The Nearest Faraway Place

Ask the fashion-ignorant layperson what he or she knows of Jean Paul Gaultier and the response will place the respondent in one of two groups: those who remember Madonna's Blond Ambition cone bra and those who wear the Gaultier fragrances. In the 21st century, the popularity of the scents has eclipsed the popularity of the singer.

Both singer and designer appear to have outgrown their most highly controversial inclinations, even if the straight male population is still affronted by the Gaultier men's cosmetic line that includes the semantically dodged Sneaky Kiss lip "balm."

The theme of Gaultier's Spring 2008 couture show was mermaids and the men they cause to wreck upon the rocks (or involuntarily asphyxiate). Pretty, some said, ergo for Gaultier innocuous. The runway hosted a briny, mythological kingdom with knife-cut shoulders on whippet-thin suits. And if not tails of cod and scales of scrod, then those multicolored yet anonymous Mediterranean fish that are tossed heads and all into a proper Marseilles bouillabaise.

Mermaids and sailors are hardly the stuff of contention. The controversy proceeding Gaultier's separate explorations of Hasidic apparel and acceptable modeling weight makes the sea creatures almost Disneyesque by comparison.

As a result, there wasn't all that much to talk about. In a season that saw the retirement of Valentino and the brute force of Chanel, Gaultier simply presented a mix of concepts and solutions. One might not wear, as Coco Rocha did, the Thessalonika bra, but one could easily solve any number of fashion quandaries with the magnolia-white suit walked by Chanel Iman.

Emotionally, though, the collection was true to Gaultier's past performances. This past includes the questionable payoth of the Hasidic collection and everything else Gaultier has done that has raised eyebrows and hackles.

Theme and simile aside, Gaultier once again took the observer to the nearest faraway place. This is quite a different destination than that of Galliano, whose place for women this season was not nearby at all.

Gaultier's nearest faraway places--wherever they may be--are ones that are familiar to recognition but foreign to experience. We may see the Hasidim on the streets of Borough Park, we may wonder why they do not manicure their sideburns, but we do not and cannot have their experience unless we are one of them.

If we are not mermaids, we cannot flip our tails in the Aegean.

An interesting observation about fashion is that if it is to repeat itself, it must have had some token in the first instance. The seventies are back, or hadn't you heard? Halston isn't dead, he is alive and well and living at Net-A-Porter. The observation is especially true of Lacroix, Valentino, Armani, and the Blond Ambition bra. Yet, tokenless (non-repeatable) haute couture is generally the haute couture that creates stir and excitement. As the fashion generally held to be closest to art, it also is the one to provoke artful polemic. The pieces at the center of the fashion versus art debate are inevitably those that are barely adaptable to normal usage.

There wasn't much room for adaptability in the referential cone bra, but there was in the gold-scaled skirt that accompanied it down the runway. Alone, the skirt was a model of reduction and could easily be seen as a seasonal essential.

"Beauty," Michelangelo said, "is the purgation of superfluities." The meaning of this statement is clear when it is applied to the more streamlined and less vocal designers. We dispense with frill, flounce, and fins and leave only what is essential to highlight the body and what makes the body function as a basic shape. It is the shape of the body that is beautiful, not the clothing. Shoes and ambition were problematic in several instances this season. Lagerfeld's timid models and Galliano's overwhelmed ones were both stricken by superfluity. Gaultier's were not.

If we set aside the "F" word (functionality) and specify superfluity only as that which does not detract and that which does enhance, then the cone bra gets a pass as well.

We might also utter the "F" word in all its emphatic glory and praise Gaultier for giving us such wearable imagination. In his mid-fifties, Gaultier is less punkish enfant terrible than he is Peck's Bad Boy, a capricious scamp who invites you on a seaside holiday and delivers you home with a wink.

Images: Style.com

The Pleasure of Answering One's Critics

In an 1884 essay published in the Pall Mall Gazette, Oscar Wilde dashed off a quick 200 words to address the limitations inherent in wearing high-heeled shoes. Platforms, he suggested, were the answer (or clogs, in the vernacular of the day).

Wilde's proposition was anthithetical to fashion. High heels were needed to keep one's skirts from dragging in the street, but they also created a difficulty with gait that Wilde claimed "produce(d) that lack of grace which always follows want of freedom."

The essay was written as a response to an ongoing debate about dress reform, a topic about which Wilde held strong opinions. Writing it gave him "...the pleasure of answering one's critics."

The Armani Privé Spring 2008 Couture Collection was likewise antithetical to fashion, or antithetical to the definition of fashion by amateur fashion critics. Yet in a suburban shopping center, in vast tracts of Australia, on Hollywood's red carpet and at other poles of inaccessibility, Armani's collection is de facto fashion. And why not? An Armani piece is superbly rendered and masterfully cut. One cannot go too far astray wearing Armani; it is one of those international symbols of sleek good taste that readily answer the ever-fraught question of what to wear. In most circles, an Armani garment lifts said question above the comically rhetorical.

The amateur critic, whose avocation it is to be critical and whose opinions are nonetheless not diminished by increasingly impassioned critique, regards Armani as a case of form following function. "Form" in this case is defined as that which advances knowledge and experience. For the purposes of this essay we will accept that "function" refers to the designer's past as a tailleur and his ability to construct an unimpeachably exquisite suit. Tailors make suits. There is no disagreement in that simple and unprovocative statement. Tailoring is a time-honored tradition that requires the eye of the hawk and the steady hand of a surgeon.

Ah, says the critic, but does Armani make haute couture? And if we define fashion in the terms of haute couture alone, then Armani must be anti-fashion. If he is not anti-fashion, then where is his evolutionary bridge? His designs have eclipsed mere uniformity and have almost become uniforms.

Among the lesser charges are: a lack of whimsy, a lack of raw emotion, a lack of risk. Haute couture is about risk and showmanship, branding, and increasing brand awareness. How and where this translates into sales is a mysterious science best left to accountants. Without risk it veers perilously close to prêt-à-porter and a waste of a Parisian afternoon better spent at Ladurée chomping macarons à la pistache.

As critics, we expect an artistic response to what we might term profitable fashion, and in this light Armani has failed to deliver. All that pearl and dove gray that could be tried on and worn out without alteration or concession. A beautifully rippled Ondine-like gown no doubt destined for a ceremony that may or may not take place. Fifty-two looks and not a futuristic kimono or a sustainable flounce among them.

We are an odd species. Repetition is only permissible in romance novels, not runway shows. Not for us the comfort of the sartorially familiar. We place immense token on imagination and transcendence. We must be seen to keep apace of the times, and yet these are strange and disorienting times. Merely looking good is not the best revenge. There must be more or the artistic dialogue is defeated. It is nearly incumbent upon a creator to step away from a signature and to attempt the uncharacteristic. Even the flop may be redeemed by brinksmanship.

There are limits, naturally: The Galliano Fall 2008 men's collection is said in some circles to have nudged them, even if Galliano is no longer shitting dandy. Armani's gentle mutations of previously exercised forms were evidently pleasurable only to the professional arbiter, whose job it is to write semi-lyrically and to ensure all-important and ongoing advertising revenue.

Somehow, we have determined that haute couture must not be primarily emblematic of lifestyle or social class. This observation splits the broader definition of "fashion" into two realities. If haute couture cannot answer or relieve the monotony of saleable fashion, then it must challenge or at the very least widen our knowledge and provide rewarding emotional content and grist for the mill of dissection.

If we confine ourselves to that narrower logic, then Armani gives us nothing to think about and nothing to revisit for inspiration. Armani does not perform artistic gymnastics or other feats of athletic prowess, like triple axels. Still worse, he does not pause to answer his critics. The stale maxim "Il faut souffrir pour être belle" is not germane to his production. Not only does one not suffer an Armani, the designer himself does not suffer the anomie that permeates the work of certain other haute couture houses. He isn't quite in step with the modern need for responsibility either--not as respects smudging the unsightly lines of class or supporting the burgeoning eco movement.

