Everyone’s Here, Pass the Oscars

By GUY TREBAY
Published: February 8, 2008
“This is the best place in the house to be,” Angie Harmon said on Wednesday night as she made it through a boldface mob gathered in a tent outside the United Nations, edging her way toward the Champagne bar.

“Then this is the worst place in the house to be!” said Ms. Harmon, who turned on heel and dived back into the celebrity scrum.

The evening’s event, sponsored by Madonna and Gucci, raised $5.5 million for Madonna’s African charity (and, not coincidentally, helped flag the opening on Friday of Gucci’s new store on Fifth Avenue). It also elevated the celebrity quotient of New York Fashion Week by an order of magnitude.

Perhaps because the fate of the Oscars remains in question; perhaps because the Vanity Fair Oscars party has been canceled this year; and perhaps owing to the combined drawing power of the luxury goods label and the Material Girl, the event attracted so many of the people who fuel the tabloids that to wander through the heavily secured tents was like falling down a rabbit hole and into the pages of Star.

Here was Drew Barrymore jammed up against a banquette, wedged between Debra Messing and Vince Vaughn. Here was Rosie O’Donnell squeezing Tom Cruise in a bearhug. Here was Barry Diller talking to anyone who would listen about his new Frank Gehry building. (“It’s pretty. It looks like a lantern lit up at night.”) Here was Ms. Messing flicking on her high-wattage smile whenever she sensed a camera in the vicinity.

Here was Chris Rock liberating Mr. Cruise from Ms. O’Donnell’s death grip in order to pitch not a film script, but real estate. “Eddie Murphy’s house in Beverly Hills is for sale,” Mr. Rock told Mr. Cruise, who was wearing an evening jacket and patent leather shoes, accessorized with a diamond-studded watch and Katie Holmes. “It’s the perfect place for a guy like you,” Mr. Rock said, referring to Mr. Murphy’s 10-bedroom, 19,000-square-foot house in Beverly Park, the gated community for billionaires.

And here was Madonna, being piloted through the crowd by lugs with earpieces and the anatomical proportions of a Humvee. Tiny and fit, and accompanied by her daughter Lourdes, Madonna made stately progress into the large candlelit dining tent to join Salma Hayek and Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony and Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale and Djimon Hounsou and Kimora Lee Simmons and Alex Rodriguez and dozens of other beings from high atop pop culture’s Olympus, people whose names strung together at random read like a kind of found poetry.

There were dusty pink roses on the table and votive candles encased in smoky glass. There was Corton-Charlemagne Burgundy flowing in rivers. There were speeches by Madonna and the economist Jeffrey Sachs about the devastation wrought by AIDS in Malawi and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. And there was a charitable auction during which Christopher Burge, the auctioneer from Christie’s, fielded bids for packages including trips to the Milan fashion shows, a Giants practice or Château Latour in France.

Frantically waving a glow stick and acting on behalf of Mika Noguchi, a Japanese lingerie magnate, the burlesque star Dita Von Teese bid $600,000 for a chance to accompany Madonna on tour. And then, moments later, the singer and producer Timbaland appeared onstage to rouse the crowd with “The Way I Are,” a dance hit whose lyrics (“I ain’t got no money, I ain’t got no car to take you on a date”), as sung to a roomful of people with all the money in the world, seemed very rich indeed.

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Restraint That No One Will Find Stifling

By ERIC WILSON
Published: February 8, 2008
Come fall, if professional women are taking their fashion cues from “Lipstick Jungle,” they will be wearing gauzy princess dresses that emphasize their breasts. If they are watching the runways, however, they will be dressing like Hillary Clinton.


Fashion’s mood of enforced sobriety is understandable in the context of difficult political and economic times, but it has resulted in a lot of safe, and frankly mumsy, clothes being shown this week. But two collections, those of Maria Cornejo and Vera Wang, stood out because the designers were probably thinking about women who want to appear serious without feeling as if they are being trussed up like a turkey (or browsing in the mother-of-the-bride department).

