by Simon Doonan
The casting is very bold. Fashion models are outnumbered by “real people.” An endless stream of mysterious characters—twins, potentates, librarians, policewomen, high priestesses, mystics and concubines—are all attired in Adrover’s new Middle Eastern–ish designs. As American fashion shows go, this one is very original and extremely creative. It’s like watching a Pasolini movie. Soon it would morph into a Jacques Tati movie. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The Adrover clothing is as diverse as the casting, a something-for-everyone parade of men’s tailored jackets, stained and torn kaftans, high-necked ruffled Pollyanna dresses, Foreign Legion uniforms, blousons and majestic robes made out of muddied sateen or recycled quilted packing blankets. Turbans and veils abound.
Though Miguel is a beginner, this show, with its bold, cinematic celebration of filth and grandeur, is genuinely impressive. It has gravitas . . .
. . . and then it doesn’t.
Suddenly, without warning, slapstick invades the casbah.
A sturdy lady in a hijab and a nicely cut suit appears on the runway. She is not alone. Accompanying her is a large hairy black goat. There is a whiff of Edward Gorey about this sinister animal. It has horns. It has cloven feet. It has long coarse silky hair. It is the devil.
This beast may well have been more than cooperative in rehearsal. I am sure he trotted alongside his minder with nary a sideways glance. Now Mr. Devil Goat is faced with a seething souk of unknown faces, and it’s a whole other story.
This animal takes one look at the crowd of fashion luminaries and slams on the brakes. This is one huge goat. The instant deceleration causes the veiled lady to stumble and screech to an inelegant halt. She glares at Satan. Satan refuses to budge.
Instant traffic jam.
The show comes to a complete standstill. Everything stops except the paparazzi. For some reason, they appear to be taking more pictures than usual. Flash! Flash! Flash!
The lady becomes very agitated. She knows that if she and her cloven companion don’t start moving again, the show cannot continue. Models are already accumulating behind her like so many ketchup bottles on a factory conveyor belt. She has to act NOW.
Abandoning all pretense of fashion elegance, she turns around and, assuming a skirt-splitting tug-of-war stance, the plucky model attempts to haul the stubborn beast down the runway, à la tow truck. Tug. Tug. Resist. Resist. Flash! Flash! Flash! This standoff continues for an excruciating minute or so.
In the face of this determination, the satanic goat takes the only course open to him: suicide.
To shrieks of horror from the assembled crowd, the massive hairy black beast pitches itself, legs revolving uppermost, off the back of the runway and disappears from view.
A collective gasp removes most of the oxygen from the vast auditorium.
If it were not for her strength and her low center of gravity, Satan’s date would have followed him into the abyss. This courageous lady is still standing on the runway, clutching the end of Satan’s tether and staring down into the black hole at the back of the runway.
Suddenly the beast reappears, or rather its mocking head does. Plonk.
At this point in the proceedings I am reminded of the old story of the tubby opera singer who, at the denouement of Tosca, flings herself, on cue, from the ramparts of the Castel Sant’Angelo only to land on the thoughtfully placed mattresses and then bounce back into full view of the audience.
The goat rests his skull on the ledge of the runway and stares at the fashion flock with a glassy gaze. It eyes the audience with a cheeky defiance, the same cheeky defiance which I have seen in the eyes of other supermodels, Linda Evangelista being a good example.
As I mentioned, Satan’s companion is still clutching the leash. Her tenacity is impressive. She is clearly unwilling to admit defeat. She will not proceed without her accessory. Boldly and optimistically, she attempts to pull the animal back up onto the runway. Satan probably weighs about three hundred pounds.
Would she have been better advised to let go of the tether and keep walking, thereby allowing the show to continue? Quite possibly. But she didn’t. Instead she persevered.
She is not the only one who is determined to force this rogue four-legged model to fulfill his obligations. An executive from Mr. Adrover’s parent company, a distinguished middle-aged man in a pinstripe bespoke suit, leaps onto the runway and attempts to wrangle the beast himself.
“We booked you for this show, and you’re gonna model or else!”
Flash! Flash! Flash!
The tussle continues. There is no way to describe the explosive delight of the banks of paparazzi. Never in the history of fashion has there been such an uncooperative mannequin.