Any couture designer's output is an extension of and commentary on himself, but in the haute couture it is expected to reflect upon his world more purely than hybrid ready-to-wear/haute couture collections. Outside of haute couture, how this world is translated for the end-user is of paramount importance.

If we see ourselves as a creatively progressive and dynamically au fait species (and really, who would not want to be thought of in those terms?) Armani's collections fail to gibe. We also must factor in the truth that what we think of ourselve we also must think of our surroundings.

When we acknowledge that we must move forward or stagnate, we then must ask how we cognitively process what we see. How do we outline our visions? A slightly modified, yet still identifiable suit is processed as not being updated enough or worse, is seen as a ho-hum retread. Or perhaps it's dismissed as tailoring instead of fashion, as craft instead of couture. We see the negative and the seam, not the positive and the chic.

Lagerfeld sidesteps this complaint because a Chanel cardigan jacket is a historical and affectionate emblem. The flawlessly cut suit, however, is just a flawlessly cut suit. Any tailor worth his weight in gold thread should be able to make one.

Images: Style.com

Hollywood Diaries: Part Two

16) What was considered a fashion faux pas for you and your friends? (Where I grew up, it was anything from Sears! NB: Outfit to right was definitely not from the Sears catalogue!)

Polyester pant suits of the day come to mind, and I suppose blending in with the crowd.

17) Describe a night out at the clubs...where are you going, what are you wearing...what are the groupies wearing...is there anyone who is a fashion star of the scene, whose wardrobe you admire?

A typical night out was first to the Whisky A Go-Go to check out the bands performing and to see who was in the club. Depending on that I would either stay and dance or talk to people I knew. Then I would walk up the street to the Rainbow and see who was there. And from there I would either go back to the Whisky and dance or stay at the Rainbow. Usually I went back and forth to the two places. It could be an amazing night out, or very quiet, depending on what band was in town.

I am wearing anything from a long evening gown which I did like in those days or ripped jeans tucked into boots. The girls are dressed in vintage clothes, a lot of satin and velvet in those days. Platform shoes are in as are hot pants (short- shorts) and lots of glitter. The fashion stars are the ones who carry their fashion well.

My friend Tyla was always one I admired. She mostly wore vintage clothes and feathers in her hair. She could pull it off and look exotic and different from every girl in the place. She had a style unlike anyone I have ever seen.

18) You hung out a lot at the Riot House. Describe a typical afternoon there--who is there, how are they dressed, what do you use to catch the attention of a musician?

An afternoon at the Hyatt House usually started in the coffee shop. In the early days, before everyone in the city knew about it, there would be very few people about. We would order tea and perhaps lunch or dinner and sit and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I'm not so sure I relied on fashion to get noticed, but rather a witty line or something as a musician would walk past. Then if all went well I would be invited up to a room and party. That could lead to many different things...sex, drugs...rock and roll. At one time, when the word got around, there would be a long line waiting to get into the coffee shop, mid-day or in the evening. There was every fashion style imaginable from space thing like David Bowie was doing, to tie- dyed shirts and patched jeans, back then style was very personal.

19) People have an impression of the groupie scene as being very exotic, very sophisticated, very glamorous; come to find out it was peopled by teenagers. What was the average age of a girl on the scene? How competitive was it?

The girls were from 14 to mid-20s. It was not that competitive during my years there. I think the waitresses at the Rainbow and Whisky were the competition for me. It was a small world and easy to meet whomever you wanted. I never had to compete with anyone to meet the people that interested me; if it didn't happen it was not meant to be. That has always been my attitude. I never got into those cat fights over the guys.

20) You don't appear to have worn much makeup; was this a cultural thing or a personal thing? I recall makeup not being tremendously popular in that era before disco.

I don't like to wear much makeup. There was a cultural thing about it, natural was the way to go. I just don't feel good with a bunch of stuff on my face and hair. I also grew up with parents who were both in the modeling and fashion industry. I sort of rebelled against makeup and all the glamour stuff my parents were so into.

21) I have to ask: What were you wearing in that famous Led Zep pic? You're sitting down and we can't tell. There's a story behind that pic, isn't there?

He he, yes there is more to that outfit. I had on a really great satin and tapestry cowboy type shirt that I bought at Holly's Harp, a great store on Sunset, and a pair of Landlubber jeans. Landlubbers were about the most popular brand of jeans at that time, nice hip-hugger bellbottoms. And, I was wearing a whip as a belt. I guess that is an accessory that will get you noticed and it did. Later that evening I had a fun conversation with Jimmy Page and Roy Harper about my belt...you'd have to read Hollywood Diaries to find out about that...lol. I put the whip on as an accessory in one of my silly moments.

22) You've just released Hollywood Diaries, your memoir. It's your actual diary from the era. We hear your voice as you recorded it over 30 years ago. It's a fascinating self-archaeology. There is storytelling in its most elemental form, without intellectualism or hindsight. What do you think of the girl who wrote the diary compared with the woman you are today at age 51?

I admire the girl I was. I think she lived true to her dreams and when things didn't work out she kept on going and creating new dreams. She was a good friend to people and that has resulted in the gift of lifelong friends. I think I am pretty much the same person today in many ways. I don't take as many risks as I once did, my responsibilities are greater. I miss that about being young, there was much more freedom to pursue your whims. I don't think life's disappointments have made me bitter as I see sometimes in people who encountered rough times. Life is short, so go for it, has always been my motto.

23) Using the actual diary makes the memoir extremely personal. Did you ever consider writing it in narrative instead in order to maintain separation? It seems to me that using a narrative form might have resulted in some abbreviation of expression. Also, it would have created a distance between you and the reader that the diary format doesn't have. Central to the diary is the sense of discovery; there's a real-time engagement.

I wrote Hollywood Diaries in a couple different formats initially. My first draft was a fictional story that incorporated my experiences. I got fed up with that, it became too complicated to tell my story. Then one day it came to me and I decided on the diary format. The Internet was still rather young and I decided to post an entry every two weeks on my Web site. I gave myself two weeks to get a new entry together, so it was like posting it as it happened in a way. It also kept me on a schedule. I built up a following of people waiting for the next entry. I decided to keep much of what I put on the Internet as is into the book.

24) Did you ever want to go back and revise anything, perhaps shade it a bit differently? Did you ever feel that the memoir was too personal? As it stands, it is almost painfully truthful.

In real life there are a few things I would have liked to do differently. As for the book, there was a lot I edited out, mostly because I didn't want to infringe on other people's personal life. It is very personal and sometimes raw, but I think we need that in our society. Everything is becoming faker and faker. I don't mind being honest about my life. I cannot be any other way. It can be risky, there are a few people out there who like to use those things against you. I guess that is a good thing about being older is not caring as much what people think and being wiser about dealing with those who do try to use your past against you. I also intended this to be a documentary of those times so I wanted it to be real and not too glossed over.

25) Did you ever want to play with the structure of the book, rather than telling it in linear
form? Or perhaps with some detachment rather than from the extreme inside?

I did try several different forms. I may resurrect the original fictional story at some point. One thing I learned about me as a writer, is the process of finding your voice. I think once you find it, words and thoughts begin to flow. When you are not in the right mind, the work does not seem authentic. For me, that process is sitting quietly and tuning into that frequency. If I am detached from the work there is risk of not putting my soul into it. If I only write one book, it had to contain my heart and soul. I think I need full immersion of self instead of detachment when I write.

26) Did you ever think, when you were involved in the scene, that what you were really doing was collecting information? How much did you see yourself as an observer? The book really is about your reflections, your intepretations of what you saw.

I saw myself both as observer and participant. I knew during those years that I would write about the days. People would always say to me, you should write a book, and I would reply, "I will!" I knew at the time that what we were doing was very special. I now see that it was more special than I thought. My only regret is that I didn't write down more and that I could not remember half of what did go down then. At the time it seemed that life was typical, now I realize how unique and historic it was.

