By GUY TREBAY
Published: February 27, 2008
PARIS
So much about fashion shows can seem astounding, in a practical sense. Each is like an unusually complex piece of 15-minute theater, and typically there are eight every day.
Estimated at random, there were dozens of performers at Dior, hundreds of costumes, a producer, a D.J., technical crews for music and lights and stage props (in this case, a waterfall staircase), wranglers responsible for the ornately hierarchical seating arrangement for (in this case) more than 1,200 people, who perched on ballroom chairs with tags affixed with a black satin ribbon, each one inscribed by a calligrapher with the occupant’s name.
There were individual crews for hair and makeup, each traveling with tons of equipment in custom-fitted vans; scores of security goons with earpieces; crafts-services people to provide the food that models never eat (the latest form of ostentatious backstage intake-avoidance is the cup of hot water, nursed as if it were sacramental wine), and all the assorted human flotsam that the industry seems to attract. By that one means models’ boyfriends, a breed apart.
People complain about fashion shows being late, but the wonder is that they happen at all. If Hollywood had to labor under fashion conditions (nonunion, by the way), it would spell the end of moviegoing as we know it. Yet somehow it all works. Ms. McGrath powered along unflappably. The same went for Orlando Pita and a posse of hairdressers charged Monday with concocting at warp speed the kind of leonine 1960s coiffures that, in the versions designed in that era by Ara Gallant and photographed by Avedon, required days of preparation and hairdressing tools like rats, falls and staple guns.
By the time they had been fully spackled and bewigged, the models were barely recognizable. And this is one of the more demented aspects of the business: how after going to the trouble of selecting prized specimens from the global gene pool, what designers like best is to render their beauty invisible.
Sometimes this takes the form of face-covering nylon headpieces that make the models’ heads look like sacks of blocks (Junya Watanabe) or funnel collars (Martin Margiela) that convey the impression that the wearer has fallen down a well. Sometimes it is just that big architectural eye.
“She’s like a homing pigeon, this one,” Ms. McGrath said Monday, referring to the Brazilian Raquel Zimmermann, who currently holds the No. 1 position on the model-rating Web site Models.com. The passion that some people bring to reading the stock market index, others devote to this site. And weird as it may seem, there is a certain utility in a Web locale dedicated to charting the fortunes of people who are beautiful occupationally. Fashion is a consensus business, after all, based to a large extent on wholly subjective markers of taste. Vogue isn’t called that for nothing.
“Raquel flies away,” Ms. McGrath said airily. “But she always comes back.”
By that Ms. McGrath was indicating that Ms. Zimmermann had gone missing from this season from the catwalks in Milan. The reason was simple: her United States visa was due for renewal. She might also have meant, though, that although Ms. Zimmermann’s good looks are incontrovertible, she is an industry anomaly.
A decade older, at 26, than most of the competition, she is proof that the immortal Heidi Klum-ism about being in fashion one day and out the next miscalculates the intervals of change. Ms. Zimmermann has been in the business since she was 16 and has had all the magazine covers and walked all the runways and shot all the campaigns and yet somehow manages to seem fresh again each season.
“Why has she lasted so long?” a Vogue editor remarked on Tuesday (speaking anonymously, for fear of going off message and being banished to a job at a knitting catalog). “Maybe it’s that combination of a Nordic head on a Brazilian body.
Fashion is a funny business, Ms. Zimmermann mused as the hairdresser Teddy Charles readied her mane at Dior. “People are always taking care of you, you have a car and driver 24 hours a day, they’re treating you like a star. You can lose yourself in the fantasy.”
For a middle-class girl from the south of Brazil who had planned on becoming an architect, she suggested, the trick to achieving longevity has been perspective. “Absolutely, you can enjoy all the shows and the creative people and the fabulousness,” she said. “But in the end, you have to know how to go back to normal.”
Published: February 27, 2008
PARIS
So much about fashion shows can seem astounding, in a practical sense. Each is like an unusually complex piece of 15-minute theater, and typically there are eight every day.
Estimated at random, there were dozens of performers at Dior, hundreds of costumes, a producer, a D.J., technical crews for music and lights and stage props (in this case, a waterfall staircase), wranglers responsible for the ornately hierarchical seating arrangement for (in this case) more than 1,200 people, who perched on ballroom chairs with tags affixed with a black satin ribbon, each one inscribed by a calligrapher with the occupant’s name.
There were individual crews for hair and makeup, each traveling with tons of equipment in custom-fitted vans; scores of security goons with earpieces; crafts-services people to provide the food that models never eat (the latest form of ostentatious backstage intake-avoidance is the cup of hot water, nursed as if it were sacramental wine), and all the assorted human flotsam that the industry seems to attract. By that one means models’ boyfriends, a breed apart.
People complain about fashion shows being late, but the wonder is that they happen at all. If Hollywood had to labor under fashion conditions (nonunion, by the way), it would spell the end of moviegoing as we know it. Yet somehow it all works. Ms. McGrath powered along unflappably. The same went for Orlando Pita and a posse of hairdressers charged Monday with concocting at warp speed the kind of leonine 1960s coiffures that, in the versions designed in that era by Ara Gallant and photographed by Avedon, required days of preparation and hairdressing tools like rats, falls and staple guns.
By the time they had been fully spackled and bewigged, the models were barely recognizable. And this is one of the more demented aspects of the business: how after going to the trouble of selecting prized specimens from the global gene pool, what designers like best is to render their beauty invisible.
Sometimes this takes the form of face-covering nylon headpieces that make the models’ heads look like sacks of blocks (Junya Watanabe) or funnel collars (Martin Margiela) that convey the impression that the wearer has fallen down a well. Sometimes it is just that big architectural eye.
“She’s like a homing pigeon, this one,” Ms. McGrath said Monday, referring to the Brazilian Raquel Zimmermann, who currently holds the No. 1 position on the model-rating Web site Models.com. The passion that some people bring to reading the stock market index, others devote to this site. And weird as it may seem, there is a certain utility in a Web locale dedicated to charting the fortunes of people who are beautiful occupationally. Fashion is a consensus business, after all, based to a large extent on wholly subjective markers of taste. Vogue isn’t called that for nothing.
“Raquel flies away,” Ms. McGrath said airily. “But she always comes back.”
By that Ms. McGrath was indicating that Ms. Zimmermann had gone missing from this season from the catwalks in Milan. The reason was simple: her United States visa was due for renewal. She might also have meant, though, that although Ms. Zimmermann’s good looks are incontrovertible, she is an industry anomaly.
A decade older, at 26, than most of the competition, she is proof that the immortal Heidi Klum-ism about being in fashion one day and out the next miscalculates the intervals of change. Ms. Zimmermann has been in the business since she was 16 and has had all the magazine covers and walked all the runways and shot all the campaigns and yet somehow manages to seem fresh again each season.
“Why has she lasted so long?” a Vogue editor remarked on Tuesday (speaking anonymously, for fear of going off message and being banished to a job at a knitting catalog). “Maybe it’s that combination of a Nordic head on a Brazilian body.
Fashion is a funny business, Ms. Zimmermann mused as the hairdresser Teddy Charles readied her mane at Dior. “People are always taking care of you, you have a car and driver 24 hours a day, they’re treating you like a star. You can lose yourself in the fantasy.”
For a middle-class girl from the south of Brazil who had planned on becoming an architect, she suggested, the trick to achieving longevity has been perspective. “Absolutely, you can enjoy all the shows and the creative people and the fabulousness,” she said. “But in the end, you have to know how to go back to normal.”
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