Hard at Work, the Model Whisperer

By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: February 10, 2008

DURING Fashion Week, any given table at any trendy restaurant might yield characters worthy of a novel about the ephemeral value of youth and beauty. It would be airplane reading, quickly adapted for cable television. “I’ll Never Be Alone,” it might be called.

Open with a casual glance at the gray-haired man at a sidewalk table at Downtown Cipriani, who appears to be wearing a rodent pelt as an ascot as he quaffs white wine and nuzzles a raven-haired model with a British accent.

Let your eye flit a few blocks uptown to a booth against the south wall of the Coffee Shop on Union Square, where a dark-haired man in a baseball cap and sunglasses is eating herbed French fries desultorily with a fork, while Samantha, a next-to-the-last-round loser from the eighth “America’s Next Top Model,” snuggles against him.


Finally, track a few tables over to the banquette near the hostess station. Zoom in on Oscar Batori, who has just turned 21.

He is 6-foot-3, lean and English, with a faintly menacing sharpness to his face, which bears a resemblance to that of a young Mick Jagger.

Two years ago, Mr. Batori was working as a male model earning about $75 a day, sharing an apartment with others and eating ramen noodles for dinner. Two years from now, who knows where he will be. But last week, he was in his element: 21 and good-looking, during a week when youth and beauty hold full value.

“They weren’t lying when they said the streets are paved with gold,” Mr. Batori said. “If you’re observant here, the sky’s the limit.” A new nightclub in the meatpacking district named Kiss & Fly had just hired Mr. Batori and given him the title “image director.” The club plans to send him to Milan, Paris and London during their Fashion Weeks, and to the Cannes Film Festival.

“It’s to create relationships with agents, designers, model agencies and with the celebs,” said an owner of the club, Remi Laba. “He could be our connection between the A-list and our venue. Oscar is our product. He’s a well-spoken person. He’s very bright.”

At the Coffee Shop, Mr. Batori was discussing with Annette Amundsen, a marketer for Karlsson’s Gold Vodka, a party he was planning for a modeling agency at Kiss & Fly. Ms. Amundsen agreed to provide 10 cases of vodka.

Mr. Batori wore Yohji Yamamoto sneakers, Paul Smith striped socks, brown corduroy pants and a gray cashmere hoodie from Marc Jacobs underneath a navy blue Gucci overcoat, which cost $1,500, he said.

Although he attended the prestigious City of London School for Boys on an academic scholarship, he said: “When it was time to apply for college, I was going out every night until 5 or 6 in the morning to Movida, Aura, Boujis. That was three or four years ago. They’re all over now.”

When you are 21, three years ago is a long time.

Instead of college, he was recruited to be a model. He walked in a Prada show in Milan and for Yves Saint Laurent in Paris.

“It’s boring,” he said of modeling, sipping a double espresso. “You can’t make any money if you’re a guy.”

Money did start flowing once a friend fixed him up with a job as a nightclub promoter at Retox in Chelsea. His job was to bring models to the club, where they in turn would attract big-spending guys. Retox paid Mr. Batori $150 a night.

“Get a new hat, meet a few people, move up in the world,” Mr. Batori said.

He likes the people he meets in clubs. “You might not meet left-wings, liberals and bookworms,” he said. “But then again, I’m not into bookworms.”

Though educated in England, Mr. Batori has an American passport because, he said, his father was a Hungarian refugee who escaped to the United States. Mr. Batori said his father was an alcoholic, that his parents split when he was 11 and that his father died two years ago.

What of, exactly?

“I don’t really know,” he said, stiffening his bottom lip. “Don’t really care.”

Mr. Batori is angry about his father, said his mother, Rebecca Collings, speaking from London. “Oscar doesn’t know how like him he is,” she said. “He was a totally brilliant guy who lost it.”

At the Coffee Shop, Mr. Batori found fault with the slightly wilted lettuce on his burger. “That’s typical of American agricultural practice,” he said. He asked the waitress for extra ketchup. Then he looked at the fellow seated with Samantha, who had not removed his iPod earbuds, his hat or his sunglasses as he ate.

The guy was the biggest loser in the world, Mr. Batori said.

These days Mr. Batori lives in Chelsea with a model named Alana Zimmer, a Christy Turlington lookalike whom he met shopping at an H & M on Fifth Avenue. Ms. Zimmer, 21, does not like to go to clubs, to drink or to be interviewed, he said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Batori went without her to Tenjune, another meatpacking district club. It turned out that many of the New York Giants, including Eli Manning, Plaxico Burress and Michael Strahan, showed up to celebrate after their parade along the Canyon of Heroes. The mayor had given them the key to the city and they were using it.

Despite walking the catwalks last week for Calvin Klein, Proenza Schouler and others, Ms. Zimmer found time Wednesday morning to give Mr. Batori a few birthday presents: a cookbook, the third and fourth seasons of “Family Guy” and a $1,000 gift certificate to Prada.

He spent it fast. That night at Kiss & Fly, before the modeling agency party he was giving, he was wearing a new Prada sports jacket.

Mr. Laba, the club owner, said Mr. Batori had impressed him the night Kiss & Fly opened in December. “He brought us Andy Roddick and a lot of the more respected, over-21 models,” Mr. Laba said. “And so, after we discussed it, we offered him a position, which was 10 days ago.”

Before the party began, Mr. Batori was sitting at a round table in the club’s restaurant, Bagatelle, tearing into a rare filet mignon, two martinis and a cosmopolitan. Mr. Laba approached and spoke about a model wrangler he had ejected from the club the previous night, because he was getting too hands-on with one of the girls.

