Paris Fashion Week: Requiem for Luxury

A lot of things aren't what they used to be. Big Macs, airline meals, the English language, and luxury have all taken big hits in the past decade. Luxury is in a particularly bad way. Now, things must be so slimmed down in the name of social responsibility that anything luxurious marks the buyer as an ignoramus.

Slimming down isn't always beneficial. Decreasing luxury won't take an inch off your waistline, and decreasing English is a national disaster.

Something odd has happened over the past decade. At the same time that luxury is being equated with obscenity, many luxury brands have been cheapened to the point of unrecognizability. Or luxury brands have bastardized and bootlegged their own product so perfectly that no one can tell the difference between a fake and an authorized fake.

There's been a strong tendency to go in the opposite direction, to reject luxury through sensibility. But sensibility tends to be the color of a mouse or a wet Parisian sidewalk on the gloomiest day of the year. Sensibility is insidious; it goes hand in hand with efficiency and a number of other do-good defining characteristics that are said to be healthy but that don't have that rich, full-fat taste.

Yves St. Laurent knew luxury when luxury was the innocent pastime of the gloriously rich. This was back when the world was a lot bigger and France had a monopoly on the best wine, cuisine, and couture. The end of that era coincided with the end of the self-indulgent eighties and it's been all downhill from there.

Fashion's new label is expectation. Expectation that the consumer won't do anything reprehensible, like wearing haute couture while not deliberating long and hard about the planet and one's responsibility to it. When was the last time you heard something naively described as "sumptuous"? St. Laurent knew from sumptuous: sumptuous peasants, sumptuous coolies, sumptuous Tatars. And smoking, let's not forget. Smoking! Dastardly. Looking at St. Laurent's body of work is looking at the death knell of irresponsibility. In as much as one's choice of clothing can be a reflection of both an actual and a fantasy persona, that much luxury on one mortal husk smacks of intemperance.

The luxury implied by the big French labels used to be aspirational. Not that your average punter waiting for the six o'clock commuter rail had the coin to rush over to Paris to be decked out à la Chinoise, but there were always the stockings and the perfume and the sunglasses as consolation. Then, somewhere in that rift between Boomer and X, luxury became equated with gaucherie, gluttony, and a lack of awareness.

Blame the gray market, blame the Internet, blame the strange allure of illiteracy. What had once been symbolic of luxury has depreciated to the point that it has token only in certain unattractive subcultures. It is tempting to say that their gratifications are not aligned with the sustenance of the privileged, and yet they are precisely the same thing. It's the feel-good factor that only serious commodification can provide. Once you can be one with the thing you desire, the thing has value only in so far as it affects the next chump downwind.

This is why today's fashions have to be blameless and above ethical question. You see it in the fall particularly, because at present anything you can visually equate to dead leaves and concrete must be on the right course. It's all over the fragrance industry, with the backlash against allergens, and you can see it in the fashion industry as well. Everywhere you look, sobriety and accountability rule. With some exceptions, color is looking like provocation. Step outside this proscription with a bit of flamboyance and there will be a trial of public opinion and perhaps a call for heads.

Into these difficult waters step the old-school design houses, but none more significantly than St. Laurent. During the 1970s, St. Laurent described luxury as something with a taste roughly equal to Perigord truffles. That is, far too silken and costly for any but the very wealthy. That was the legacy of the house, but the problem was how to keep the idea of it without making the diet version. Tom Ford tried and came up newly gluttonous; although his smut-chic looked and felt like luxury it was intrinsically debased currency with a stratospheric price tag.

In some instances, it looked as if it smelled of popper sweat and careless arrogance.

Taking over from Ford was Stefano Pilati, who had an impressive background in textiles. Pilati's test has been to make the label socially relevant and socially enlightened while maintaining the brand's value and integrity. In the face of those demands, Pilati has been a cautious and clever student.

Pilati's Fall 2008 outing hit the bull's eye of responsible luxury and desideratum. He understood that intimation is not always essential so long as the character remains strong. Over the course of several seasons, Pilati has quietly refined the idea of YSL into something with present consequence. His looks were freed from the body, free of speculation, and full of the verve of the original without indulging in the original's outsized savoir-vivre.

Ironically, one of the highest walls to scale at YSL has also been one of the easiest to climb: the huge bulkhead of St. Laurent's original work. What did YSL stand for, exactly? So thematically diverse is St. Laurent's cultural legacy that only the very wisest man could ignore the far-flung exotica while pursuing the global democratization. Right now, that means the facelessness of the individual and the devaluation of the individual's crassest commercial needs. This can only be accomplished as a group effort, a unified whole, but with a flick towards the old in a squared-off coolie jacket and baggy coolie pants. That was the most significant look in the collection and also the most telling; what once had been decadent was once again merely uniform. Things have truly come full circle.

Luxury. Price tag aside, today it's just a six-letter word.

Paris Fashion Week: Balenciaga's Aquawomen

Certain material tends to be used for certain apparel that is associated with certain minority pursuits. This is the long way around saying that latex is used for fetish clothing and fetish activities, whatever they may be. They may take more forms than you imagine.

Nicolas Ghesquière is known for maintaining form across his collections for Balenciaga. He is also known for working with an assortment of non-traditional materials like latex, plastic, and foam. How these have found a commercial home outside dungeons is one of fashion's bravest stories. Ghesquière mixes textures and impacts: rough/smooth, dull/shiny, matte/satin. He does this without pandering to fetish, an interest best left to the young, club-going English designers.

Ghesquière is also a master sculptor who goes far beyond a simple understanding of anatomy. If you were to give him, say, the contrapposto statue of David, he would clothe it impeccably, but he would also take into account the tautness of David's physique and the fact that--energetically--the right side of the statue differs markedly from the left.

A master designer would not stop there, however. There must be obstacles. Once David had been clothed according to modern mores and necessities, the designer might take on the challenge of the upper torso of the Venus de Milo, even if the waistband of her skirt suspiciously resembles one recently paraded down the runway by Yohji Yamamoto.

Challenges like these are too fundamental for someone of Ghesquière's advanced skill set, so for Fall 2008 he showed a collection with what looked like a creative abstraction of phylogeny, or evolutionary history. With the patent leather and latex that paraded down his catwalk, Ghesquière became a phylogenetic visionary. Either that or he was very much influenced by scuba divers.

Most designers will shape clothing more or less to standard human anatomy, unless they hope to remain in that potentially deadly category known as cult. Occasionally one of the more creative will take an aggressive artistic stance that is acceptable because of historical or cultural imperatives, but the rest will founder as their fan base marries and moves to the suburbs. These designers are generally in that group of artists who are unable to forsake momentary impulse for later financial success.

At Balenciaga, Ghesquière has spent a season or two retooling hips, and for Fall 2008 he has done the same with arms. Four months ago, he foreshadowed new arm treatments in his spring collection, but it wasn't until the fall grouping that he disconnected arms from the skeletal frame.

Short jackets cut from latex and heavy wool had the curious effect of making the arms look boneless and the shoulders appear as the sloped trunk of a salmon, as if both regions had undergone a reverse evolution to earlier taxa. Legs remained in evolutionary stasis, that is, they were one with us. Evolution, you see, is best accomplished slowly. The curious shape makes one wonder if Ghesquière imagines this as the ideal human form in another million years or whether these were simply impulsive aquawomen. It also fuels the conjecture that so-called conventional shapes may have no future applicability.

Beyond science, there was also an artistic question related to Impressionist painting: Does nature impress Ghesquière or is he making his own impression on nature? This new collection seems to argue for the latter, which would mean that his inspiration is not from the external world but has sprung up as mysteriously as life itself.

Dresses that conformed more literally to the body's outline caused an inescapable association with wet suits and the odd way that wet suits enhance the breastplate. Speaking of breastplates, they were there too, on the front of those very dresses, as shield-like voids in the middle of barren Japanese forests. Sound complicated? It wasn't. It just was.

Patent leather coats also demanded adaptation. These were garments that require the body to comply with their limitations if flattering silhouette were to be achieved across a full range of movement. Since this seems desirable, the coats were a bit counterintuitive; the inflexibility of patent leather means that the garment remains in place while the body turns. They would cry out to be hung up on airplanes, where looking chic was once an international requirement.