Ms. Cornejo’s collection, which involved brighter colors and more strict tailoring than her audience is accustomed to seeing, brought to mind elements of power dressing from 1980s Donna Karan. A loose coat and a long-sleeve dress in red alpaca were cinched at the waist with a thin black belt and a wide obi, respectively. Origami dresses of loosely folded wool were tightened to the body with straps of fabric crisscrossing the chest. The shoes and fisherman’s boots were sensible and flat, something you should not expect to see in the “Sex and the City” movie.

Restraint is usually not an easy word for Ms. Wang to embrace without a martini first. But she has begun to see that simpler is better, given the clearheaded collection she showed Thursday. Dreamy colors, in shots of bright yellow tempered with mushroom gray, came from the Dutch Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen. And some of her smashing, swirling dresses, affixed with crumpled bits of chiffon, might have been based on Rembrandt’s hats.

There were nice surprises: dresses with sequins on the front had silk chiffon or pleated tulle on the back. But she could not resist piling on some inexplicable elements — one outfit had so many layers the model appeared to be sprouting a fox tail.

And then there were the necklaces, which looked like stripper tassels strung with a lanyard.

Some of the most subtle examples of the conservative look came from Phillip Lim, a designer whose collection is less expensive than most runway fare and quite often is more refined. Mr. Lim showed dresses and skirts in plain gray wool or denim that came down to the midcalf, a length not popular since the Eisenhower era, and he managed to make them look respectably chic. He cut a great pair of relaxed looking trousers (cropped and tapered at the ankle like a carrot). And to a dusty old silk chiffon bow-tie shirt — he even called it a librarian blouse — he added a handful of crystals that stood out on the runway like stars.


Derek Lam’s show felt as if it were set in a funeral home, with the walls and runway shrouded in black; and the models, some wearing lace blindfolds, were dressed for a party in Monte Carlo, where they would sneak upstairs to crack a safe with David Niven. I’m not saying it was a dark collection, but the word black appeared in Mr. Lam’s program notes 88 times — and there were only 44 looks.

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To Be Young Again, and in a Shrunken Suit

By ERIC WILSON
Published: February 4, 2008
All men are little boys when it comes to toggle coats. Grown-up men, even balding men, can sometimes be found in department stores fondling the horn buttons, looking at them the way they might a red sports car or Gisele Bündchen, as the outerwear antidote to a midlife crisis.

“This will make me look young and hot again,” such a man may be thinking, “like Ethan Hawke in ‘Dead Poets Society.’ ”

Last week Tim Hamilton, a rising star in American men’s wear, pulled out a green cashmere toggle coat from his fall collection, which he was photographing in a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was an example of what Mr. Hamilton, who parlayed a job selling clothes for Ralph Lauren into a design role and then started his own label, does well, which is to create weathered-looking, expensive versions of clothes you could have found in any J. Crew catalog two decades ago.

His racks were filled with plaid shirts, striped turtlenecks, a leather bomber jacket, a cashmere hoodie, twill pants, bow ties, little-boy jackets and a table full of mittens so precious they can be tucked into pockets at either end of a matching scarf, so you won’t forget them.

Judging by the collections shown in New York this weekend, there may be no stronger emotional current running through men’s fashion now than that offered by Mr. Hamilton: personal nostalgia, a longing for what men wore as boys. The shrunken proportion of suits, popularized by Thom Browne and now universally represented on the runways, seems to have marked the beginning of a deeper regression into the staples of a prep school or a military academy. Are men stylish only if they are playing make-believe?

By all appearances, men are more and more interested in fashion today, and that has encouraged a renaissance in design. The problem is that many of the new collections conformed to the kiddie aesthetic to the point of being patronizing, or infantilizing, with jackets uniformly cut to waiter’s length, just below the waist, as were those at Band of Outsiders. And as were those in the otherwise electrifying collections from Robert Geller, who once worked with Alexandre Plokhov on the Cloak label, now defunct, and from Patrik Ervell.

The first exits at Mr. Geller’s show were stiffly militaristic: a general’s coat with a black leather harness, followed by a monochromatic black blazer and tie worn with jeans. The last ones were copiously layered knits shown on disheveled-looking models, who were wrapped in cable-knit scarves and shawls like apocalyptic versions of Stevie Nicks. During the show, an evolution seemed to take place — from a slim and trim geeky silhouette to a tougher, pumped-up gothic monster.

