we learn to unpeel each other from the couch. This action is accompanied by a comforting coming-unstuck sound. While Michael is rocking jet-set glamour, we are within shrieking distance and living in a sub-trailer-park hovel. I would call it “grunge” except grunge has not yet been invented. So I will just go with “gnarly.”

For obvious reasons, we spend a great deal of time chez Kors, lolling on the massive architectural deck and gossiping with the always entertaining MK. Like Chiclet and me, Michael loves to dissect the sociology and anthropology of the strange time warp that is Fire Island Pines. In many regards, nothing has changed since the disco seventies. One feels as if one is about to be photographed for a cheesy spread in
After Dark
magazine. Old-school queens in caftans waft down the teensy boardwalk clutching a cocktail in one hand and a poodle in the other. The music at the Pavilion's tea dance is a decade old and straight out of the cliché end of the Studio 54 disco canon. We find this to be pathos drenched but also rather delightful.

Among Michael's disco faves is a classic titled “Use It Up and Wear It Out” by Odyssey. The chorus may well be familiar to readers
d'un certain âge.

“One two three . . . shake your body down.”

So enamored is Michael of this smokin' hot dance ditty of yesteryear that he elected to incorporate it into the soundtrack of his upcoming show.

Which brings us back to the gritty space and Suzy's
saucisson
.

So there I am, perched in my second-row seat, jonesing, not just for the clothes but also for the soundtrack. The show begins and, sure enough, in no time at all we hit the opening bars of “Use It Up and Wear It Out.” It is undeniably catchy. The throbbing music gets Suzy's toe tapping. I swear I can see her luscious hair-roll pulsing in time to the music.

Out walks Gauguin-esque beauty Anna Bayle. At this point in the song, we are just about to hit the first “one two three.”

The volume increases dramatically. In my mind, I can see Michael backstage vigorously jiggling a coat hanger in an upward motion, indicating to his sound guy that this is the moment to
blow the lid off and
TURN THE MOTHER OUT!

Up goes the volume . . .

and down comes the ceiling.

As the phrase “shake your body down” reaches my ears, the spectacle in front of me goes into slow motion. Large slices of concrete and plaster descend onto the runway. Shake your body down has shaken the ceiling down onto the heads of the most important people in the fashion industry. A cloud of dust and debris has engulfed the first row.

In amongst the screams and the sound of falling debris, I hear a familiar male voice yelling, “Cut the disco!”

As the dust clears and the music finally dies, a poignant vignette emerges. There is Anna Wintour, her signature bob intact but dusted with white powder in the manner of an eighteenth-century princess at Versailles, and she is leaning over Suzy Menkes. In a kind and caring and meticulous manner she is extracting lumps of plaster, which have lodged themselves in, on, and behind Suzy's hairdo.

Post-traumatic stress has erased much of what happened subsequently. But I do remember the fashion flock tiptoeing out of the industrial space so as not to dislodge any more debris. Within hours, Suzy was back in the front row doggedly covering the next show.

From whence cometh this resilience? What engenders this kind of passionate commitment to La Mode?

I feel sure that if I could just have some face time with Suzy's legendary
saucisson
, he/she/it could help me to get inside Suzy's head, and all would be revealed.

•   •   •

postscript
Michael remembers: “When I first heard the boom from backstage, I thought it was gunfire. Anna Bayle came off the runway screaming that the ceiling had fallen and hit Suzy Menkes. I rushed out from backstage to make sure everyone was okay. We swept up the mess, turned down the music to inaudible and continued the show. I couldn't believe Suzy and everyone stayed, but fashion folks are a strong group. In that best Broadway phrasing, I always wanted my collections to bring down the house—but not so literally.”

Suzy remembers: “My memory of the whole thing is that Eleanor Lambert, aged ninety-something, was much smarter than I was and got up and scuttled out as the first piece of plaster fell. (You don't get to ninety-something for nothing.) I ask myself why I never sued the good Kors. Brits just don't!”

JAPAN IS A FREAKY SCENE.
It's a lethal combo of beauty and perversity. It's schoolgirl panties sold in vending machines. It's a silk obi woven by a two-thousand-year-old toothless crone from threads produced by hermaphroditic silkworms and then wound so tightly around your middle that your internal organs keep threatening to come flying out of your orifices.