Ghesquière's loyal and considerable following will find much to wear in the remainder of the collection, most outstandingly in the form of a black cocktail dress with scalpel neckline and ridge-like peplum. Since this garment appeared to have been built for neither evolutionary exercise nor deep-sea diving, it feels like the safety of land.

Images: Style.com

Paris Fashion Week: Messiness is Your Dior

Nineteen sixty-one was a pretty good year. It may have been the last year we truly had something to be optimistic about, up until the Bay of Pigs proved that nothing was perfect, not even "plausible deniability." That's the year we elected Jack Kennedy to the White House, and remember how good that felt? Out with fuddy-duddy Ike and Mamie and in with Jack and Jackie; Jackie in particular. Old Joe may have poured millions into that campaign, but in the end it all came down to glamour. Glamour, in case you hadn't realized it, always prevails.

Camelot, they called it. A White House couched in terms of a mythical court and with the better half of it outfitted by Oleg Cassini.

Cassini understood something: Style is a remedy for whatever ails you. Socially, we were a provincial, potluck nation still dining out on tuna casserole. We were not chic. In certain quarters, we might have even been a bit of an embarrassment. You couldn't compete globally while dressing locally. That was the genius of Cassini, a European whose mother had been the darling of the D. C. social set during the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations and a dress designer subsequently.

Well-articulated elegance and simplicity became the key design components of Jackie's state wardrobe, and as a result that wardrobe became a polity unto itself. The First Lady prided herself on her French-Catholic lineage; she pronounced her name in the French manner. Much of what Cassini designed for Jackie might be termed borrowings, as one borrows words from mother tongues or recipes for sole à la Meunière from Larousse Gastronomique. Heavily influenced by master French couturier Hubert de Givenchy, Jackie's wardrobe was a sensation. The Frenchification of the United States was under way.

That Frenchification was returned to Paris by way of John Galliano's anti-anomic Dior Fall 2008 ready-to-wear collection. Anomie is today's hottest ticket. It's what happens when society goes to hell in a handbasket due to corruption of its principles. Designers, especially younger ones, do whole idealistic collections around this theme. They try to darn together what we are so desperate to rip apart, and when they can't they build clothing for new empires that will themselves eventually strike back.

Galliano's wayback machine backs up from a time when we want more out of life to a time when we just about had it (or so beer and cigarette advertisements claimed), and in doing so he has penetrated our conscious with clothing that appears to have been designed exclusively for us. This is not pigeon-toed perimeter apparel in the face of all that hipness. The new Fall collection is equal parts fond concept and crackerjack modern execution.

Bohan-era Dior may have been the professed jumping-off point, but it wasn't a parasitic one. Time-wise, the collection was a slideshow of the years 1961 through 1965 (that is, before the hippies and women's libbers turned this look into the uncoolest totem in town). Into this literal overlay of boxy, Cassini-like insights went with-it, Mod Manhattan, the Twist, and Nancy Sinatra. And there was limelight and maribou and an evening gown whose bouffant skirt was shaped just like rose hips.

It was beautiful, and what can you do with beauty but mar it?

Remember that perfection is dullness. Injury makes for distinction everywhere but on the wings of butterflies. Thus, Galliano made sure his models walked with crudely corrupted hair and makeup that were parodies of Yardley advertisements and a coiffure that was much harder to maintain than it looked. Ask your mother.

Beauty is messiness. Messiness is Your Dior. So is mimesis, in a way that just made the American legacy collections look arthritic.

Images: Style.com

Paris Fashion Week: Not in the Details

Lee Bontecou began to sculpt during a period of social, political, and philosophical flux that occurred with America's transition from the Atomic into the Space Age. In the late 1950s, America openly flexed its muscles on the worldwide stage as it raced towards space and nuclear domination. At the same time, the country was riding a pre-fab economic high that began at the end of World War Two. We were moving into the future not just confidently, but aggressively. Art--primarily in the field of design--reflected this futurity by streamlining buildings and their decor into dispassionate utilitarianism.

To move forward, to build for speed and efficiency, artists and architects had to do away with detail. Progress would only be hindered by sentimentalism and clutter. Half a century earlier, the Victorians had thrived on excessive and often incomprehensible feature. As the country embraced rapid technological advancement, the old forms of decoration became symbols of intellective calcification.

We were not a country without a need for comfort, however. Heaviness represented solidity, but it also represented outmoded intellectual patterns. America had always felt most comfortable in the past, even as it marched towards tomorrow. The new design aesthetic created an emblematic visual rift between traditional and modern values.

Although Scandinavia pioneered functional design, America quickly adopted it even as it refused Scandinavia's political neutrality and moderation. It was this perverted humanism that Lee Bontecou investigated through works that explored not just the scientific questions engendered in the race for space but also in America's escalating political interventionism.

An allegorical black hole was reiterated in many Bontecou sculptures of this period. The hole could be said to simultaneously represent the natural and the absurd. The artist was intrigued by both the boundlessness of space and the atrocities of man. From this perspective, the circle became a locus of reflection into which one could peer infinitely and without definite conclusion.

The sculptures' provocative abstractions appealed so much to Rick Owens that he happily cited them as the entire premise behind his Fall 2008 collection. Owens has been routinely pegged as a sartorial crypt keeper, someone who in the past could not climb out of the grave long enough to pull together a wholly wearable collection. His work has largely been seen as a collection of variables, some of them impossible. What had been carelessly labeled as "goth" is starting to seem more and more like anti-bourgeois. Owens is beyond chic, and as his body of work expands he appears to be making a statement about fashion's fallacy of detail. Detail exists on clothing for the bourgeois; Owens designs for those who must outline and master new worlds.

Through the use of visually primitive textures, Owens' Fall 2008 collection echoes Bontecou's use of common materials and objets trouvés as much as it does her actual geometry. Pelts and leather become carapaces and vestigial appendages from which the survivors of the new Ice Age can emerge. These modern-day Sabinas move past disaster and cataclysm blinded by their own hair, as if they haven't yet reacquired sight.

What might appear to be inexplicable detail--useless wings, unfurling leg warmers--is instead justifiable as a stage of evolution.

Bontecou was a superb inspiration for Owens, because her work demands a re-examination of our relationship to the past and the ideological divides between former assumptions and present-day realities. Certain designers ply these same seas with cynicism (and in goth this is often an implied state), but the Bontecou references remove cynicism and replace it with questions of control. Who will control the future? Who can survive today?

If it sounds as if Owens is treating fashion as a political vehicle, this is because he is currently at war with cirrhotic features that have no basis in truth. What Owens does best is to create fashion that is a pictorial representation of fighting back, even as it is clear that we will always have to return to the starting point.

Images: Style.com

Red Carpet: The Big O

Big, overbaked, bogus L. A. They tell you that the line between reality and fakery is very slim here, and that all actors have something inherently wrong with them. People like to think of Los Angeles (and Hollywood in particular) as being out of proportion to everything else, but the truth is that Los Angeles is just like everywhere else and probably more like Chicago than you ever realized.

They roll up the red carpet early here. They have to; above all else Los Angeles is a business in the business of making money, not dreams. Dreams can be made any old time of day, but money, real money is made in the early morning hours, over thirty-dollar yolk-less omelets and designer water trucked in not from Italy but from your ordinary local tap.

Awards shows are artificial contrivances with a little bit of ductile voodoo thrown in for good effect. Like the cars that get towed from Sunset Boulevard, like the European misconceptions of California, awards shows are things to be taken away in the night.

L. A. glories in its vending-machine culture. It used to be the second cultural capital of America, before people smartened up and realized that culture is really about who has better temporality, artificiality, and parallel universes. It wasn't too hard for Las Vegas to snatch the second spot out from under Los Angeles' red-hot klieg of a sun.

It's all about the now, now. Asking why will simply cost you time and money.

The 2007 Oscars, coming as they did right at the tail end of the writers' strike, seemed more a period piece than they did a party. The award for best dressed went to a man (Viggo Mortensen) and no one seemed in danger of being devoured by a dress from a second-tier designer. The only person who did a valorous "I can take this" cakewalk was French and no one wore anything that exposed their striving to the elements.