The models who closed Mr. Ervell’s show, who still looked like little boys, wore parkas and hoodies made of gold foil, as if they had just completed a marathon. The suggestion, depending on your feelings about gold, was either of glittering nomads or of an Elvis comeback. Strange, then, to describe these clothes as restrained, but the cuts were simplified to the point that minimalism outweighed ostentation.

Steven Cox, one of the designers at Duckie Brown, said before his show that the likelihood of a recession had forced designers to rethink extravagances like beading and embroidery. “It’s as if we’ve put our hands around our throats,” he said. He seemed to be apologizing. But the collection, straightforward suits worn with too-short nylon zip jackets over them, turned out mostly all right — save for a few ideas that looked like mistakes, like elbow patches sewn on the front of the sleeves instead of the back, where the, uh, elbows are.

At an informal Band of Outsiders presentation, the designer, Scott Sternberg, showed more shrunken suits than anything else, in gray flannel or brown velvet and worn with rep ties or bow ties with tight vests. He added some plaid pants this season, and a furry trapper’s hat, which looked cute but didn’t exactly represent a seismic shift in fashion.

Likewise, the new label Shipley & Halmos, from Sam Shipley and Jeff Halmos, two former Trovata designers, offered more options for men who have recently mastered the Windsor knot, like a sharp leather bomber jacket with extra-wide ribbed cuffs.

What has separated Rag & Bone’s brand of dark and moody denim and urban tailored jackets from, say, Kenneth Cole, was at best a fine line — that is, until its show on Friday. The designers, David Neville and Marcus Wainwright, seem to have understood that their moment would not be a long one if they didn’t stand for something besides Ms. Bündchen, in the front row, looking good in their pants. How hard is that?

This collection, playing off military dress uniforms remade in immoderate fabrics, proved that Mr. Neville and Mr. Wainwright have the ability to make some seriously daffy ideas in men’s wear look commercially sane. Several models wore rings or necklaces made of what appeared to be gold-plated barbed wire, and their formal suits, in royal blue or gray (the Civil War in cashmere?) were shown with pants that were described as jodhpurs. This was evidently a reference to a slight elongation of the fly and a stylist’s trick of cinching the legs around the models’ ankles with bands of fabric — fairly safe stuff, even for the Citadel.

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The Vanishing Point

By GUY TREBAY
Published: February 7, 2008
CREDIT Hedi Slimane or blame him. The type of men Mr. Slimane promoted when he first came aboard at Dior Homme some years back (he has since left) were thin to the point of resembling stick figures; the clothes he designed were correspondingly lean. The effects of his designs on the men’s wear industry were radical and surprisingly persuasive. Within a couple of seasons, the sleekness of Dior Homme suits made everyone else’s designs look boxy and passé, and so designers everywhere started reducing their silhouettes.

Then a funny thing happened. The models were also downsized. Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt.

Nowhere was this more clear than at the recent men’s wear shows in Milan and Paris, where even those inured to the new look were flabbergasted at the sheer quantity of guys who looked chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished. Not altogether surprisingly, the trend has followed the fashion pack back to New York

Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? Little over a year ago, in Spain, designers were commanded to choose models based on a healthy body mass index; physicians were installed at Italian casting calls; Diane von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, called a conference to ventilate the issue of unhealthy body imagery and eating disorders among models.

The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.

“Skinny, skinny, skinny,” said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. “Everybody’s shrinking themselves.”

This was abundantly clear in the castings of models for New York shows by Duckie Brown, Thom Browne, Patrik Ervell, Robert Geller and Marc by Marc Jacobs, where models like Stas Svetlichnyy of Russia typified the new norm. Mr. Svetlichnyy’s top weight, he said last week, is about 145 pounds. He is 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist.

“Designers like the skinny guy,” he said backstage last Friday at the Duckie Brown show. “It looks good in the clothes and that’s the main thing. That’s just the way it is now.”

Even in Milan last month at shows like Dolce & Gabbana and Dsquared, where the castings traditionally ran to beefcake types, the models were leaner and less muscled, more light-bodied. Just as tellingly, Dolce & Gabbana’s look-book for spring 2008 (a catalog of the complete collection) featured not the male models the label has traditionally favored — industry stars like Chad White and Tyson Ballou, who have movie star looks and porn star physiques — but men who look as if they have never seen the inside of a gym.