27) What are you doing now? You live in Arizona, right? What interests you these days?

These days I am working promoting Hollywood Diaries and all the business attached to that. That alone keeps me busy. I also have a Web design and promotion business, 2 Chicks From Mars, but am taking a sabbatical while I work on Hollywood Diaries. I am also raising six grandchildren which is BIG. I live in a small town where I can hike in the forest and mountains, I love to garden and spend time outdoors, and I love to dance under the moonlight. I am deeply interested in what is happening to our world, politically, economically, and socially. I don't like the direction we are heading. I also, from time to time, teach the art of manifesting. I developed a six-part course to help people realize their dreams. The material is based on practical business skills and visualizing work.

28) How would you describe your style today?

Today I enjoy great trousers with a fun jacket and a sexy top, something vintage perhaps. I love a romantic Victorian era gothic look in long dresses. I wear a lot of velvets and brocades. I love rich fabrics. I still do not like to dress like everyone else. I like that fashion can vary according to our personalities. Sometimes I watch the show What Not to Wear especially when I went through "Oh God, I'm 50 now what should I be wearing?" but decided that I don't subscribe to the "uniform" look. I think there are some basic things like certain styles that look better on a figure than on others. But I still look at fashion as a statement of who one is and I guess I will always be a bit bohemian.

29) What did you learn from putting this book together?

I learned a lot about my ability to focus in on a project as big as this one, and to pull it off on my own. I had to pull every business skill I had learned in my life out to take each baby step to make it happen. I have also learned a bit about book publishing, that will help me next time around. There were many snags along the way, but all in all it came out great. Anything you do teaches you something. I'm still learning now that I am moving into the marketing phase.

30) If you were to return to the Hollywood scene today, how would you think it has changed? Would you even recognize it or would it be an unfamiliar pile of glitter?

I think many things have changed. Hollywood and the music biz in general have lost a lot of originality and because of that the excitement that was once abundant is not there. I think the boundaries that were stretched out in the 60s ran amuck somewhere when everyone tried to one up each other. That is one of the things that drove me out of LA. It was as if a door to decadence opened even wider and it just keeps expanding. On the other hand, I think LA is a very creative place. I have always thought that was more part to the land and it's beauty, you can't help but be inspired there. I miss the old days when it was less populated and really a place of beauty.

Thank you so much, Morgana, for this interview. It was a pleasure working with you.

Hollywood Diaries available here

Morgana on MySpace

Photo credits: Morgana Welch personal collection

Led Zeppelin photo from Hammer of the Gods by Stephen Davis

Morgana is center with Tyla (star on forehead) to her right. Also Sable Starr, Lori Maddox, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham, circa 1973.

Hollywood Diaries: The Morgana Welch Interview

Morgana Welch wasn't the girl staring dreamily at the David Cassidy poster on her bedroom wall. Nor was she the girl caught thumbing through Creem magazine in sophomore biology class. Instead, Morgana was the girl who thumbed to the Sunset Strip to hang out with rock's ruling class.

Morgana released her debut book, Hollywood Diaries, in October. Hollywood Diaries is Morgana's actual diary, told in her teenage voice. The story is more organic and genuine when told without the interference of mature reflection. As Morgana recounts her adventures on the Strip, the details emerge as immediate and as relevant as they were in 1973. So honest that one gets the goosebumps of snooping through very private property, Diaries hasn't been edited, erased, or censored.

In the days before the teenage orgy that is MySpace--and there were days before MySpace, kiddies--a diary was a sacred text, a communion between the writer and the soul. You didn't share your diary. You either burned it, read it when nostalgia trips replaced tripping on LSD, or in the case of Morgana, published it when you turned 50.

This is more than just a girl's account of playing catch with the baddest boys of English rock. A strong sense of place and time is fundamental to the story and provides valuable sociological insight into what was the middle period of the Strip's halcyon days.

Generation X didn't get to experience music the way the Boomer generation did. Before the Internet and file sharing, before Walkmans and iPods, there was AM radio. AM radio was a limited playing field that relied on Top 40 programming for its rock stations. The music business was smaller than it is today and the Top 40 was populated only by the biggest, most commercial acts. AM radio didn't play indie music; a band either had an enormous deal or it wasn't worth wasting the airwaves on. It wasn't until FM broadcasting moved away from classical music into prog rock in the mid-seventies that a listener got to hear more than the A side of a single. If you wanted more than that, you had to buy the album.

So limited in number were the bands that did get AM airplay that the release of a new album was a huge event. Disc jockeys would start talking up, say, Sticky Fingers months before its release, teasing the listener with the single and building up anticipation. An album's release was an epochal event followed by both European and American tours. The radio stations also did advance promo for the tours, which were titled with supreme braggadocio. The big touring bands (Led Zepplin, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd) could be counted on to sell out enormous arenas. The events were seen as as having tremendous cultural criticality, with local media coverage beginning as soon as the band's private 707 landed at the airport. The term "royalty" wasn't modified by "rock" out of overenthusiasm; you could cut the air with a diamond-dusted razor blade when any of the bands rolled up to the Continental Hyatt flanked by their police escort. As was common practice, the bands were on the lookout for a little female companionship after waggling their sock-stuffed crotches at a coliseum full of screaming fans. With superstars came supergroupies, and the LA scene had the most famous groupies in the world.

Morgana's story begins at Beverly Hills High, an atypical institution of learning in the most atypical city in America.

1) You were on the music scene in the early seventies, when you were still in high school. What drew you to the scene initially and what cultural impressions did you have at first glance? Of course you grew up in LA, but that Hollywood scene appeared to occupy a niche unto itself even within the greater LA conurbation.

The freedom of expression drew me to the music scene and to its culture. There was another universe on the Sunset Strip that was unlike anything I had ever seen. Since I was a kid I was attracted to the "counter culture." I always liked the beatniks, hippies, and the psychedelic culture. Some of it was like a living cartoon, full of color and costume-like clothes, hair and makeup. Hollywood is like an island of avant garde, I was highly attracted to that wide array of style and freedom.

2) Many people considered (and still consider) Hollywood to be a place of no culture, of no morals, a dysfunctional and artificial planet separated from the rest of America by what is perceived as self-indulgence and anti-intellectualism. Did you feel this at the time, or did you consider the rest of America to be out of step?

I didn't feel that way at all about Hollywood then. I still think it is full of culture, any culture you can imagine. I think the dysfunction is more apparent today than it was back then; we have pop psychology to thank for that. Everything is put into little boxes of dysfunction these days. I did feel, and it was true, that the rest of America, except maybe San Francisco and New York City, were years behind in trends back then.

3) The zeitgeist of that era and the music scene was one of reckless abandon; consider the bad-boy notoriety of Zeppelin and of someone like Keith Moon, for instance. Were these just boys being boys and immaturely enjoying the spoils of success or was there some deeper psychological aspect at play? (In other words, do you think the music of that era attracted a certain type of incautious personality? We can contrast this to today's business-like musician, who often seems to be oriented towards self-preservation.) What was it about the seventies that encouraged the type of excess you describe in your book?

I think drug experimentation had a lot to do with certain behaviors and that was a core aspect of the 60s "counter culture." The drug scene was a response to a narrow-minded view that was then prevalent in the world. I think we were looking for more meaning to life than the "American dream." There was a youth rebellion against all the established rules. It was a conflicting time where anti-materialism was in full swing in the younger generation and perhaps this clashed with fame and fortune. I don't think the awareness of drug abuse was as apparent as it became in the 80s. By that time many of us realized we had abused our bodies enough and stopped. The drugs were becoming more dangerous. We may have thought that we were invincible too, I know for a time I did.

The music business was not the same back then. An artist was honored for being unique and perhaps being a bit wild was a novelty. Being a business person was almost a dirty word. Things change. Now we can run our own businesses as technology empowers us in ways that were not available then.