Japan is a giant watermelon scooped out and filled with ice so that one single ridiculously tiny morsel of haute couture sashimi can rest in splendor on the top. Japan is also a square watermelon, imprisoned in a box, screaming to be round, but forced to be cube shaped for unspecified aesthetic reasons.

It's about going to restaurants with your nearest and dearest, and then not uttering a single word of conversation for hours, but remaining quite happy and content in your silence. And when the food is plonked in front of you, it's about obsessively documenting it with your phone.

It's about sitting in a pachinko parlor for weeks at a time without ever stopping to pee or eat or sleep while stuffing fistfuls of teensy ball bearings into those mysterious machines, and wearing a blank expression which suggests that you are blissfully but inexplicably unaware of the hideous eardrum-destroying cacophony inside said parlor.

In the eighties I traveled to Japan with a female colleague who was wearing a modest scoop-neck dress. The man who met us at the airport stared at her barely visible cleavage and said, “Soon may I have some milk to drink please, Mommy?” He then put on little white Mickey Mouse gloves and drove us to our hotel.

On the same trip I wandered into a Shinjuku porn store. I wasn't looking for kicks. It was more of a Margaret Mead kind of a thing. The exhausted and wildly unhot store proprietor exhaled his ciggie and gave me a deadpan guide to his emporium of erotica.

“Old lady porn here. Schoolgirl porn there. Fat, ugly businessman porn under here. What you want?”

Helpful service, along with beauty and perversity, is also very much part of the Japanese scene. And then there's fashion . . .

On a more recent trip to Tokyo I saw about fifty girls standing outside Shibuya Station, each dressed up like a Madame Alexander doll, ringlets, starched crinolines, graphic circles of rouge on the cheeks, Victorian lace-up ankle booties, frilly bloomers, the whole megillah. I was told that these indigenous kooksters refer to this particular style as Gottic Rorita. Translation: Gothic Lolita.

Bonnets aside, the most noteworthy thing about these gals was that they were trying to look nonchalant, and they were succeeding. There is something deeply perverse about dragging yourself up as a life-size Madame Alexander doll and then walking about in public as if you were wearing slacks and a simple sweater.

“I dress like oversize doll for no reason—not big deal” their blank expressions seemed to say.

I am guessing about the Gottic Rorita interior monologue. Maybe there is no introspection. Maybe there is just the sound of an old-fashioned musical jewelry box? Tinkle. Tinkle. Tinkle. In Japan you are forced to rely on guesswork because nobody speaks much. This is a good thing. It's a
sugoi
thing. The annoying Western compulsion to overcommunicate does not seem to have impacted the land of the Gottic Rorita. This absence of chatty badinage allows one to spend many blissful hours lost in creative speculation.

Lest I sound disrespectful, let me say for the record that I am in love with Japan. I have traveled there more times than I can remember and always found it insanely life enhancing in every aspect, especially the visual stuff. All of my creative idols are Japs: Yohji Yamamoto, Yayoi Kusama, Araki, Tomita, Tamasaburo Bando, Issey Miyake, Eiko Ishioka, Junya Watanabe, and, at the top of this list, Miss Rei Kawakubo.

Rei, pronounced Ray, is the reigning enigma of global fashion. Nobody knows if she is a bitch or an angel or a psycho. One thing is for sure: she is an object of fascination. With her rigorous black wardrobe and her blunt-cut hair framing her inscrutable face, Rei is a true icon. Deservedly so. Rei is one of the most influential fashion creators of all time, up there with Madame Vionnet, Coco Chanel, Azzedine Alaïa and Yves Saint Laurent.

John Waters has a long-standing obsession with Rei and has described her thus: “She is locked in a self-imposed deconstructed cell, like the Saint Teresa of fashion, massacring hemlines for next season's no-dimensional outfits that will be mocked, brilliantly reviewed and worn by the brave.”