That's why we needed Diablo Cody. Cody's been a stripper, a phone sex operator, an author, and a screenwriter. She's inked up her right arm and in her quasi-Egyptian toga looked more like a daylight dancer at the Seventh Veil than she did a Perma Press star. And yet, in this oddly subdued year, Diablo Cody is a star, of the biggest and brightest magnitude imaginable. That's what happens when you've had a run of good luck that hasn't been deliberated, steam-cleaned, and delivered with the morning paper. Cody's more connected to the old Hollywood, tin-dream Hollywood, than anyone else out there. Like the rest of us, she has a no-tech Blogger blog, except that hers was called The Pussy Ranch. She has a MySpace page that lists fornication and porn as interests.

She's a neighborhood girl, bless her, in that unflattering leopard-print dress. Pedigree is nothing but a fraudulent accessory. Cody, with her marvelous mongrel talent, won an Oscar on the one night that everyone else chose to look sterile and flat.

This is the New Hollywood. What a wonderful, unreliable, and for once unconditional town.

Milan Fashion Week: Ich hab noch einen Koffer in Berlin

Until the turn of the century, the Berlin skyline was a jumble of cranes. For the prior decade, the cranes had been a symbol of the city's rebirth and reunification--die neue Berlin-- after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

This was not the first time Berlin had experienced a resurfacing. At one time the intended seat of Hitler's Germania, the city that was once noted for its Bauhaus and medieval architecture became a structural testament to the intended Thousand Year Reich. At war's end, the city was in rubble and what was left of it bore the stamp of its reprobate modern history.

By 2000, much of the new construction was completed. As international architects left their stamp on areas once vacant or historically questionable, Berlin acquired a polyglot postmodernism perhaps best expressed by Daniel Libeskind's design for the Jüdisches Museum. Other areas of transformation included the Potsdamer Platz and Stresemannstraße.

Berlin is where Donatella Versace found inspiration for her Winter 2009 collection. While visiting the city, she was struck by its newfound confidence. The new Berlin was swathed in visually arresting shapes and colors suggestive of strong forward movement. The use of bright hues and unexpected silhouettes created a fullness of energy and attitude that Versace quickly translated into a series of silk dresses printed with active cityscapes.

These were not just any dresses. They were reminders of the signature print scarf, long one of Versace's totems. The scarves had formerly been cacophonous to the point where they were nearly audible. Transformed into simple apron dresses, they carried bustling scenes based on the photogenic variety of Berlin.

There was not a Medusa head in sight, or, for that matter, much hangover Versace miscellany.

Much like Roberto Cavalli, Donatella Versace's last gasp at fashion debauchery occurred in 2004. This was the final year of design gluttony for both, and subsequently each embarked on the process of streamlining their labels to accommodate a shifting consumer power structure.

While Cavalli continues to have trouble rehabilitating his Cavalli woman into cutting-edge pertinence, following her own stint in rehab Versace has had an easier time. Unlike Cavalli, who has taken a sauve qui peut approach, Versace has almost abandoned the hyperventilated binge that once detailed the label as gaudy Euro-chic.

For the Winter 2009 collection, the designer continues to work with the important 360° silhouette. Gowns and dresses that appeared spare in the front had distinct eye appeal in the back, with flowing cape-like panels giving a sense of airiness and flight.

The highlight of the collection was a pink-toned beige gown whose curvaceously draped panels appeared to unfurl like the petals of a rose. Thirteen additional gowns had varied degrees of success; when the designer reverted to vestigial habits in one dress it seemed out of place among the more belletristic pieces.

Daywear didn't benefit as much from the trip to Berlin, leaving one wondering if Versace's impressions of the city had been no more intellectual than snapshots. Trousers grabbed and pouched at the crotch and long button-down sweaters belted over shifts looked banal. Certain coats and short dresses had muʻumuʻu sleeves that looked fresh in some instances and gauche in a pink fur number that looked more like a housecoat than it did an exciting piece of outerwear. Or perhaps it was a dress.

That item proved how hard it is to exorcise the past and also decries the necessity of doing so in the first place. Much like Berlin, the question of whether to topple cultural monuments for the sake of a clean slate introduces a challenging and energizing dialogue.

"I always keep a suitcase in Berlin," Marlene Dietrich once said, and perhaps Donatella should as well.

Images: Style.it

Milan Fashion Week: Love with a Proper Stranger

Where is Roberto Cavalli and who is the stranger that has taken his place? If you didn't know any better, you might think that Cavalli was compressed into tiny molecular particles and placed inside a time capsule with the year 1982 stamped on it. This capsule is in the Smithsonian, under strict orders not to be opened until the year 3000. When it is eventually unlocked under the watchful gaze of dully clad anthropologists, a riddle will be solved:

So that's why Cavalli woman became extinct! Must have been one hell of a demise!

"Demise" refers to the last Cavalli collection that was truly decadent. The Big Bang collection. That occurred four years ago, and ever since then Cavalli has become, if not sensible, then comparatively sober. Fashion writers have been slow to notice this mutation, because, being human, they tend to become paralyzed at the sight of leopard. It wouldn't be truly Cavalli if the runway weren't also the veld.

Since that collection, the designer has been slowly reeling in his most extravagant tendencies. Last fall he confined the spots to workable outerwear and in the spring he abandoned Rodeo Drive. It is as if Cavalli realized that in 2004 he finally approached the boundary between ripe and rotten.

The result of this new (relative) sobriety is a Fall 2008 collection that was one third inspired by the young Natalie Wood. The other two thirds involved Peruvian Indians and c. o. d. Cavalli; one item was incomprehensible and the rest reflected the evolving leanness.

Never fear: There was still plenty to satisfy the wax figure known as Victoria Beckham.

A stranger to Cavalli might not realize that the full-blown Cavalli woman once existed in all her glorious ambrosia. She paraded around Beverly Hills with one breast exposed to the sun and the other covered in chinchilla. Wise men and history tell us that her wardrobe makes Cavalli's new collection look almost Puritanical. The episodic orgy of prime-time TV may be over, but Hollywood is still very much a part of the designer's lookbook. Time will tell whether this new script is something other than ephemera.

In the past, Cavalli painted in Dionysian oils, the thicker the better. Having switched to watercolors, the Wood-inspired dresses for fall were primly Apollonian. They were also white or pastel and styled like the underpinnings of a prom dress. This gave them an elysian perishability akin to being unable to watch Splendor in the Grass without separating Wood from the knowledge of her mortality. It also spoke volumes about the fragility of fantasy.

Overall, this part of the collection was simple but not arresting. To say it was seasonally incongruous sounds peevish. Expectation might be at fault here; when one is expecting an autumnal cliffhanger and gets instead an easy springtime ending one tends to question the price of admission.

Luxe returned, moderately, for the Peruvian-folk abstraction. Here Cavalli trimmed two coats with fur and used bright floral patterns on skirts inspired by the petticoat-like traditional polleras. Through no fault of the inspiration, a couple of pieces in this section failed to come together. A silk skirt and bodice fused onto a gray top looked like a mismatch. Balancing this misfit was a deluxe flapper dress with semi-sheer skirt and signature sternum slash.

Also part of the Incan third of the collection was a black silk dress with dropped, boxy waist. Its funereal starkness made it an odd fit. Not particularly figure-enhancing, it had a stiffness close to rectitude and yet was perhaps the part of the collection closest to a purist's bella figura, a Prada bella figura. "La bella figura" refers not just to an ideal image, but to the cultivation of manner. Arguably, the purist in Prada would be perceived as having a quieter, more refined aesthetic than the glamazon in the older Cavallis.

The collection was not meant to be unitary, although the demure Splendor in the Grass looks would have been more relevant in the spring. Why Cavalli chose to include them in the fall collection might be expressed by a quote from the writer André Breton:

"First one must love. There will always be time afterwards to analyze the reason."

Images: Style.it

Milan Fashion Week: Those Bloody Weekends

To put it graciously, Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is not exactly what one would call a clotheshorse. The only relationship one can find between that word and the Queen of England takes the form of a horse blanket.

As befits a person of her station, Her Royal Majesty has always dressed with gentility. And with caution, modesty, and a good dose of immutable discretion, save for the slightly reckless pantsuit she sported on a 1970 visit to Canada.