Eventually, the wranglers admit defeat and the animal slides under the runway never to be seen again.
The show eventually concludes without further incident. It was beautiful and memorable, and was punctuated by one of the best comic vignettes ever to have played out on a fashion runway.
As I wandered home, I lamented the absence of Mr. Crisp, the man who unwittingly played such a key role in Mr. Adrover’s success. If it had not been for Quentin and his mattress, the goat fiasco would never have taken place. I pictured the ghost of Quentin, sitting in the front row, smiling discreetly and coquettishly.
I always had a soft spot for Quent. We were connected in all kinds of strange ways. Back in seventies London, we often rode the same #22 bus to Chelsea. I would contrive to sit next to him in order to extract some piece of drollery. Despite his barbed wit, I always felt very comfortable around the stately homo. This may well have been because he bore such an uncanny resemblance to my own mother, especially when he played Elizabeth I in Tilda Swinton’s breakout movie Orlando.
“It’s Mum!” screeched my sister into my answering machine, after she had seen the movie. “Rush out now and see it! You won’t believe the resemblance!”
Like his doppelgänger, Betty Doonan, Quentin was also highly quotable, a little Oscar Wilde and a little Erma Bombeck.
“Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.”
“There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years, the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”
As the glamorous anarchy of the Adrover show sank in, several more Quentin-style bon mots floated back into my consciousness.
“It’s no good running a pig farm badly for thirty years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.”
“Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence, I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.”
“Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.”
And speaking of fringe . . .
Frantic postshow inquiries revealed that the long-haired goat slept through the rest of the show, after which he was fed and then conveyed back to the farm, his fashion career in tatters.
the nude wall phone
“SO, GET THIS. Last night I sneezed and my back popped out, so the doctor gave me a girdle. It’s not funny, asshole! I’m wearing it now. Go ahead, feel it. Feel it! Don’t be chickenshit. Feel my fuckin’ girdle!”
I reached out and touched Morty. I ran my hand across the broad, rock-hard landscape of his freshly corseted torso. It felt dense and unyielding, like a bag of cement. And there were whalebones. Yes, there was no denying it. Morty was definitely wearing a girdle.
“Oh, and another fuckin’ thing.” Morty opened a desk drawer and took out a small filthy plastic cup with an inch of pinkish liquid in the bottom. He thrust it under my nose.
“I’ve got blood in my urine. Look.”
I winced and recoiled, as one does from a forward-thrusted cup of someone else’s blood-infused urine.
“So
, can I go home, fer chrissakes?”
Welcome to my world.
Welcome to the glamorous world of high-fashion retail.
Morty was an ancient heterosexual window dresser and a truculent hypochondriac, a rare breed indeed. At the time, I was his boss, which was a surreal experience at best. Any attempts to give instruction or assign work to Morty were met with requests to examine recently emerged kidney stones or check out a bulging lymph node or a volcanic pustule. He was treading water until retirement. I had inherited Morty, with his girdles and neck braces and dusty cups of urine. He was grandfathered in.
Though window dressers tend to be male, our team was mostly female and often highly strung. At the top of the food chain was Monique. Though I was the official boss, Monique was definitely the éminence grise. Like a wardress in a 1950s women’s-prison B movie, she clanked around with a large bunch of keys on her belt. She locked up the tool cabinet at night. She kept track of everyone’s vacation days. She organized the Secret Santa. She would tip me off if one of the window dressers was thieving or copulating with another window dresser in the mannequin room when nobody was looking.
Nurturing, sarcastic and lethal if double-crossed, Monique was one tough dyke. Nothing seemed to faze her. She had worked in display for years, and she’d seen it all: the booze, the dope, the tinsel, the laughter, the glue-gun burns and the fairy-light electrocutions.
Monique loved deep-sea fishing. She spent her weekends throwing buckets of rotting chum into Long Island Sound. Angling was not Monique’s only passion: she maintained a lively and academic interest in serial killers and spent her evenings glued to the Court TV coverage of the Jeffrey Dahmer trial. A portrait of John Wayne Gacy adorned her desk.