The legend of Rei—and her designer label, Comme des Garçons—results from the fact that she is supremely talented but also mute. During her half-century-plus career, Rei has mostly kept her trap shut, even during interviews. Kawakubo-san is famous for her ability to ignore quotidian questions. This can be very nerve-racking. Any journalist proposing to interrogate Rei would be well advised to wear adult diapers. Rei has more patience than you. She can weather a spaghetti western standoff for much longer than any bubbly reporter.

An intrepid pal once decided he would be the one to break through the wall of inscrutability. He would be the guy to warm her up and ignite the Chatty Cathy persona that he felt sure must lurk within.

He kicked things off with a real crowd pleaser.

“Have you ever thought about doing a line of children's clothing?”

A Comme des Garçons aide embarked on a painstaking translation while Rei stared straight ahead through black Ray-Bans. Silence followed the painstaking translation of the dorky question. Rei stared at my pal. My pal's butthole slowly began to shrivel. Rather than admit defeat and face the agonizing humiliation of moving on to the next question, he gave it another whirl.

“Children's clothing by Comme des Garçons?” bubbled my anxious friend, adding, “How fabulous would that be?”

Another painstaking translation followed by another excruciating silence.

“Whaddya think? Children? Clothing?”

My pal was starting to disintegrate and to sweat and to seriously understand the appeal of hari-kari.

The translator gave up and stared at Rei. Rei stared at my pal. Finally Rei elected to put them both out of their misery.

She spoke in English.

“I don't like children.”

I consider myself something of an expert on Comme des Garçons, or CDG as we in the business refer to the company Rei founded in 1969. I have observed and displayed her collections since the early eighties and have attended many of her shows. I have touched the merch, the artfully constructed holes, the boiled wool, the raw seams, the fungal padding. When she designed costumes for Merce Cunningham, I cheered from the front row. When she was honored with a retrospective at the Fashion Institute of Technology, I was first in line.

On this latter occasion, the CDG archive was exhibited on clusters of strange, grim, gray cardboard mannequins. The effect was jarring and Orwellian. After the exhibit was dismantled, I called FIT and begged to borrow these grim figures for an installation at Barneys honoring Rei. FIT obliged and we trucked them down Seventh Avenue to the old Barneys, where they were immediately installed in the windows. Once the vignettes were completed, I took pictures and sent them to Rei. Her response was swift and dramatic. She immediately recalled her gray cardboard dollies to Japan, where they were fed into some kind of massive Dr. No granulating machine. After the dollycaust, it was explained to me that Rei had created these mannequins for the FIT exhibit and could not tolerate their use in any other context. Hello dolly. Good-bye dolly.

Speaking of granulations: For years it was rumored that Rei was in the habit of feeding last season's clothing into a giant incinerator. She could not endure the idea of unsold CDG items languishing at Forever 21 or Loehmann's alongside a bunch of conventional schlock. Better to immolate an asymmetrical blouse than to have it end up on a rolling rack next to a naff Seventh Avenue polyester patio gown.

Putting aside all the fables and legends, the most noteworthy thing about the Kawakubo oeuvre is the brilliance thereof. Rei is an undisputed genius whose influence is immeasurable. This is exemplified by the fact that her designs never go out of fashion: despite being so daringly experimental, Ms. Kawakubo's creations remain immune to the passage of time. Comme des Garçons never dies. CDG garments remain timelessly avant-garde, cool, and groovy.

During her long career, Rei has applied her genius to many areas of design, including accessories and furniture . . . and perfume.

In 1995, Rei introduced her first Comme des Garçons fragrance. Barneys was selected as the launching partner. I vividly remember the planning meeting at the Paris showroom with Rei and her South African–born husband, Adrian. Every aspect of this strange new product was riddled with Kawakuboian perversity.

The bottle was flat. It lay in the palm of your hand like a molded-glass river rock. Forget about ever getting it to stand up in your medicine cabinet. Forget about lining it up next to your bottles of White Diamonds or Jontue.

Then there was the color. The Comme des Garçons fragrance was a startling and challenging shade of yellow. Think about what you see when you take a whiz after you have overdone the vitamin B. Yes,
that
particular shade.

When describing the scent itself—and this might just be the most perverse bit of Japanobilia I have ever encountered—Rei went
inorganic
. Just when everyone else in the entire universe was going headlong down the sustainable, lesbian-certified, recycled, locavore, übercrunchy organic rabbit hole, Rei went in the totally opposite direction.