Last November, British Vogue named the Queen one of the 50 most glamorous women in the world. In doing so, the magazine praised what they deemed her "rustic style." Rustic style referred not to the Queen's public closet, but to the apparel worn at Balmoral, the royal family's Aberdeenshire estate. There, in pursuit of the sporting life, the Queen suits up in plaid skirts, wool sweaters, and head scarves. If one had to describe the Queen's rural closet in five words or less, one might try some combination of "blitz" and "Pringle of Scotland."

The good thing about a wardrobe like this is that it is immune to the vagaries of fashion. No ill wind of PVC leggings or dangling paillettes will ever chill the House of Windsor. The constancy of the royal wardrobe is like warm milk in a world gone mad. The British Empire can rest easy in the knowledge that their titularly head of state will never be caught dead at a scandalous Gareth Pugh runway show.

It was in this country closet that Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana hunted down the inspiration for their Fall 2008 diffusion collection. Diffusion in this case denotes "juniors," meaning that the D & G label is meant for women young enough to be Her Royal Majesty's granddaughters.

A small history lesson is in order: Weekends are a 20th-century phenomenon popularized by the smart set surrounding Edward VIII, he of abdicating the throne for the woman he loved. It was the young David (as the then Prince of Wales was familiarly known) who asked his father for the Fort Belvedere estate. "What do you want that barn for?" King George V asked. "Those bloody week-ends, I suppose!"

Thus was born a pleasurable institution that was quickly adopted by younger royals, including those who would prefer a gun to a gin cocktail. While in the 1930s the weekend dress code might have specified Patou gowns and dancing slippers, the present ruler changed the party dress to patrician kilts and wellies.

Someone at Dolce and Gabbana must have brushed up his royal history, for in the midst of teddibly British skirts and twinsets came what appeared to be a complete absurdity: a triple-sized Russian trooper hat in Prussian blue fur. And then another, and at the end of the show a top styled after a kosovorotka.

For those who have no more than a passing familiarity with traditional Russian peasant wear, a kosovorotka is a long linen tunic with a skewed collar. This was not a sudden nationalistic about-face; the Slavic elements were worked in while the models were still traipsing about Scotland.

Since it was unclear whether hipsters outside the Sloaney Pony would look to the Queen of England for style clues, the last third of the show featured paisley peasants.

The amateur genealogist would immediately applaud the designers' knowledge of royal ancestry: Queen Victoria's favorite granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse married none other than Nicky Romanov, both later shot by the Bolsheviks in the unglamorous Siberian city of Ekaterinburg.

To further unwind the spool that is European royalty, Tsar Nicholas was himself first cousin to Queen Victoria's son King George V.

Whether this stylistic fusion was historically intentional is as mysterious as the abrupt appearance of hemophilia in Queen Victoria's male descendants.

After the first look, a literal interpretation of Balmoral-wear, Dolce and Gabbana showed the funhouse version. This involved plaid acrobatics, imperative tartans, and a blue fur jumper that Queen Elizabeth would likely draw a bead on and shoot between the eyes. There was a good deal of semiotic confusion as the collection went in the rough direction of Minsk. When the headscarf traversed borders and topped mock-folkloric costumes, it became less to the manor born and more the signal of a color-blind refugee. Although clothed in velvet, these neo-peasants appeared to have dressed under the influence of a psychoactive agent.

Since the two themes were oppositional, the looks did not coexist in grace-and-favor coherence. Despite the lack of successful unification, there was a liberal immigration policy at work.

Unlike its political equivalent, thematic harmony is overrated.

Milan Fashion Week: Armani Affronted

Anyone who doubts the correlation between fashion and art need only consider that, like the artist, the fashion designer is largely considered to be only as good as his last collection. If said designer is a tyro with only a season or two under his belt, the correlation becomes all the clearer. The sophomore book was a disappointment, the second role was a bust, the latest album was not as good as the first.

Or so the song goes. It's a tough world out there.

Even the artist in his prime can suffer a reactive disappointment, and disappointment may sow the seeds of doubt in the mind of the critic (we cannot speak for the artist, who we hope possesses a large enough ego to overlook a cavil or two).

Ego is sometimes as unpredictable as an act of God.

Giorgio Armani is an artist in his prime and in the prime of his ego. Back in 2005, he threw a clinker of a collection that was based on bloomers. Bloomers did not change either the fashion industry or the way women dressed, and because of the designer's track record he was treated gently and respectfully by the media. He did not receive, as a freshman designer might, a critical walloping. Women did not respond well to the pantaloons, no matter how well tailored, and the moment became a minor blip in fashion history that passed without causing psychic injury.

Armani returned to form the following season with a collection that he predicated upon what women really want, i. e. not satin diapers. The critics breathed a sigh of relief at this careful backtracking; he is taking our needs into account after a brief and thankfully temporary period of delusion. This is the Armani we know and love. They still politely wondered if he would ever break out of his smartly tailored jacket.

In a three-week-old review of the designer's couture collection, Cathy Horyn of The New York Times referred to that signature piece as a "huge beige hub" and remarked that she doubted whether "a jewel of a dress" would ever emerge from within it. She went on to say that Mr. Armani, unlike Mr. Lagerfeld, had a diminished ability to use his own history or wit as a reference point or to create sui generis garments. In order to produce such a masterpiece, she felt, Mr. Armani would need both irony and self-reference, neither of which was in the range of his "imagination." She said that his body of work had been "impeccable."

Mr. Armani, via his head of communications, not so promptly uninvited Ms. Horyn from his Autumn 2008 ready-to-wear show on the morning of the show. The rescindment took the form of an e-mail, supposedly reinforcing the contents of an earlier letter that Ms. Horyn did not receive. Mr. Armani, the e-mail said, had not cared for the "tone" Ms. Horyn had used to describe his friends and family as they waited for the start of the January haute couture show. Ms. Horyn's tone had been "belittling" and Ms. Horyn need not darken the ready-to-wear doorway with her presence.

For those of you who do not read Ms. Horyn's column, the article stated, "Sophia Lauren, dressed in a dark coat and trousers, sat in the front row. There was no need to smile because Sophia Loren had smiled so many times before. Mr. Armani’s niece, Roberta, sat next to Hilary Swank, who had on a black beaded cocktail dress. Ms. Armani never seemed to stop smiling.

The burlesque star Dita Von Teese, who had changed from a Dior in the afternoon to an Armani, its portrait neckline now framing her bosom, sat very still, her hands folded on her lap, the picture of a lady in drag."

It could well be that the burlesque star objected to having her appearance associated with transvestism, especially when wearing one of Mr. Armani's own garments. Mr. Armani might have balked similarly. Neither Mr. Armani's niece nor Ms. Loren seemed to have grounds for complaint, but you never know. These are sensitive times.

It seems more likely that the real reason for the retraction was that the designer perceived Ms. Horyn's remark about his apparent inability to produce a magnum opus as damning. That may have been what was truly "belittling," and Armani may have felt it discredited a designer with a prolific and commercially successful body of work. To dissemble and use a sophistic reason for the rescindment was preferable to acknowledging the existence of the statement and ergo admitting that it had an impact. By easing around its gravitas, the statement became distant and less alive. Still, it's the designer version of the actor who will never win an Oscar, the writer who will never win the Pulitzer, and the singer who will not cart home a Grammy. Ever.

You can see how quickly such a thing might get out of hand, even if it won't approach the hostility of the Capulet-Montague feud. Was Ms. Horyn throwing down a gauntlet or was her statement an absolute? What of Armani's enormous body of work; was all of this not up to snuff? Was Ms. Horyn saying that he had never once produced "a jewel"? What about all those Armanis that have paraded down red carpets on the backs of Hollywood's shiniest stars, were these simply "impeccable" shmattes?

Whatever the real reason for the e-mail, it read as a self-conscious and puny one. It lacked, as the Italians say, coglioni, and there was Ms. Horyn busting what was left of them in an On the Runway blog post.

It may have looked like an antique comedy of errors, but it was a modern conundrum with modern implications.

Language is a funny thing, especially today. No sooner does one manage to extricate one's foot from one's mouth then someone else forces it back in there. It happens with increasing inadvertence as the world grows smaller, and as a result of this shrinkage there are innumerable fresh opportunities to offend. Journalists--and especially those who collate letters to editors--know that if someone can take umbrage, he will. There is always someone to rile. That person might live in a remote corner of the Idaho Panhandle, but he's out there. There is a giant computer in Belgium that stores all of our choicest and not-so-select words and keeps a running tab, so watch it, buddy.