Mr. Laba pays the wrangler $700 a night, he said, to bring in about 8 to 10 exceptionally attractive women. “He’s good except when he drinks,” Mr. Laba said. “He starts throwing things, breaking glasses.”

After he walked away, Mr. Batori said of the fellow promoter, whom he knows: “He’s like 29. Look at him, small time. Came to New York 10 years ago, still small time. Dragging models around.

“And look at me, a couple years ago living in a model apartment eating ramen for dinner.” He used his steak knife to smear mashed potatoes onto a slice of filet before dragging it through the sauce on his plate and moving it into his mouth. “Look at me now.”

On the back of his chair hung the Prada coat. To the touch, the fine wool was as soft as the underbelly of a lamb.

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At Klein and Lauren, No Looking Back

By CATHY HORYN
Published: February 9, 2008

You have to be new in fashion, or you’re on the side. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that. There may be a recession coming, and you would think that designers would want to create new and desirable looks, but that has not been the story of the fall 2008 collections, which ended on Friday night with Marc Jacobs. Old has been the story.

Two exceptions are Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, and it’s not because they’re big names or anything like that. On Friday morning, dressed in faded jeans, Mr. Lauren offered cool, polished sportswear, drawing on Adirondack lodge style — or what must be a very chic log cabin.

There were lean suits and dresses in charcoal cashmere, tailor-made for people looking for quality and a contemporary fit. The collection was also loaded with classics like a long swing skirt in black jersey and elegant shoes and boots in suede and crocodile. This has been a merciless season of ugly shoes.

But Mr. Lauren was also fantastical. It was as if the lumberjack plaids, the feathered sequined skirts, a red Mounties jacket and the organza plaid gowns were part of a private house party, in which the guests only slightly bothered to put on evening clothes and instead made use of anything available — a blanket, a pheasant’s tail.

At Calvin Klein, Francisco Costa delivered a superb collection of minimalist coats and dresses in black cashmere and boiled wool that often had contrasting shiny elements in silk. More than anything else, the clothes — the way they appeared to be molded with random volumes — were interesting to look at. You couldn’t say that about many collections this week.

Among the strong looks were sleeveless dresses with overlapping cuts of wool in the front or insets of crinkled chiffon, a gray pencil skirt with a silk and wool twill bustier, and a supersimple jacket — based on a riding coat — that was seemingly reduced to a shadow.

The tailoring, fedoras and bright fox vests at Bill Blass on Thursday looked suspiciously Saint Laurent. Well, Mr. Blass never bothered to deny that he sometimes knocked off Saint Laurent, but did his successor Peter Som have to remark on this in his first collection for the label? Shouldn’t he have been looking harder at the things that made Mr. Blass tick?

The silent collaborations between designers — between, say, Balenciaga and Oscar de la Renta — would make interesting ground for a young designer to explore. But if a fashion house is a kind of school, you have to cover the basics before you can tackle the complex stuff, and Mr. Som hasn’t really dealt with or even understood the basics at the school of Blass.

Mr. Blass was much less interesting as a designer than he was as a man, but the distinction was at the heart of his designs. He was a friend to the many women in his life, but no one was more afraid than him of being possessed. Boundaries, then, mattered. He was extremely masculine; it affected everything he did, the way he stood or talked.

Although Mr. Som used men’s wear fabrics for suits and soft skirts, this masculinity was pro forma. And many of the other styles — the beaded floral dresses with tight waists and bell-shape skirts, the kimono-sleeve coats, the French platform shoes — looked fussy or indifferent or just plain old. Mr. Som could have made things easier for himself if he had really focused on two Blass standards: the suit and the little black dress. Creating a snooty suit and a sexy little dress for 2008 would have been a mean challenge.

How do you go from Shakers to Bo Peep? Zac Posen’s collection of pleated dresses and coats embroidered with satin loop rings was indeed a switcheroo. Last season he was extolling the virtues of Americana. On Thursday, it looked as if the entire contents of a French courtesan’s wardrobe had spilled onto the runway, along with the tufted upholstery.

Against a backdrop of gilt chairs, Mr. Posen sent out a sequined tuxedo vest, French maids’ blouses, and minidresses and suits made in a glistening ivory cloqué that resembled bubble wrap. All this was shown with black tights, perilous platforms and little pompoms planted on the models’ lacquered heads.

Mr. Posen obviously worked hard on this collection, but the collage methods put him very close to Marc Jacobs, as did the amount of lingerie, and it made the concept seem not merely unclear but also foreign to him.

Isaac Mizrahi, who was recently appointed the creative director of Liz Claiborne, showed his couture collection the other day. It’s really a world apart: long dresses scattered with silk leaves and autumn fruits, stiff bell-shape skirts with plain scoop-neck tops, new takes on Fair Isle sweaters, and dramatic evening dresses in sturdy tweeds. The wit and sense of craft are sometimes sacrificed to a strange dollhouse formality, but Mr. Mizrahi’s ability to blend sportswear and glamour (a glitter parka, a terrific fur coat made from rag strips of fur) is always original.

The pair of crimson dresses at the start of Keren Craig’s and Georgina Chapman’s presentation for Marchesa was in such a deep and precise shade of red that it could have been mixed by a lipstick chemist. Just as dreamy was a gown in layers of green tulle embroidered with flowers and feathers. It was like the sugary glaze of a petit four.

The designers offer the full-on effects, like a strapless white tulle dress with a filigree of black embroidery and a dense hem of white feathers. But this season the drapery and the colors stand out, particularly a one-shoulder gown in Prussian blue chiffon and a short dress in amethyst silk that looks as if the organza folds were whipped. Evening wear seems such a stodgy, humorless category, but Ms. Chapman and Ms. Craig bring a kind of narrative to their collections. It’s gorgeous, but it’s not the same old fairy tale.

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