4) What was the reward for negligence? One gets the sense of a lack of regard for consequence. Did you ever get the sense of a limit to recklessness or was it anything goes, even down in flames?

The culture, and people, was very different; things that may seem reckless now were not so much then. I consider hitchhiking very reckless for a young girl, but back then people wanted to help one another and hitching was something many people did. I guess some people were of the down-in-flames mentality. I don't think that is a product of that era though, I think that is human nature. Personally, I don't feel I lived a life that neglected to consider the consequence. For me it was not anything goes. I knew my limits yet stretched them at times. I did find myself in many situations I would not do today, but that could be part of growing up.

5) Did you feel a critical eye looking over your shoulder? I recall the country as being very Republican (what used to be called "uptight"), still trying to hold on to morals of the fifties. The generation gap from the sixties was still very much in evidence. Did you ever feel judged for your choice of lifestyle?

No, I never felt judged in Hollywood. The lifestyle was completely accepted...in Hollywood. I don't think the "Republican" influence really affected Hollywood. Things that happened there stayed in that little niche. But outside of Southern California, yes, I did notice that we were very different and we were severely judged. I also encountered that with my family; they thought I should be more traditional. If I were ever judged, I really didn't care, I thought the rest of the world was out of step.

6) When we look at pictures of the era, it seems there were a number of fashion influences on the scene--for instance it appears that a Hollywood-type glamour still extant in the sixties was corrupted by early-70s British glam influence and also by the Sunset Strip folk rock. What was your look and how did it evolve?

My influence in fashion was somewhere among all three styles. I love the Janis Joplin look and the glam look as done by Marc Bolan of T Rex. Fashion is a way of art for many of us, a personal expression. I don't think I really had a look. I never had a definitive style, more whimsical I suppose. If anything, I looked like the blonde beach girl, an image that used to bother me because it was so plain. I wanted to be more exotic.

7) Where did you shop? What stores were popular at the time? How creative were you with your personal style?

I shopped at some shops on the Strip - Holly's Harp, Columbine, The Garment District, Linoleum Experience, and then at places like Fred Segal, Judy's, Contempo, Pier One. And of course there were the thrift shops and a great swap meet that used to be on Santa Monica and San Vicente. The thrift stores were gold mines because not many people were into it and there was a plethora of vintage stuff. We used to go out with five dollars and come home with a couple bags of clothes at the thrift shops.

I have always been creative with my style and influenced by the late-eighteenth-century artists like Maxfield Parrish and Mucha, and probably a little Marlene Dietrich too. I loved her men's suit looks. A lot of times I dressed to be comfortable dancing. I liked to wear very short cut-off jeans that were embellished with tons of rhinestones and studs, perhaps a few patches. I mostly wore boots, I have a lust for boots. There was also the vintage me who loved the beaded dresses from the 20s and long satin gowns from the 30s and 40s. You could get them all the time at the swap meets then, but not any more! I would wear boots with those dresses and find vintage jewelry too. And there were the satin and velvet trousers, boas, and glittery tops. Being young and in the rock and roll world left the door wide open for expression. I still like that.

8) When dressing up to go out for the evening, what did you take into account (venue? event? band?)?

Dressing was gauged mostly by mood. I didn't usually try to blend in to a certain style. It was always more fun to use surprise as an element in fashion. I think I tried to dress differently or outrageously to attract attention. Sometimes you had to dress up or down depending on a venue and what party might be happening afterward.

9) I have to ask about Sable Starr and Lori Maddox, since for some they were the face of the LA groupie scene. Did you feel any fashion competition from them? Sable in particular dressed cheaply and flamboyantly, all legs and giant platforms. Yet you seemed more casual--did you use your wardrobe as a provocation?

I never felt any fashion competition from them. We were very different people, even though we hung out in the same scene.

I may have been more casual, sometimes, not all the time. Of course we used wardrobe as a way to entice, perhaps all of the time. Clothing is a great tool for that. A first impression happens in the first few seconds. There were many fashion trends that were great for provocation, such as see-through tops. I wore them frequently.

10) Did you ever experiment with different looks, trying on a different image?

A couple time I did experiment, especially with looking more like an average citizen, or with short hair, which I have always hated on me. I was never one though to venture out into totally new looks. I have always been comfortable in the same mode, perhaps refined a bit along the way. I think the 80s really stretched my appearance when I had purple spiked hair and dressed very punk, skulls and crossbones and ripped clothes type of thing. The 80s were a fun time in wild clothes like the 60s.

11) How would you describe the look of the bands you hung out with? Which musician would you say was the best dressed? Who was the vainest about his appearance? Who looked good no matter what debauchery had gone on the night before? Who would you say had no taste?

Long hair, beautiful. Many men wore female tops, I liked that edge. Men had much more fashion sense then I see today. They were more expressive through wardrobe and not afraid to wear frills. Some guys in bands had great vintage stuff, like jackets and shirts. There were a lot of great, one of a kind clothes in those days. I always loved Rod Stewart as a flamboyant one, and Marc Bolan. Looking back I think the early 70s was about jeans and cool shirts...and snakeskin boots. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page always dressed well. I think they all looked great no matter what happened the night before. I really didn't like the dirty hippie look, I'm not mentioning names...lol.

12) As you met more rock stars, how did they change in your opinion? Did they become more human and perhaps turn into clay idols? Did you change your perspective after seeing them in mundane daily activities?

Many of my ideals about "stars" were shattered after meeting them. Some people turned out to be very rude, or just too full of themselves as stars and that was disappointing when their art created another persona of them. For the most part I found very nice people, I was lucky. I think many public people lead double lives and it is probably no different than any other career, you are one way at work and another way at home. I did know some people who changed when the fame and fortune hit, there was more money to buy drugs. The drug scene and alcohol abuse got to me eventually. I began to notice how some never grew beyond that as the years went by.

13) How much were you influenced by mainstream magazines (Seventeen, Cosmo, Glamour) or were you mainly influenced by the local publications (Star)? How would you differ from a girl from the Valley who never made it to the Strip?

In my time we rebelled against the mainstream. I never looked at the fashion magazines or music magazines. We were creating the fashion by experimenting and expressing ourselves through clothing. There were certain fashion cues we took, but for the most part I think the music scene created the fashion we liked. We were much bolder and more revealing than someone outside the Hollywood scene. We dressed like we were "somebody" and I think that was a huge part of being different. I don't think the rest of LA was as bold as the fashion on the Sunset Strip.

14) Did you feel a sense of privilege, of being part of a strange and wonderful community at a momentous time? There was a lot of wildness and very little self-censorship.

We knew that what was going on was very special. In some ways I did feel privileged at knowing some amazing people. I think it was intense and fun, and like living many lifetimes in a few short years.

15) Do you think the scene at some time became harsh and ugly, and if so, why? Many people feel that a shift occurred in the late sixties, after the Manson murders. Others think that punk rock heralded a move towards a distasteful aesthetic. Still more see those seminal events as expressions of personal freedom. What caused formative change?

By the time the 80s came along things on the Strip were completely different, a new group took over. That is how it goes. There were probably many factors leading to the shift. The wackos were everywhere and you had to have a certain toughness about you to survive. I thought the scene also shifted into a game of who could be more outrageous than the other. Perhaps my generation set the bar for that. But I don't think we acted outrageous to outdo each other, well maybe sometimes in fun. I think in my time it was all new. There was no roadmap so we experimented. By the 80s the experimenting was over. Attitudes were changing, the "Yuppie" era came to be and it was all about "ME." The innocence was lost. And, AIDS certainly changed everything too. The entire lifestyle was wiped out then.

Tomorrow: Morgana on writing, the future, and meeting Led Zeppelin.

Hollywood Diaries can be purchased through Morgana's Web site.