We've now worked ourselves into a tight little knot that requires a communication protocol. We must stick to the simplest language; words that are in the vernacular suddenly have significance well outside our ken. We are all arrivistes on the new linguistic frontier. Simple literacy is no longer enough--if by literacy we mean that one knows when it is necessary to seek information, where one might find correct information, and how one must properly use that information.

All of this takes place before expression, before considering tone, before wondering about what goes on in someone else's head. If you're feeling somewhat less than creative, you are on the right track. You may now call yourself, until tomorrow, a responsible writer.

By the looks of it we are going to have to write with a very cramped pen.

And that ready-to-wear collection? Armani redux, with a bit of social reflux. Always true to itself in its fashion.

Milan Fashion Week: Molto Topolino

There are a couple of things you can say about certain collections at Milan Fashion Week, and one of those is: Che macello! This is the knee-jerk statement that arises from being exposed to the fashion equivalent of a cartoon slaughterhouse. All that gaudiness! That hair! Donatella!

The other is a narrow defense of Milan as culturally correct response to the saturnalia of Paris, to the sclerotic indie cred of London, and to New York as a hidebound gauge of commercialism. Poor New York; imagine being seen to openly troll for customers. The fact that Milan seems in part disconnected to the other three can be explained by philosophical stereotype: The Italians know being from existing. In other words, they know how to live with gusto. They have appetites and they indulge their rights to abuse bronzer.

Gross generalization aside, these are the people responsible for the comic minion Arlecchino and the Commedia dell'Arte, and what is that but improv theatre in its most enjoyably unsubtle form?

Comedy in whatever form is a matter of national pride, even as it crosses not the Tiber but the Rubicon.

So it's the Italians--or the Frankie Morello designers in particular--who make liberal use of epic and ad hoc comic simile while the rest of the world gets bogged down by pedantic discussions of the global fashion marketplace and one's obligations to its needs.

As the Frankie Morello collection proves, sometimes it's about having a good time in bad taste instead of the other way around. Morello makes Paris look depraved, London look arthritic, and New York look anxious. In all cases, the rest of the world seems unhealthy and far too serious. Who wants clothes that are manifestations of neuroses?

The Morello romp included eleven giant mouse-eared bows, some more literal than others; three bellboy caps; three sets of plastic google eyes either worn sensibly on the front of one of the bellboy caps or more incongruously at the waist. Plus transparent skirts, a sheath silk-screened with what appeared to be three quarters of Madonna's face, and a chic but inexpensive-looking collarless tweed suit with fake fur cuffs.

Besides Madonna, Maurizio Modica and Pierfrancesco Gigliotti took this opportunity to introduce the world to the rest of their imaginary pals. For Autumn/Winter 2008-09, these buddies included Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Séverine Serizy, and Wham!

Wham!? Amen to that, sister. Pop culture has always been a slumgullion of disconnected idiom. In instances like these, where many of its brightest symbols seem to be disgorged at once, it feels both nauseating and liberating. The former occurs only if one allows oneself to get personally involved or to be preoccupied with intellect. The point is that there is no point. Scholars have wasted years on presumptive debate and other academic errata when there may have been nothing to evaluate in the first place. Frankie Morello does away with this nuisance speculation in a torrent of Belle de Jour hair, fake fur, and a peppy FRANK! emblazoned across another of the caps.

Culture here does not mean sophistication or anything remotely close to it. The Italians have always loved Topolino, Madonna, and evidently Wham! as well. The only people who will be upset are those who suffer fashion instead of suffering for it. The first of these two unrelated anxiety disorders is beyond the scope of the Morello aesthetic.

It might be prudent to view the Frankie Morello label as a nostrum whose purpose it is to relieve intellectual bloat, like a psychedelic antacid.

Mixing international kitsch from the Big Eighties with Kellogg's Americana from the 60's , the dynamic duo refuted the idea that fashion has to have purpose. Sometimes, all it needs is pop. And maybe a little snap and crackle.

London Fashion Week: Pugh's Eschatology

One of the best things about London is its tendency to magnify pocket subcultures that completely baffle the generation immediately preceding. In the '60s it was the Mods and Rockers, in the '70s the punks, and in the late '80s the club kids. The "club kids" tag has a wholesome, Babes in Arms feel to it, as if "club kids" are the denizens of the local soda fountain whom Mickey and Judy round up to put on a backyard show.

London's club kids are anything but naïfs in overalls. Their creative derring-do is often responsible for stylistic crazes that inspire tomorrow's runway looks, at least as concerns fashion's young Turks. By the time these trends reach the High Street, they are several months out of date.

As the Brits are wont to say, it's not bloody likely that most of Gareth Pugh's latest collection will turn up at Top Shop. Pugh, the undisputed star of fashion-as-cinema, released another costume phantasm that left one feeling as if one had gone to the movies, fallen asleep, and had a petrifying nightmare brought on by ingesting unpopped popcorn.

This is not as disagreeable as it sounds. Pugh knows how to put on a show, and as a result his are the hottest tickets in town. In the category of short feature, Pugh reigns über alles. He's an emo-coiffed club kid inspired by other club kids, all of whom must share a fascination with cinematic terror.

The Autumn/Winter 2008 collection drew heavily on a Hollywood classic that only became popular 20 years after its release. A horror movie cloaked as a morality tale, The Wizard of Oz terrified generation after generation of children with its flying monkeys and monosyllabically chanting Winkie Guards.

As far as universal fright-referents go, the monkeys and Winkies of The Wizard of Oz rank right up there with the bogeyman, goblins, and things that go bump in the night. A headdress and flared skirt from the Spring 2008 collection turn out to have been a sign of things to come. The connection to the film wasn't obvious in September. In hindsight, one was seeing a trailer for a coming attraction.

The coming attraction more than repaid the film(s) that inspired it, although in only one instance was the interpretation fairly explicit. In that look, a Winkie cross-bred with a monkey; the result was a fur dress (or greatcoat, who can tell?) with a severely flared skirt. In another, Pugh placed the monkey's fur as a shrug on a zip-front, two-toned dress that had its provenance not in Hollywood but in the Mugler-Montana continuum.

Then there were fractal collars, sleeves, and skirts, as Pugh worked with his trademark modularity and burst volumes. An ominous-looking suit and two dresses that appeared to be made of recycled aluminum turned out to be made of zippers. The designer's eye for geometry must be noted; the designs were precision mutations when they could just as easily have been malformations.

Here is where we come to the eternal, and eternally impenetrable question of what constitutes fashion. The way Chanel had it, "A fashion that goes out of fashion overnight is a distraction, not a fashion." But who are we to say whether what Pugh did for autumn will disappear by tomorrow morning? Both the flared skirts and zippered material could well show up in a suburban mall, but how much does indirect reference count towards qualification?

Pugh's spectacles tend more towards technical wizardry than they do to dramatic narrative. Although high entertainment, they aren't exactly Stanislavkian. Psychological truth and emotional life are subjugated in favor of special effects. This leads to a feeling that what appears on the runway has been outsourced by a Hollywood costume department. In turn, the objective of the work seems to lie in conspicuousness, i. e. how visible it is. Considering Pugh's attachment to the club scene, this is defensible; visibility and recognition are of utmost importance.

For the sake of argument, let's say that adults have demands that often render them serious and incapable of having child-like fun (a terrible proposition). As adults, we may have forgotten that fear can be not just terrifying but also thrilling. Hollywood has exploited this successfully and so has Pugh. We may well have outgrown and rationalized our early fears so that they are no longer points of reference. We've replaced them with far worse things that we'd never dream of using as a basis for fashion. So what if what Pugh sent down the runway was a teenage eschatology? When was the last time you tried to save humankind from warrior cyborgs?

It was the end of the world, and fifteen bucks buys you a front-row seat. At the local multiplex, that is. Don't forget to bring your lightsaber.

London Fashion Week: The Beautiful Damage of Marios Schwab

Although they might not recognize today's colloquialism, the Egyptians pioneered what is now known as "body con" dressing. "Body con" is a very ancient borrowing that was buried with the Pharoahs and which the Bandage dress resurrected.