“The look is different from when I started in the business eight years ago,” Mr. Ballou said last week during a photo shoot at the Milk Studios in lower Manhattan. In many of the model castings, which tend to be dominated by a handful of people, the body style that now dominates is the one Charles Atlas made a career out of trying to improve.

“The first thing I did when I moved to New York was immediately start going to the gym,” the designer John Bartlett said. That was in the long-ago 1980s. But the idea of bulking up now seems retro when musicians and taste arbiters like Devendra Banhart boast of having starved themselves in order to look good in clothes.

“The eye has changed,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Clothes now are tighter and tighter. Guys are younger and younger. Everyone is influenced by what Europe shows.”

What Europe (which is to say influential designers like Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at Jil Sander) shows are men as tall as Tom Brady but who wear a size 38 suit.

“There are designers that lead the way,” said James Scully, a seasoned casting agent best known for the numerous modeling discoveries he made when he worked at Gucci under Tom Ford. “Everyone looks to Miuccia Prada for the standard the way they used to look at Hedi Slimane. Once the Hedi Slimanization got started, all anyone wanted to cast was the scrawny kid who looked like he got sand kicked in his face. The big, great looking models just stopped going to Europe. They knew they’d never get cast.”

For starters, they knew that they would never fit into designers’ samples. “When I started out in the magazine business in 1994, the sample size was an Italian 50,” said Long Nguyen of Flaunt magazine, referring to a size equivalent to a snug 40-regular.

“That was an appropriate size for a normal 6-foot male,” Mr. Nguyen said. Yet just six years later — coincidentally at about the time Mr. Slimane left his job as the men’s wear designer at YSL for Dior Homme — the typical sample size had dwindled to 48. Now it is 46.
“At that point you might as well save money and just go over to the boy’s department,” Mr. Nguyen said from his seat in the front row of the Benjamin Cho show, which was jammed as usual with a selection of reedy boys in Buffalo plaid jackets and stovepipe jeans, the same types that fill Brooklyn clubs like Sugarland. “I’m not really sure if designers are making clothes smaller or if people are smaller now,” Mr Nguyen said.

According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans are taller and much heavier today than 40 years ago. The report, released in 2002, showed that the average height of adult American men has increased to 5-9 ½ in 2002 from just over 5-8 in 1960. The average weight of the same adult man had risen dramatically, to 191 pounds from 166.3.

Nowadays a model that weighed in at 191 pounds, no matter how handsome, would be turned away from most agencies or else sent to a fat farm.

Far from inspiring a spate of industry breast-beating, as occurred after the international news media got hold of the deaths of two young female models who died from eating disorders, the trend favoring very skinny male models has been accepted as a matter or course.

“I personally think that it’s the consumer that’s doing this, and fashion is just responding,” said Kelly Cutrone, the founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion branding and production company. “No one wants a beautiful women or a beautiful man anymore.”

In terms of image, the current preference is for beauty that is not fully evolved. “People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult,” Ms. Cutrone said.

George Brown, a booking agent at Red Model Management, said: “When I get that random phone call from a boy who says, ‘I’m 6-foot-1 and I’m calling from Kansas,’ I immediately ask, ‘What do you weigh?’ If they say 188 or 190, I know we can’t use him. Our guys are 155 pounds at that height.”

Their waists, like that of Mr. Svetlichnyy, measure 28 or 30 inches. They have, ideally, long necks, pencil thighs, narrow shoulders and chests no more than 35.5 inches in circumference, Mr. Brown said. “It’s client driven,” he added. “That’s just the size that blue-chip designers and high-end editorials want.”

For Patrik Ervell’s show on Saturday, the casting brief called for new faces and men whose bodies were suited to a scarecrow silhouette. “We had to measure their thighs,” Mr. Brown said.

For models like Demián Tkach, a 26-year-old Argentine who was recently discovered by the photographer Bruce Weber, the tightening tape measure may cut off a career.

Mr. Tkach said that when he came here from Mexico, where he had been working: “My agency asked me to lose some muscle. I lost a little bit to help them, because I understand the designers are not looking for a male image anymore. They’re looking for some kind of androgyne.”

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