And what, precisely, were these inorganic top notes, middle notes and base notes?

According to Rei, they were electricity, granite and aluminum. Who doesn't want to smell like an office park? (The ingredients are actually rose, cardamom, cedar, etc., etc., but Rei, for some deeply perverse reason, chose to promote the idea of an inorganic concept.)

The international CDG perfume launch started in Paris, around the pool at the Ritz. While synchronized gals in black swimsuits thrashed up and down, we guests made polite chitchat. As per Rei, the décor of the party consisted of large transparent plastic bags filled with the yellow perfume. Bold, brave and vaguely obscene, they resembled mastodon-size bags of urine.

The Paris launch was a huge success. New York followed, as did more colostomy bags. Fortunately none of them broke. By the time we got to Los Angeles, the concept no longer struck me as peculiar or jarring. “We need more giant colostomy bags,” I instructed the L.A. display team as we prepared for Rei's fête, matter-of-factly adding, “Let's put a couple of biggies by the entrance and hit them with a yellow spotlight. Thanks, luvvies!”

To say that Rei Kawakubo appeared a little out of place in Beverly Hills would be a colossal understatement. While she has always looked right at home in a concrete bunker or next to a defunct nuclear reactor, when she wandered onto Rodeo Drive, she suddenly seemed like a space alien. The man-pleasing bimbo culture, the face-lifted superficiality and the fake tans all conspired to give Rei the appearance of a freaky
manga
cult leader.

The L.A. launch party was noteworthy for the following reason: I had sent an invite to photographer William Claxton and his wife, Peggy Moffitt, muse and collaborator to the late Rudi Gernreich. Peggy arrived in full-on futuristic vintage Gernreich drag, complete with Sassoon bowl cut and forty billion false eyelashes. There was a frisson between the two women. Rei seemed almost flirtatious. Having introduced them, I got quite excited about the notion of a clandestine lesbian affair between the two. A decade later Rei embarked on a platonic collaboration with La Moffitt. CDG T-shirts bearing images of Peggy's face became the must-have item of the season. Score a yenta brownie point for me.

Harry Dean Stanton came. The melancholy-looking actor had walked in Rei's men's shows—Rei has a history of casting improbable males for her presentations—and wanted to pay his respects.

And then the grand voilà! An unscheduled celebrity appearance of massive, pressworthy proportions.

Kato Kaelin crashed Rei's party.

The perfume launch occurred during the O. J. Simpson trial and Kato Kaelin, having recently given his rambling testimony, was the most recognizable face on the planet.

Kato had been lurking in the pool house on the night that O. J. had, allegedly, murdered his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her unlucky visitor, Ron Goldman. Mr. Kaelin's abundant sun-bleached tresses and douche-bag good looks had made him an instant media star. There was a force field around the charming-but-sleazy Kato. As soon as he entered the store, the paparazzi began falling over the large yellow bags of perfume, trying to get a few words with him.

I tried explaining to Rei that a very important celebrity had just arrived. Distilling the broad strokes of the trial of the century into simple, coherent party chat was an impossible task. Rei stared straight ahead and nodded. A little smile upturned the corners of her mouth, suggesting that she was seriously considering casting him for the next men's show.

The après-fête dinner was held at Chasen's, a Hollywood classic and Liz Taylor's fave chili joint. Rei seemed to dig the old-school Hollywood vibe and the red Naugahyde booths. Was she envisioning an entire collection of padded trepunto rubber clothing in homage to the Chasen's banquettes?

She also fixated on the prevalence of toupee-wearing older dudes who were dining at adjacent tables with their busty, much younger wives. When, decades later, her male models wore strange little Brillo-pad wigs, I could not help but think that Rei was referencing the superannuated silver geezers of Chasen's with their artfully glued Sy Sperling rugs.

“What shall I do with Rei tomorrow?” asked Mickey, one of Kawakubo-san's trusted female minders. Rei had an entirely blank schedule the next day and a somewhat nervous Mickey was charged with identifying the local points of interest. She enlisted my help because she knew that I had spent a lot of time in Hollywood in the sleazy seventies and the early eighties.