A year ago, fashion critics nudged Marios Schwab to move away from "body con" design. Body con was beginning to look dated, they said, even though they had said it in 2006 and had probably said it as far back as the Ptolemaic dynasty. Schwab responded by creating exoskeletal dresses for Spring 2008. Wrapping the body in its own frame was a way to momentarily sidestep an outmoded fashion tradition while clarifying that Schwab's extracurricular erudition would continue to play a large role in his evolution as a designer.

Both body con and that somewhat esoteric academic interest have returned for fall in what might be termed a collection of perception. This time around, it was clear that design and erudition are inseparable. The runway may be an unusual place to ponder what is sometimes found in a textbook of deviant psychology, but that's his genius. Anatomical hobby and kink, it turns out, are fine bedfellows. In Schwab's hands, the correspondence between the two is seamless and even rational. What Schwab causes is beautiful damage. You might want to think twice before meeting him in a dark alley, perhaps doubly when you realize that fatigue and concentration give Schwab the under-eye circles of Beetlejuice.

Schwab exhibited a museum of minor affliction with dresses that had been neatly vandalized and dissected (another fascination), bringing to mind not just surgery but autopsy. These ideas were morphologically articulated with the precision of a coroner. Although the distribution of the pattern varied from dress to dress, each garment was sliced in the vicinity of the colon. In one instance, the slashes made the petals of an abstract flower; in others they were burst outwards in order to show their contents.

Trespassing on Schwab's hobby took up one-third of the collection.

The other two-thirds of the collection included body con so extreme that one could see the grape that two models shared for lunch. Among this group were two well-advised pea coats and dresses with large rectangles cut from the bottom half through which one could study the physiology of immobility.

In all instances, the models were almost reduced to inaction by the tight circumference of the hems. Confinement, not dissection, was the idea upon which Schwab predicated the collection. These were hobble skirts with fetish in their pinch.

Schwab has turned in a thrillingly voyeuristic study that demands courage and a liking for risk. He's set apart by a frisson of danger, and right now there is room to maneuver. So long as his work doesn't appear to have been commissioned by the Black Dahlia murderer, it looks as if Schwab has the rare glory of being not just a creator but an inventor.

London Fashion Week: Ossified

They say that if you remember the '60s, you weren't really there. This aphorism doesn't apply to Avsh Alom Gur, the designer behind London Fashion Week's Ossie Clark revival. Gur was born nearly a decade after the end of that tumultuous, hallucinogenic decade.

It was in London that the art, fashion, and music worlds combined to create the city as "Swinging London," for a year the epicenter of everything that was shiny and chic.

Ossie Clark and Swinging London enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that turned Clark into the designer for the mod generation and London into the fashion capital of the world. Just as Halston's sleek jersey aligned with the disco era, so Clark and the '60s conjoined in his poetic, sinuous garments.

Clark translated Carnaby Street and the Kings Road with Pop Art geometry and flowing Victorian romanticism. Taut suits with abstract prints expressed the modernity of the era, while fluid tunics and wide-legged pants addressed its peace-loving, chimerical nature.

The business of reviving a brand depends upon an indefinite number of interconnecting factors, any one of which can be the decisive element. Can the brand transcend its era? Is the target market familiar with the brand? Does it have cultural relevancy in the present? To what degree should it refer to legacy? Is the brand so connected to a certain period that to lose the spirit of those times would mean to lose consonance? Does anyone care?

It's a conundrum, and one that was answered differently in New York and in London.

Even though the two are being linked by the media, the Clark brand is not analogous to the Halston brand. Halston had a signature piece (the shirtdress), two signature fabrics (Ultrasuede and jersey knit), and an uncomplicated, unfussy profile that was generally considered bland. The Halston label was prominent half a decade before the designer became a symbol of disco debauchery.

Halston had two sets of customers--uptown society matrons and downtown celebrities--and Clark had one. The woman who wore a Halston shirtdress in 1972 could easily carry off another one today. The renewal of the Halston line felt like the end of an interregnum, whereas the same occurrence with Clark felt forced, unnatural, and lacking in a crucial continuity. Most importantly, Clark's designs had a touch of the Arcadian that related directly to the philosophy of the era in which they were produced. This is the substantial differentiation and the main reason why the mini-collection in London seemed so out of step.

In addition, Clark was strongly associated with embellishment and Celia Birtwell's whimsical, imaginative prints. The new Clark collection dispensed with Birtwell's legacy entirely while offering a rote checklist of Ossie details: snake skin, ruffles, Lurex, wide trousers, and a billowing tunic. Most of the designs failed to make the leap to today; where do you wear what is essentially a vintage jumpsuit constructed of mustard-colored knit? The Halston collection, derivative though it was, had extension on its side. Avsh Alom Gur, on the other hand, turned in a Clark simulacrum that simply underscored the difficulties of modernized adaptation.

Successfully updating Clark would mean assuming that some signature elements had present-day applicability. Avsh Alom Gur incorporated these elements into the collection, but they felt spurious due to their original degree of elaboration, like forgeries rather than originals. The problem was nearly insurmountable. Without defining Clark in the new collection, the brand would merely be a license.

What Avsh Alom Gur showed wasn't a collection and it wasn't, as was the case with Halston, a hagiographic étude. It was more an antecedent trailer whose purpose was to pique interest and to gauge enthusiasm, and it ended up being more confusing than it was coherent.

Separated from the Birtwell prints, the collection lost the marvelous visual vulnerability that the softer of Clark's designs possessed. The most interesting part of the collection was that the designer was damned if he did, damned if he didn't. Perhaps it was best to leave Ossie in the V & A, where students of fashion and history can analyze his work as symbolic of a vanished culture and how ideologically different that culture was from ours.

Avsh Alom Gur was handed a retrograde problem, not a modern puzzle. The truth is that the best of Clark is so firmly rooted in yesterday that it may have no tomorrow.

London Fashion Week: Extrabraganza!

Maybe we expect too much of New York. We've become so accustomed to the glamour version of New York that when New York turns out to be ordinary we don't know where to turn.

Take Fashion Week, for example. Big marquee names without big marquee clothing. Dresses for socialites, debris for artists. Somewhere in between, a few comers and Anna Sui. But this is New York, where if our legends don't live up to, well, legend, then we at least expect the understudy to become the star.

New York Fashion Week bowed out with the dull befuddlement of Marc Jacobs, a collection that called for neither roses nor multiple curtain calls.

The place we should be turning is London, to Jean-Pierre Braganza.

Braganza already has a few tyro seasons under his belt. He's the young designer who was chosen by Karl Lagerfeld to be Lagerfeld's protégé in the Australian Merino Wool Innovation project. Karl has a good eye, because Braganza is poised to revive something that hasn't happened since 1967.

Braganza is making London swing again. He's the antidote to the blowout that was Paris and the glazed referendums of New York.

Perhaps Lagerfeld noticed the way Braganza stands away from the pack, creating his own separate and self-sustaining kingdom. The best designers do that and make it look effortless. You know you're daring a new world by the nomenclature: Plutonicon. Convincementavia. Mytholactica. And his Autumn/Winter 2008 collection, Chromacolyte.

Braganza is building a 21st-century escape pod, and with each collection he refines those key items that must be included on any journey into the future unknown. Since 2004, he has made these items animate through a thorough understanding of the human form and how to display it for its ultimate efficiency and eroticism. A Braganza collection is a metaphysical pilgrimage on which you destroy illusion from the outside in. It's even more rewarding if you remember your geometry and can hitch a ride on a spaceship.

Lagerfeld would have seen the way a Braganza (no need for a noun) is cut for tension and release, revealing the dynamic but never the process. These are the clothes that spark adventure; they are liberating agents when everything else is sewn up tight as a drum.

The first thing you notice in Chromacolyte is the lack of delusive detail. There's so much of this everywhere else that it takes a moment to realize that what appears to be starkness is merely Braganza pouring aqua regia on the zippers of trash culture.

It's pretty arousing stuff, and it's best experienced as an insiders' collective. These are not clothes for the High Street, but for those lodestars who will at some point in the future be called upon to deliver us from some very awkward messes of our own careless devise.