Morgana's MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/hollywood_diaries

Photo credits: Morgana Welch personal collection

Mondays Are Not Mundane

Monday's feature is a revealing interview with a legendary Hollywood scenester.

We talk culture, clothes, rock and roll, and get an insider's view of what it was like to (as they used to say) "make the scene" on Sunset Strip in the early seventies.

You'll recognize some of the players...

The Last of the Red Hot Lovers

The end of the millennium did not occur at midnight on January 1, 2000. The end of the millennium occurred eight years and 23 three days later with Valentino's retirement. It was then that the door closed not just on a designer's career, but on a way of life.

Valentino was in business for 45 years, and during those four and a half decades that business never lost its focus. What Valentino sold was celebration. While Chanel's forward trajectory aimed at the anticipated BRIC consumer, Valentino remained Gatsby-like, designing for a dying material world.

Although Valentino's couture was flawlessly worn by Princess Diana, Marella Agnelli, Audrey Hepburn, and Farah Diba, his work seemed to exemplify Park Avenue and American chic. In 2008, Park Avenue spells purposeless socialite. In 1968, Park Avenue denoted all that was right about the American woman. America still held firm to the prevailing notion that a woman's place was at her husband's side. It was her duty to effortlessly run a household and appear on her husband's arm as an object of pride. Hillary Rodham was still at Wellesley. If the Park Avenue socialite was the international glamour model of American womanhood, then we were a nation of cocktails, bouffants, and fatuous, non-threatening chit-chat. In the suburbs, where we might sew a Valentino design from a Vogue pattern, we were patio cookouts, PTA meetings, and pigs in a blanket.

The American Valentino woman posed in the pages of Town and Country magazine while underscoring the effort that went into her appearance. One could not wear Valentino without a visit to the Kenneth salon. Jackie O. went to Kenneth, Jackie O. wore Valentino. For a generation of women, Jackie O. was the WASP ideal, a patrician figurehead and style arbiter whose wardrobe choices greatly impacted the retail market. Park Avenue literally followed suit. The Valentino suit, with its genteel elegance and everyday ladies-who-lunch correctness, stood in stark contrast to the braless devolution into feminist fashion.

Valentino also dressed Hollywood. Where Jackie O. was an icon of the educated, upper-middle-class wife, Elizabeth Taylor was her cruder counterpart, and one whose allure cut across class divisions. In the pre-AIDS days, Valentino designed for celebrities who had no cause célèbre other than a commercial endorsement.

Throughout his career, Valentino was often at odds with the popular groundswell. In the sixties it was the women's libbers, in the eighties it was the working woman, in the new millennium it was the need to innovate.

Innovation is a dirty word, an offensive action verb employed to find fault with solidity and tradition. "But can he innovate?" is the question of the moment, and one that is just as readily asked in the fashion industry as it is in technological circles. Innovate or perish. Valentino never grasped evolution; he conformed only to his own vision of a social circle of diminishing numbers.

The scope of Valentino's innovation was to dress the extraordinarily rich in a tasteful manner. In the face of multiple stylistic changes, he maintained a resolute equilibrium. He celebrated good (if sumptuous) taste and answered our need for stable identification, never perverting his manifesto to appeal to trend. In Valentino's world, there were no trends. There was only an endless round of places to go and people to see.

It was the eighties, a decade in which Valentino's signature red represented the unquenchable pursuit of power, that started his long slide into supposed irrelevancy. The eighties woman with her newly minted MBA was trained to compete on traditionally male playing fields. No longer would she be content to be a trophy wife who spent her days planning soirées and having fittings at Saks. Rather, she was apt to be found in the boardroom with her tight helmet of hair and sensible automaton business suits.

The opposite of what Valentino epitomized was espoused by the 1978 book Dress for Success. This working woman's bible, written by John T. Malloy, turned fashion from an institution into the institutional. The author dictated that in order to be successful, women must reject those fashion details that signified sexuality. In this era, rules were not made to be broken. The wrong color or the wrong shoes would spell career disaster. The militant rules were immediately embraced by the new working woman, while her uptown, Valentino-wearing neighbor (and the neighbor's lifestyle) was seen as outmoded and risible.

The strong red that was Valentino's signature color suddenly came to represent career and not couture. Although Valentino employed it to signify feminine power, in the eighties it telegraphed upward financial mobility that could be achieved without a man. Valentino's woman was deracinated and told to buy a briefcase. This influence could be seen in the evolution of luncheon suits into the power suits worn by Nancy Reagan. Hats and gloves were no longer required.

Over the next quarter century, the younger socialite lost her separation from pop-celebrity culture. As the two cultures commingled and became inseparable, the allure of class insularity was no longer appealing. What used to be called "class" became a synonym for being out of step with the times. We would have our rich, but they would be illiterate. The pernicious influence of cheap celebrity dominated magazine covers and editorial. The clients who might have followed their mothers into Valentino were instead betrayed by the vulgar-chic popular culture.

It was the right time for retirement. These are difficult times where one must have a political platform or be seen as obtuse and unaware. Whatever the real motivation behind his stepping down, Valentino was seen as an anachronism who was socially conscious only as respects his own social class.

In the media, there was no mention of passing a torch, because the torch was deliberately extinguished in a parade of red-draped models. There was only the brief and impartial mention that the house would now be guided by Alessandra Facchinetti, former designer of Gucci women's wear. No one speculated on what she might bring to the design table, because no one expected a legacy transition. Being clothespinned by tradition is not the millennium way.

Full Concrete Jacket

Clichéd it may be, but the famous scene in The Devil Wears Prada illustrates how today's haute couture portends tomorrow's Hot Topic. The colors and volume of the Spring 2008 collections will turn up in the local mall, if not in actuality than in spirit. An acid green t-shirt will recall Galliano, a prom dress the volume of LaCroix, a scarf Valentino's watercolors.

Even when the relationship is a remote one, a keen eye will spot the provenance.

The monster concrete jacket that towered over Chanel's Spring 2008 show may one day be remembered as portentous for another reason. It was said that the jacket--a monumental audacity--represented agelessness and endurance. There will always be a Chanel jacket as long as there is a Chanel show. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. It's one of the few things you can count on in this wacky world, a compass by which we gather our surroundings.

The size of the jacket sent a different message: Chanel is poised to take over the world. Not the world as we know it--that world is shrinking like wool in a dryer--but the new world. There's an acronym for this new world: BRIC. In 2003, the word was coined by Goldman Sachs, an investment banking firm whose business it is to anticipate economic trend. By 2050, the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China will have surpassed those of today's wealthiest countries.

In the Spring 2008 show, the giant jacket sent the message that the customers were more important than the couture.

That is not to say that the couture itself wasn't worthy of remark. Chanel has fired a salvo at the youth market and the youth market is firing back. The designs were short and young. There were lots of knees and the awkward poses of teenagers unhappy with having their pictures taken. Flat shoes failed to show the garments to their full potential. Without heels, the models seemed unsure of how to pose their legs and looked as awkward as colts. Dynamism was lost to first-dance gawkiness.

It was all a bit unsettling.

While one expects a clear vision and direction from a collection, the lack of ambiguity here was startling. The old couture clients are a dead or dying breed, their pockets shrinking as those of the BRIC countries grow. The population is exploding; there are now more young than ever before. Someone had to address this, so why not Chanel? Chanel has, after all, an enormous and instant recognizability quotient. Their jacket is probably the most continuously knocked-off item in the world of retail. Aspirational design for today's twelve year old is savvy business. If the Old Guard wants to buy from this collection, they will have to add ten inches to cover up their creaky knees.

Some of the designs were inspired by the shapes and coloration of seashells. What nature intended, Lagerfeld translated into folds and swoops. What nature did not intend (the knees again!), Lagerfeld ignored.

One would not normally expect to find such forward economic prediction in a couture show (where are the rags for the middle class?), but Lagerfeld laid it bare on the world's stage. We have seen the light on the horizon and we are sailing towards it ambivalently. On the beach, amidst the flutes and whorls of the coquilles, Chanel has become a cynosure.