Braganza's a millenarian, and his work reads like an ongoing narrative of the next thousand years. With each new collection he streamlines and sequences a unified theme. Favorite shapes remain from season to season, with jodhpur hips, twiggy trousers, cutaway necklines, and blouson hems threaded from collection to collection. Draping is treated the way a painter treats chiaroscuro, with careful arrangement that serves the body instead of the garment. A complete absence of tricks and twists, like the lack of embellishment, seems so simple and at the same time so mysteriously obvious. Back in New York, someone is smacking his head and saying, "Of course! Why didn't I think of that?"

The reason they didn't and they won't is that they are condottieri stretching for present novelty while Braganza retrenches and redefines the future. His love of surrealism gives him both infinity and boundary, two things that should be mutually exclusive but are not when handled by one who understands natural equipoise.

Braganza is unlocking a nerve center that is poised for flight. This, children, is the shape of things to come.

Images: British Vogue

Marc Jacobs: Waisted

First, the prologue.

On Wednesday, February 6, 2008, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (the heat) indicted James Jackson (the bad guy) on charges of extortion related to the use of the 69th Regiment Armory of which Jackson was the former superintendent. Jackson stands accused of 31 counts of soliciting bribes in the form of cash, a Bowflex, and other material goods in exchange for reserving Armory space.

Twenty-four of the 31 counts related to Marc Jacobs International and KCD, a public relations company used by Jacobs. Jacobs has been holding shows at the Armory for the past seven years.

In a swift maneuver that seemed straight out of the Hoover playbook, Jackson's indictment occurred in the middle New York Fashion Week. A coincidence, Cuomo said, that occurred due to expected judicial processing times.

While an international rug company refused to pay and reported the extortion to the police, Jacobs--via KCD--paid up.

Cuomo stated that the payment of bribes could itself be a criminal act. The question of whether Jacobs has broken the law depends on unspecified circumstances still to be determined and investigated.

The show must go on, but before it did, the media indulged in some creative lead-in license:

The Daily Telegraph, Australia bookended its lead with sexual preference and scandal:

GAY fashion designer Marc Jacobs is in hot water again as justice officials investigate bribery allegations, days after reports emerged of his bizarre love triangle.

BBC News fiddled with semantics, making Jacobs the instigator:

Fashion designer Marc Jacobs' company is under investigation for allegedly bribing an official to host shows at an historic New York building.

The first act:

Imagine an Off-Off-Broadway show--let's say one of those 1960s French avant-garde pieces that no one understands but whose patrons come away feeling intellectually superior to the rest of us dolts--in which the director rushes from backstage to insist that the audience be seated before the show can begin. Or perhaps it's not French at all but just a friendly little comedy by Tom Stoppard. The kind of play that has a partially removed fourth wall and a bit more expectation in terms of audience response. The audience may or may not be asked to dance in the aisles, throw popcorn, or blow raspberries. Or they may just be admonished to sit the hell down.

The audience in these dramas becomes a cast of extras, or, in the case of the Jacobs show, a sort of humiliated Greek chorus whose only permissible vocal response would be a sigh of delight. Not too loud, though, because the orchestra has started, and it is none other than Sonic Youth, that band of undead, downtown alt-rockers who manage to keep their act hip even though Kim Gordon is nearing 60.

Outside, bouncers bar ingenue stylist Rachel Zoe from entering, which leads to a high-pitched, Acting 101 tantrum. Ms. Zoe was tardy, a social gaffe that might be defensible considering that Mr. Jacobs started his Spring 2008 show two hours late.

Post-show, Jacobs pacified Ms. Zoe, who was wearing the eye makeup of a community theater Gorgon.

This was the second time Jacobs has appeared at the start of a show. The last time was spring's backwards collection, but there he was only doing his victory lap before starting the show with look #56.

The second act:

Jacobs enjoys the thrust of social immediacy in ways usually reserved for rock stars and other blighted luminaries. He's been sober, he's relapsed, he's had something sucked out of his jowls. His last collection featured that shoe. Now, headed into the soberness of what looks to be a fairly depressing fall, he sent out a parade of proportions that for the most part did not display to best advantage on those models who appear to have taken a pre-show swig from the bottle labeled "Drink Me."

The designer admitted that he was "not inspired." It wasn't clear if he meant inspired enough to thematically follow through on an ad hoc tricorn hat that he claimed referenced Paul Revere, or whether he meant that he was not inspired in general.

Coats in colors of pavement and sky fared best, as plush countermeasures to fall's bony grip. Unexceptional sweaters and pants that grappled with hipbones detracted from some probably outdated idea of fashion as physical enrichment. The focus was on movable or non-existent waist, an idea Jacobs continued from the spring collection. Often, Jacobs dropped waists until proportion turned into distortion. Due to the large number of disproportionate midsections, the most gracile looks had no waists at all.

The third act:

This wasn't the collection to make anyone drop trou, even if it appeared that some of the models might. But Jacobs designs for urban environments like Manhattan where in many instances what is needed is not art but stealth, and this collection is just the bland urban camo you'd want for sneaking past enemy lines.

Image: Style.com

Bill Blass: Som-nambulant

The classic American designer is six feet under. Or at least two of their leading number are, which is one reason that labels like Halston and Bill Blass are having such a hard time reanimating. Yesterday it was Peter Som's turn to breathe life into what had at one time been a big-league brand: Bill Blass. Blass died in 2002, and in the six years since four designers have braved the challenge. The first was fired after his debut collection; the second lasted slightly longer and the third lasted two seasons longer than the second. Now there is a fourth. Peter Som, who has an eponymous label, worked in the Blass design room before branching out on his own. Som designs polite frocks and slightly matronly separates for the type of young lady who legitimately gets married in white. On occasion, a look will be so demure that it seems like a reaction to the present cheapness of youth culture.

American fashion has taken a smackdown since the 1980s. Formerly marked by a good taste that was handed down from mother to daughter, it is now a battleground of generational opposition. Daughters no longer wish to look like their mothers; they want to wear expensively deconstructed apparel with odd, often fetish-like decoration. Or they buy frothy couture that looks like a child's idea of a grown-up's dress. In this latter they pose coyly, with their toes turned in and their shoulders hunched against adulthood.

It works the other way as well; a recent spate of tulle brought out the little ballerina in fifty-somethings.

The designers fired by the Blass label received a manifesto that stressed the importance of designing for the younger generation, including Young Hollywood. That, it was emphasized, is where the money and the all-important branding opportunities are. We have become a culture that lives by flashbulb and strobe; there is no underestimating the instantaneous sales boomerang of well-placed paparazzi photographs.

Som walked into this modern conundrum with the experience of his prior work at the label, and then he sleepwalked through his first collection.

The problem is that Som was asked not just to bring fresh relevancy to a label, but to spearhead--along with Marco Zanini at Halston-- an American fashion renaissance. For whatever reason, this burden rests with the designers of the master-class brands. In an ideal world, these younger designers would become not only heirs but arbiters.

The world is not ideal and the task is not simple: Honor thy father while making him hip. It's a tall order and one that is so far driving a further wedge between the generations. The clothes Som designed for Blass were supposed to satisfy the needs of both child and parent and perhaps the odd grandmother thrown in between.

It's no wonder Som reached into the grave and reiterated some of the less important classic Blass. Marco Zanini played safe--too safe-- while acting as a medium at Halston, and Som tiptoed towards Blass holding the pretty-party dance card. In either case, there was the well-publicized demand for vigorous fiscal return.

Zanini's Halston collection was deliberately imitative and retro; Som for Blass was imitative and not new. Those designs he chose as his guide simply looked unfresh, referring to an era that had as two of its main features social inaccessibility and a certain powdered vanity. His job was to style this past into something presently approachable.

He did something right, although exactly what might be missed in the critical drubbing. Perhaps drubbing is the wrong word, it implies that someone is invested. Yawning might be the better choice. Still, there is a small segment of society that does not want its fashion separated from its ego, and that is where Som's collection succeeded. These are the anti-modernists, and yes, many of them are young conservative Republicans. For the rest, who put their own idiosyncrasies before societal expectations, Som's show was full of bourgeois uniforms.

Let's assume that the definition of "fashion" must include recency. Not random alteration without momentum, but recency. If this is the case, then Som's designs are not "fashion"; they fall into a netherworld of middle-class values in which the presumption of taste is probably the most critical element. They are past-tense class markers when class markers are no longer fashionable themselves.