Images: Style.com

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?: Dior Spring 2008 Couture

There is but one House of Dior, the fashion fiefdom of John Galliano and Galliano's massive sense of the operatic. There is also Christian Dior the brand (in the actual marketplace it is all Christian Dior Couture), which comprises everything else. The brand does a tremendous business in fragrance and cosmetics. Within the fragrance division, the brand is divided into the classic and the contemporary.

Where not discontinued, certain of the classic Dior fragrances (Miss Dior, Diorling, Diorama, Diorella, Diorissimo, Dioressence) are olfactory representatives of the New Look and its exaggerated femininity. At the other end of the spectrum, the contemporary scents (Addict, J'Adore, Miss Dior Cherie, and the Poison quintet) are designed for younger women. This youthful customer is unlikely to wear Galliano's haute couture or prêt-à-porter, unlike the original clients of Dior's New Look who wore the sharply elegant Miss Dior with their hourglass suits. The modern fragrances are one vehicle by which Dior is able to extend its brand beyond its couture clients.

Dior Addict is a separate brand within the group of modern fragrances. There are also Addict lip products. The Addict subdivision is designed to be hipper, more urban, and more aggressive than the rest of the beauty/fragrance products. More than a mere collection of glosses and eau de parfum, it's both a mindset and the rock-and-roll arm of Dior beauty.

Galliano's Spring 'o8 couture collection is classic Dior homage inhaled through Addict's grittier, post-modern straw. The evolutionary trajectory includes waypoints at New Look volume and pose; New Look millinery, St. Laurent trapeze, and Bohan asceticism. The collection was rendered in a color palette that might be described as radioactive. Against a crepuscular cobalt backdrop, it glowed.

Officially, the design inspirations were the John Singer Sargent portrait Madame X and the gold adornment of painter Gustav Klimt. Klimt, a Viennese Symbolist, excelled at gilding female eroticism. His subjects often had an attitude of condescension or remove, something they share with the Sargent work. Galliano evoked Klimt through extravagant gold embroidery and decoration that recalled Expectation, Medicine, and the oil and gold of The Kiss.

As originally painted, Madame X's decorative shoulder strap had eased off her right shoulder. The references to the painting were demonstrated in both design and contrast. Bodices cut in a manner similar to Madame X's infamous gown were foil to the cool luminescence of pale skin.

Galliano's aesthetic can be somewhat predictive, in this case as though it is sounding the death knell of the bourgeois. This was a collection of shapes based on a kinder, gentler and more democratic past. The exploration of volume and perversion of shape viz classic Dior gave the older designs a slight disenfranchisement, as if to deprive them of the catholic austerity they once possessed. Revived in nearly insolent color, they were electrified with Addict's Led Zep bass line.

Although not as extreme as prior collections, there was no feeling of a lowest common denominator or of pandering to the balefulness of the new moderation. As expected, there is a bold and distinct separation between Dior couture and that of other houses. Here, where Galliano is rewriting the house's iconic history to suit his own dramatic palate, he seems once again outside the question of who will guard the guards.

Galliano and Prada: Revenge or Communications Theorists

John Galliano sent an underwear-clad model down the runway with a bloody, scraped chest and the hood and noose of a hanged man. Miuccia Prada crowed that the theme of her collection was "...the things that men usually do to women--it's revenge!" The reception to these two Fall '08 men's shows was superficially mistaken by many. They said that Galliano had trumped his own flamboyant theatricality. A hangman's noose and men's briefs--Vive la différence! It began and ended on spectacle. As always, spectacle overshadowed implication. There was praise for wearability and translation to the street. At Prada, male flounces attached at the hip like Colorforms caused perplexed critical response. Beyond her own glib statement, nearly everyone intuited that the designer was making a statement about gender bifurcation and uniform and the need to move away from historical constraint into fresh contribution. Yet the female-inflected add-ons were not at all wearable or even adaptable to current modes of dress. As respects practicality, they ended up looking foolish and worse, gratuitous.

In the case of Galliano, the reaction was about content--what one saw on the runway-- and not about signification. The response to Prada touched upon communications theory.

Because these two collections had the most impactful content and were the most open to critical dialogue, they are the two that best exemplify the erroneous interpretation of the convoluted communications maxim "The medium is the message."

"The medium is the message" is Marshall McLuhan's famously contradictory statement. Superficially, we all believe we can define both "medium" and "message." We define medium as the means by which message is broadcast and message as the content. Without knowing what McLuhan meant, the statement is nonsensical. By our definition the apparel is the message and the medium the show itself. We inferred Prada's message that rigidity and social convention are no longer necessary--a powerful comment on the accepted status quo. Men wear slacks and women wear skirts. These are the current conventions in Western society and have been for hundreds of years. Yet, when we take McLuhan's quotation at face value and in error, the runway show itself was the message, exclusive of the garments themselves.

The real message, and the real meaning of the statement viz the collections, unfolds in the future.

McLuhan defined "medium" as an "extension of ourselves." Clothing is an extension; we select it for different and quite definable reasons. An extension enables us to perform something in addition to what we were able to perform independent of the extension: McLuhan gives the example of a hammer extending an arm. The arm on its own is not able to hammer a nail. By extending McLuhan's examples to fashion, we can see that a person might wear heels to be taller, in order to reach the top shelf in the grocery. If we take the equation into the realm of the mind, we see that a woman might wear stiletto Louboutins to convey sexuality and power. A man wears a Raf Simons jacket to show that he is not just au fait, he is also a stylistic leader and a visionary.

The key precept of media is that media effects ongoing change through growth.

"Message" is defined as "the change of scale or pace or pattern" elicited by the media. What "message" is not is the content--that is, the garments and the sets and the theme--but would instead be a change (for instance, an acceptance of men wearing flounce on their hips) brought about by the media. If a man were to don a ballerina's pink tutu for a board meeting, this would be the message in action. It's unclear whether Prada herself understood this theoretical interpretation; newspapers picked up the "revenge" comment and ran with it. "Revenge" is a powerful noun of heightened poetic and shock value.

McLuhan's theory holds that we tend to focus only on content. At a runway show, we focus on the riveting visual feast. This was especially true at Galliano, where a medieval panoply unfolded on a runway meant to mimic the frozen Thames. Our gaze is limited by the striking images and settings and also by the mood. If we focus only on content, McLuhan believes, we are not in a position to detect development. We only know under what circumstances we might wear the garment or adapt it to our wardrobe. For instance, we might adopt the uneven lengths on a pair of pants. Or we might not; doing so might cause one to be a figure of mockery among one's peers (although hardly as likely as being mocked for wearing a pink tutu to a board meeting). However, it may come about that this style is adopted gradually, over a period of many years, and that it resulted in some kind of attitudinal change that wasn't originally clear (again, more so with the tutu). In hindsight, the runway shows of Fall 2008 would be the reference, even as they are supplanted by newer fashion innovations and directions.

In another example, suppose that in 20 years women begin to wear bowler hats and also become enamored of aggressive contact sport. A scholar might find explanation in Prada's flounce. Or perhaps there is a great decline in the number of teen suicides in the year 2050, and this positive change is then traced to the crudely ironic Galliano posterboard shirt.

Over time, the changes may be slight and imperceptible and perhaps not obviously relatable to any given medium. It is possible that Galliano's frozen medieval bloodfeast anticipated today's polarizing debate on capital punishment or the necessity or superfluity of a titulary English monarchy. Although a remote possibility, there was cleverness in the face of spectacle that suggested some sort of flashback didacticism.

With change comes responsibility. Not all change is beneficial. If young, tutu-wearing men were attacked for their choice of clothing, it is probable that there was an antecedent behavioral signal (change) that was ignored. The ensuing harm would have been avoidable. "The medium is the message" holds that as a collective, we assume responsibility for identifying and stopping harmful development before it becomes destructive.

A fashion show may succeed as temporarily entertaining artistic/creative event, yet analyzed in light of McLuhan's theory it may also serve as a catalyst for change. Although it may contain a wealth of theatrical incident in the present, its message has potentiality far beyond today's runway.

(Riz of Mode et Utopie addressed positive message in a brilliant essay; my own essay expands upon that earlier work.)

Nowhere You Hang Your Hat Is Home: Bottega Veneta

There are three ways to look at Bottega Veneta's Fall 2008 men's collection. The second way is straightforward and therefore easy to comprehend. The first and third ways stir some uncomfortable emotions and require at least a passing familiarity with the works of Eugene O'Neill.

O'Neill, in my opinion America's foremost Depression-era dramatist, was a bit of a crepehanger. His were fringe characters who tried and failed to identify and belong. Although not without hope, they were guided by impossible beacons. Well aware of the gaping maw between rich and poor, certain characters discovered that they did not even belong to what they considered their own kind. Not only would these characters not know primacy, they would not know survival.

In The Hairy Ape (1922), a ship's stoker represents the common manual laborer. It is he who feeds the fires that keep the pistons moving the great liner across the ocean. Above him, the wealthy are not aware of his existence. More than mere layers of steel and coarse Brooklynese separates him from the passengers. The stoker--Yank--is proud of his raw strength and physical abilities. The job is dirty, tough, and full of danger. O'Neill describes the stokers' posture as having "the inhuman attitudes of caged gorillas." The laborers are beasts wearing the flesh of men. Emotionally, however, Yank is heir to a school of thought that says the rich are feeble and craven while the working man is strong and courageous. In Yank's dominion, brute power trumps a bank statement.

During the journey, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist visits the ship's bowels. There, she witnesses a foul-mouthed diatribe that Yank directs at an unseen engineer who blows a whistle to signal the men back to labor. "Toin off dat whistle! Come down outa dere, yuh yellow, brass-buttoned, Belfast bum, yuh! Come down and I'll knock yer brains out! Yuh lousy, stinkin', yellow mut of a Catholic-moiderin' bastard! Come down and I'll moider yuh! Pullin' dat whistle on me, huh? I'll show yuh! I'll crash yer skull in! I'll drive yer teet' down yer troat! I'll slam yer nose trou de back of yer head! I'll cut yer guts out for a nickel, yuh lousy boob, yuh dirty, crummy, muck-eatin' son of a-- "

Mildred, the daughter, is so overcome by this crass verbalization that she nearly faints and must be escorted away. Repulsed, she has called Yank a "filthy beast." The play revolves around this incident; Mildred's dismissive statement has told Yank that he is inhuman and no better than an animal.

Degraded, Yank leaves the ship and attacks some society members who are on their way out of church. The battle lines between class strata are now openly drawn. Yank is arrested and jailed for a month. When he is freed, he believes he has found acceptance in a labor union. His obvious hostilities then unsettle the union members with whom he might have expected the welcome of common ground. Yank is adrift, alienated by his own brutality and antagonisms. Even among brutes, he is outstanding.

Bottega Veneta's fall collection might be metaphoric: Now more than ever one is aware of the great class distinction between labor and leisure, between wealthy and Wobblies*. Anyone who has been forced by economics to vacate or downgrade is familiar with the predicament. The collection contains workmen's coveralls and painter's pants worn under thick jackets and suits colored a concrete, urban grey. The drab, non-individualistic color allusively recalls the idea of socialist or prison uniforms. Pants have the volume to accommodate another layer of clothing underneath, as if to say that the man inside will be exposed to the outdoors in the course of his daily labors. In one ensemble, a tough-looking trouser zipper has no fly covering, a nicety reserved for gentlemen. The glint of a toothy silver zipper against black fabric exposes the crude necessity of quick biological function; these men do not have private office bathrooms but must instead piss over a railing.

At the opposite end of the collection are the dinner suits and one slimline-jacket tux that the common man likely will never require. On his wedding day he will rent a cheap polyester tux in a New Jersey mall; he will be buried in his one good suit, bought on sale some 20 years prior and featuring an awkward print. In between, he gaffes by wearing a worker's cap with a blazer. There is also lots of denim. This denim is of a tonality and finish akin to the original Levi Strauss dungarees, the pants worn by linemen and railroad workers as they connected the West to the East. It is a reminder that blue jeans were once dungarees (alt. dunjarees), the workpants of the working class. It wasn't until the 1960s that dungarees became "jeans" and were seen as acceptable leisure apparel.

Or we might take the vantage point that the collection represents the diversity of occupation of today's male, rather than the gulf between, and that by showing both coverall and tux there is no exclusivity and elitism. To take this view dispenses with angst and contradiction. Traditional male occupations are then not separated but are brought together, each one equal to the other. This, then, is the new economic reality. Timing, rather than skill, determines outcome.

A third idea refers back to O'Neill and might be called "The Making of a Gentleman." In this scenario, the laborer is slowly transformed into the elegant gentleman, passing through denim and Young Turk suiting on the way. He is an O'Neill protagonist who is not crushed to death in the embrace of an ape. There is a clearly stated progression and an anticipation that hard work may reap reward. Our new protagonist does not fall victim to despair and his diction is improved in night school. He is now ready to meet the family. Aha! you say, he cleans up well. This is populism in action: Hope has come to fruition. In a lottery ticket or being hit by a city bus, the latter probably the likelier.

*Industrial Workers of the World, a union that posited that "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common." Famous for the Seattle General Strike of 1919.

All images: Style.com

ABBA: Est Modus in Rebus

Syllogistically, a cultural anthropologist who also happens to be a student of fashion will find plenty to deduce from the array of secondhand clothing at San Francisco's Wasteland. San Francisco was the launch pad for one of the biggest cultural movements of the 20th century and Haight Street was its epicenter.

Perhaps because San Francisco so strongly espoused freedom of personal expression, its thrift shops contain an uncommon array of fashion's most momentous--if awkward-- trends. Creative articulation may never again reach the heights of 1967, but judging from Wasteland's eclectic range of thrift apparel the citizen of San Francisco had a voracious appetite for novelty.

The cultural anthropologist on a fact-finding mission might discover men's belted sweaters, Nehru jackets, Afghan coats, and leg warmers. And maxi skirts, caftans, and a wet-look raincoat. From these relics, the anthropologist can parse civilization and conclude that fashion-wise, we were a happily oblivious culture. Throw in a harvest gold refrigerator and a copy of I'm Okay, You're Okay and the anthropologist may get the impression that we were an obtuse one as well.

For unknown reasons, nearly all of these entropic trends conjoined in the closet of the Swedish supergroup ABBA, a band that lived a world away from San Francisco but which expressed the joyful randomness of fashion crazes better than any other. ABBA's wardrobe singularly expressed an Orwellian truth: Bad fashion is a revolutionary act in the face of a universal deceit.

No other musical group welcomed fashion trends the way ABBA did. In a synergistic relationship that has yet to be equaled, ABBA and the seventies embraced each other like long lost lovers. Beginning with their win at the Eurovision song contest in 1974, ABBA costumed themselves in gauchos, overalls, platforms, t-shirt dresses, western wear, Lycra, and jumpsuits. So reflective were their costumes of the latest fads that by wearing all of them simultaneously they nearly reflected an alternate reality.

With the exception of Frida Lyngstad's vaguely western outfit, ABBA's Eurovision stagewear was inspired by that of the British glam group Slade. Frida's embroidered shirt and tattersall skirt are at odds with the costumes of the other three bandmembers, who wear satin knickerbockers, satin shirts, and platform boots. Although incongruous, Frida's shirt was an important fashion statement in and of itself. A third trend is the spaceman styling worn by Björn Ulvaeus, a look that would later be perfected by Ace Frehley of KISS. Benny Andersson's military jacket is pure Sgt. Pepper.