It's not the end of the world, but it's not the beginning of a new one, either.

Images: Style.com

Mainlining Michael Kors

Michael Kors began his career at a propitious time for American fashion. In 1981, the druggy symbiosis between designers and celebrity culture was over. In its place was the healthy aesthetic of Ralph Lauren, a designer who celebrated the American woman by not placing her on the brink of scandal. Lauren gave American fashion a renewed etiquette and reclaimed it from the borderline vulgarity of the disco era.

Twenty years earlier, American fashion was a nearly featureless landscape. What would become signature American style had its roots in the outfits Oleg Cassini designed for Jackie Kennedy. Cassini cut his dresses as simply as possible, allowing the First Lady's beauty and gentility to speak for themselves. Although a European by birth, Cassini smartly avoided overt reference to the Parisian houses that either favored distortion or carried with them a sort of existential ballast. American style as seen through the Cassini prism celebrated the art of tasteful, streamlined living.

Lauren's Connecticut plaids and high-collared blouses were the direct ancestors of Cassini's earlier work and the consumer responded enthusiastically. The class that had been disenfranchised by the disco era was back.

Michael Kors is heir to that legacy of discretion. Unlike Lauren, whose rugged good looks propelled many ad campaigns, the less photogenic Kors would spend two decades in the background.

And then came Project Runway. The popular reality show revealed Kors to have a slightly cumbrous personality and a fondness for the tanning booth. He rejected garments that reminded him of mothers of the bride. His ability to provide effective critique was often overshadowed by idiom; his detractors lampooned him when, mirabile dictu, he twice lauded contestants' garments by exclaiming, "That crotch is insane!"

Recently, he announced that he didn't think straight men could design for women.

So Kors is a bit of a bumbler when it comes to shaping a public image, but his designs continue to advance American style even as they look to the '60s for inspiration.

Kors has a widely recognized love of classic Hollywood that often appears in his work. For Fall 2008, he engaged a famously cool heroine, the arctic blonde.

If you buy into Hitchcockian myth, arctic blondes are fascinating, dichotomous creatures whose surface sterility conceals a wanton interior nature. So widely disseminated is this character that Kors could easily have turned her into caricature.

Dressing a stereotype creates a special problem set. Narrow-mindedness would cause the designs to look like costumes, even as the costumes they reference were themselves referencing the rigid dress code of the Philadelphia Main Line. Then there's the problem of models: They just don't build 'em like Grace Kelley any more. Should the collection then be transformative or does one take it as a fond, retro citation? The answer seems to lie in whether the collection has a natural motif that can be delicately advanced.

One thing is clear: Kors is steeped in this character's developmental phases. First seen as a bookish graduate in sweaters and slim skirts (with horn-rimmed glasses), she later acquires the extensive and liberated wardrobe of Helen Gurley Brown's original Cosmo girl. Her newfound skill in mixing purple with green gives her the confidence she needs to move from secretary to matrimonial partner. She also moves beyond her grandmother's vintage stole and allows a junior partner to buy her a swanky, gray mink capelet.

Her mother does not approve of this gift.

After she marries a stockbroker and moves back to the Main Line, she becomes a modest yet successful hostess attired in a chaste evening gown whose gray color and full, hostess-pajama skirt evoke Mamie Eisenhower when it is likely supposed to recall her chicer successor.

There were only two missteps, one more serious than the other. There were no insane crotches. Television has a way of building expectation even as it inevitably disappoints. For those who were able to live with unremarkable crotches on slim capris, Kors rewarded us with an over-televised find: Britney Spears' castoff fedoras.

Thom Browne's Schooldays

Thom Browne's mission is one of education. Men, he feels, are incapable of moving beyond the closet of the eternal boy. Said boy wears jeans around his lower hips and exposes his boxers; his shirt of choice is made by Hanes. Even when the boy takes on one of life's greater responsibilities--a job--he remains a sartorial Peter Pan.

The American workplace has changed. It is now a bigger battleground than ever, thanks to a spurious "benefit" known as Casual Friday. Men were unable to interpret Casual Friday to their advantage and floundered while attempting to decode it. If one wore a suit on Casual Friday, one would not be seen as atta-boy, one of the gang. It wouldn't do to wear the clothes one wore while washing the car, either. This would be a mark of disrespect and worse, a sign that the wearer either wasn't serious about his career or was a Class-A idiot.

Neither outcome boded well for the white-collar male.

The Casual Friday dress code generally held that collared polo shirts and khaki trousers were acceptable workplace attire. But polo shirts and khaki trousers were in many ways more of a symbolic stranglehold than the suit. Suits at least varied in cut and men have since time immemorial been fairly expressive with ties. Browne felt that business dress demanded rehabilitation, and when he accomplished rehabilitation the previous mode of dress would become obsolete. The idea was not a new one. Adapting dress to serve the needs of the wearer and to improve his appearance dates back to the Upper Paleolithic period. Browne's premise was simple and sensible. More importantly, it solved a critical social problem.

With no formal training, Browne took on the gargantuan task of overhauling menswear. Men's professional clothing had devolved into uselessness. He rapped some knuckles in his debut collection: Ankles and wrists must be exposed. This was the first indication that Browne's signature look would consistently refer back to the Catholic schoolboy and the schoolboy's short, emasculating trousers.

Short pants have always been a linguistic metaphor. The expression "short pants" refers to the act of being one-upped, generally with no small amount of embarassment. Men do not take kindly to being short-pantsed, either on military or on workplace battlefields. Someone who has been short-pantsed or someone who is wearing them will probably spend the next year trying to live it down.

Thom Browne envisioned the working man as needing a rigorous set of rules, and then he formulated those rules using his peculiar Catholic logic. Men were not dressing organically. A Thom Browne suit would do away with the question of current style or fit: His suits would be straitjacket-tight. He wouldn't be concerned with either art or beauty, because art and beauty have a tendency to get in the way. Once he had adapted men's business dress to his rules, he would take on every other decorative aspect of a man's life. In a 2006 interview, he stated that he intended to author entire lifestyles.

And so Thom Browne fought the illogicality of men's dress and replaced it with aberration.

Aberration is a subjective--and probably pejorative--term that arises from critical response to the ongoing evolution of Thom Browne, designer. His suits sell well in Japan, home to a generation of fantastically erratic dressers. In America, the designs have at the very least created startled (and often repulsed) buzz.

Browne's Fall 2008 collection may have boosted that buzz to a lunatic's cry. In a fine punk moment, Browne channeled his inner Johnny Rotten with a show he set in an asylum circus. History may be on the verge of repeating itself. Rotten famously jeered "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" at his Winterland audience, right before he walked off the stage and quit the band that made him famous. What he meant was that the jig (or gig) was up. The joke, he sneered, was on you.

You, of course, were a moron for buying a ticket.

So preposterous was Browne's fall collection that it is hard to see it for anything other than a middle finger to both the fashion industry and to that part of society that hasn't reached a point in its evolution where it can appreciate and applaud Browne's stylistic kink. Or it could have been an onanistic display of his own sexual desires, in which case we're in trouble. His original logic in bringing the working man closer to his business culture failed so badly in this instance that the exact opposite occurred.

In order to appreciate Browne, the customer needs to consider overall message. Men's clothes do not fit properly and men do not often update or adapt well. Men excel at many things, but sartorial evolution isn't one of them. Browne makes a good case for a slimmer suit; it enhances and smartens the body the way the best women's designs do.

That, however, is the only solid point he made. Structurally, he was as focused as he has ever been. The trouble is that this is now an older focus, and one that Browne chose to update and reinforce through self-indulgent absurdity. Parading around the circus ring were malchik altar boys, a feathered Yeti, Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a Siamese-twin Tweedledee. Many wore knitted dunce caps; one wore a baby's bonnet. A few wore cloaks of acolyte fetish.

Underlying it all was a sense of aggrieved nose-thumbing. The message, maybe: Men are nothing but children who run amok in the corporate world and probably keep odd collections of beetles at home. Corporal punishment would solve the problem, but until such time as we revert to the rod we understand that men are deviant schoolboys with a madman's sense of style.

At least that's what it looked like from the sidelines.

Images: MEN.STYLE.COM