Following the Eurovision win, ABBA's costuming became more cohesive. Sometimes, color would be the unifying factor where theme or unity had been sacrificed. The picture to the left displays one of the myriad ways in which ABBA jumbled trends. While the women are similarly costumed, the likeness of the men's costumes stops at the puff-sleeved shirts. Ulvaeus wears one of the most execrable pieces of apparel in fashion history and Andersson anticipates the chest-bearing mechanic's uniform of New Wave.

ABBA's facile appropriation of the worst of 1970s style cemented them a place in history as the band that couldn't decipher fashion fault codes. This ineptitude became part of their charm and amplified the band's international appeal, especially in countries that were hungry for the latest in trendy western apparel. Through a Swedish filter, ABBA's idiomatic stagewear became the middle course by which the latest trends multiply transcended borders.

Link: Waterloo, winning the 1974 Eurovision song contest at the Brighton (UK) Dome.

Wasteland, 1660 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA

Rodeo Rodeo: Beverly Hills, 1992

It's all about the Japanese. The Japanese and Roseanne Barr. If you had any doubt as to the true definition of culture clash, pitting the people who were once Public Enemy #1 against our crassest televised comedienne should clear up any lingering confusion. On the surface, there's no commonality. There is no existing critical apparatus by which we can dissect an Asian culture and a crude comedienne vis-à-vis each other.

There is always an exception.

Both the Japanese and Roseanne Barr are shoppers. In the early nineties the value of dollar to yen was so outrageous that it honestly didn't pay to buy anything in Japan. Stories of twenty-dollar melons and sixty-dollar drugstore lipsticks were legendary. Japan had recovered from its reputation as a place of cheap dimestore tat and had become a technological powerhouse, but in so doing the cost of even the most banal items had become irrationally inflated.

The Japanese came to Los Angeles to buy. Los Angeles had only two competitors as a shopping mecca: San Francisco and Guam. San Francisco lacked a true boutique hub and Guam was nothing more than a rock in the Pacific that used to be an occupied territory and now had the Micronesia Mall.

American-style shopping was a tremendous lure for the Japanese, even though America itself wasn't internationally renowned for iconoclastic creativity. Our home turf was littered with fashion detritus like Earth Shoes and fads like pet rocks. The Japanese were light years away by comparison. Their number included designer Rei Kawabuko and Yoko Ono, an artist whose vocal stylings were the musical equivalent of Kawabuko's post-atomic bump collection. It also included the crazily inventive fashion subcultures that excelled in creatively repurposing children's cartoon figures into adult fashion trends.

The Japanese also loved a good bargain, and in the early nineties full American retail looked to them like a steal. Much as eBay has created a shopping outlet that partially succeeds on the premise of drastic discount, California at the end of the millennium was an Asian bargain hunter's paradise.

Los Angeles was not like San Francisco, where you could easily wander out of Union Square and into the disreputable Tenderloin. The tourist hotels near Market Street in San Francisco were dirty, overpriced, and dangerous. The weather could be abysmal. The best areas of Los Angeles were neatly demarcated by invisible fences. Rodeo Drive was one such enclosure.

Unlike the American who would travel abroad only to find disappointment in cultural diversity and the lack of retail homogeneity (a Starbucks on every corner), the Japanese tourist delighted in the difference. The Japanese knew how to have a good time, especially when their favorite logo merchandise was selling for what seemed to be rock-bottom prices.

If you were a merchant, the Japanese were the best customers in the world. It wasn't just the look of ecstasy on their faces or the clapping they would do when excitement overtook them. Nor was it that one didn't really have to employ any sneaky sales technique to capture their dollar.

The Japanese were grateful to buy your product.

The only caveat was that the product had to have some immediate cultural token. To quote an old Jerry Reed song, "When you're hot, you're hot; when you're not, you're not." How many retailers crashed and burned by not grasping that facile maxim? A line's popularity would probably last a single season at best, maybe six months more depending on what your competitors were hawking. The trick was to get your Japanese-language ads in JAL's inflight magazine, promising a "gifto" with purchase, and then sit back and wait for the tour busses. The gifto was the hook, and then all you had to do was to suggest a discount for a cash purchase and you were off and running.

You had to create a need. Give them something that they don't know they want. This is where so many retailers fail. The practice was post-war Japanese to begin with--the aforementioned Kawabuko collection springs to mind. The "gifto" could be anything--a coin purse, a key ring--but to the Japanese this signified a need that was going unfulfilled. It didn't hurt if the retailer had no outlet in Tokyo.

Thanks to the isolated, nearly covert positioning of the ads in the JAL magazine, other retailers never caught on. This is why one would see their upturned noses pressed hard against the glass of their boutique while the Hanako girls waltzed down Rodeo Drive carrying your shopping bags. Never mind that you were supposed to charge fifteen dollars for a box or fifty for a catalogue. In 1992 you were sales gods in your overpriced retail fiefdom.

It was a thing of mutually beneficial beauty. The Japanese saved millions of dollars and the sales clerks could afford to buy lunch.

Enjoy that tuna salad, for tomorrow you may die.

In the middle of what could only be termed a stupendous sales upswing, the company hired a new designer. In a fit of nepotistic hubris, they trusted next season's success to the daughter-in-law of the company's head honcho. This woman, who couldn't fold a Pampers, was suddenly cutting and draping. And making a whirlwind international tour to buy up and slice up the top-selling items from the world's most exclusive haute couture designers.

The idea was that she would directly imitate the clothing she had purchased, except that she would differentiate by color or by pattern. She would then sew up the clothing she had mutilated and wear it on her yacht.

Four months later, the merchandise was dropped onto the tarmac at LAX. Fedex trucks transported it to Rodeo Drive. The Los Angeles fashion pundits--the costume designers-- soon dropped by to see the collection.

How the company went from being a retail titan to a Rodeo Drive laughingstock is a cautionary tale for any designer. First, someone had decided that the Japanese would buy anything. This greatly underestimated and insulted the intellect of the very people who had made the business a success. That someone then followed this grave psychological miscalculation with a financial one: No longer would the product be made in the European ateliers. Instead, it would be outsourced to...

Taiwan.

The Japanese (and the Chinese, the Arabs, and everyone else with half a grain of taste) jumped ship when the company jumped the shark.

The error was not limited to provenance.

The collection--to use the term loosely--had as its centerpiece a pantsuit that was available in a choice of two colors: bright red or bright orange. Bright red and bright orange hadn't been popular since Nancy Reagan had a style showdown with Raisa Gorbachev seven years earlier. To compound the problem, the suits were striped. Stripes thick as jail bars ran the vertical length of the garments.

The suits were priced at two thousand dollars apiece.

Within four weeks, the turnaround kid of Beverly Hills was as vacant as an abandoned Hollywood hotel. The wrecking ball waited in the wings. Within a year, the company would be out of business and the CEO would be in prison for an unrelated matter.

And then Roseanne rang the bell. Roseanne, you might be surprised to learn, had fine taste in apparel. Despite what you might have seen on TV or on a ball field, Roseanne is a construct, a figment of Roseanne's imagination. It's an act. The woman had a keen eye for designer duds. It was Roseanne who pointed out that the "collection" was an analogue, the surimi of haute couture. Like I said, a keen eye.

The clothing wouldn't have fit Roseanne anyway. It didn't fit anyone in the store save for a tiny girl named Yu-Yu, who asked to borrow it for Halloween.

In an attempt to capitalize on the Japanese market, the clothing had been built on a model who weighed no more than 75 pounds and stood four feet, eight inches tall. Just like the the former customers, who could now be seen clapping and singing at Yves St. Laurent.

And that's the story. Another Hollywood tragedy. They happen. They happen as often as the Claymation sun rises in the sky and the Santa Ana winds blow fire on the mountains.

But this is Hollywood, and we love a good tearjerker. Almost as much as we love a comeback.