Monique had an assistant, a tall, regal black girl named Yana who dealt with invoices and phone answering. (This was eons before cell phones, and twelve of us shared a plastic nude-colored wall-mounted instrument which dangled next to Yana’s desk.) She wore a massive pendant inscribed with a revealing message that read I WAS BORN ENTITLED. Yana was my first exposure to the phenomenon of the BAP, the Black American Princess. Her goal was to marry, as soon as possible, somebody rich so that she could hand in her notice and become a lady of leisure. She planned to come shopping at the store every day, pausing in front of the windows to mock her former coworkers.
Yana was extremely disturbed by the filth and the Chelsea Hotel–ish, anything-goes ethos of our sprawling basement studio. She particularly disliked the smelly menagerie which came to occupy some of the empty mannequin bins.
The no-pets policy which governed the rest of this particular retail establishment meant nothing to us. Two neo-punk-rock chicks called Sheree and Elise raised stick insects in a cracked aquarium. A boy called Priscilla—Monique gave all the boys girls’ names—treated the display studio as a pet day-care facility for his cocker spaniel, hamster, and an aging parakeet.
And speaking of day care . . .
Tight as I was with Monique, she scared me somewhat. We maintained a certain distance. My closest pal was an intense young window dresser named Cynthia, Cynders to her coworkers.
Cynders had a problematic relationship with her boyfriend. When things were bad, she would work out her hostilities by calling a particular New Jersey gun store and conducting loud, mysterious conversations about firearms.
“I need a revolver. How quickly can I get one?” Cynders would ask the person on the other end of the line, waving a cup of coffee in her other hand.
“And some bullets. Yeah, lots of bullets,” emphasized Cynders, adding in a chirpy way, “By the way, how much are bullets?”
Thankfully, Cynders never morphed into Valerie Solanas. She was just a stressed-out single mother letting off steam. Yes, Cynders had a baby boy and, unbeknownst to Human Resources, she brought him to work every day. Who looked after the little fella? While she worked her display magic in the glamorous, twinkling, aboveground emporium of elegance and style, Cynders’s mother tended to the needs of her grandchild in the lunchroom of our dank basement studio. This lady was no ordinary granny: she was a full-blown, saffron-robed, chanting, finger-cymbal-chinging Hare Krishna. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Krishnas were quite ubiquitous back then. Where did they all go? Let’s not get sidetracked.
Granny Krishna, as we called her, quickly became absorbed into our little Warhol factory of marginalized freaks. We rather liked the idea of having our very own resident mystic.
Granny Krishna sat for hours next to the microwave, rocking her grandson in an improvised saffron-schmatta hammock. She would chant, and om and hare, hare, and when she got bored, she played cards with Morty.
On the morning Morty showed me the urine-filled cup and forced me to feel his girdle, neither he nor I had any idea that big changes were coming. The clock was ticking for Morty and his malades imaginaires—and for all of us.
• • •
LESBIANS ARE GREAT. I count many among my friends and relatives, and am sympathetic to their struggles and familiar with their strengths and weaknesses. I also have a good working knowledge of their likes and dislikes. For example, I know that they loathe sweeping generalizations about lesbians. (Any lesbian reading this paragraph will already have blown her indignation gaskets.)
In addition to their antipathy toward sweeping generalizations, lesbians also loathe patriarchal organizations and corporations. They are—not without reason—wary of being taken advantage of by “the man.”
Gay men, on the other hand, rather like the idea of masculine dominance. They think big daddy is hot. Lesbians are jihadists against hetero male power. Their goal is to take down Mr. Big Stuff and they are quite prepared to slog through the fine print in order to do so. As a result, lesbians can be very nitpicky and litigious. If you work alongside a bunch of lesbians (I suggest that the collective noun for lesbians might be a “carpal tunnel” of lesbians), it is only a matter of time before a lesbian lawsuit comes through the door. They call this “taking back the night.”
The lesbian willingness to read the fine print and unearth hidden inequities and injustices can be annoying, but it can also be a force for good. Such was the case with the Morty debacle.
On the morning of the girdle and the blood-infused urine, Monique and her jangling keys came into my office and plonked a piece of paper on my desk. I winced slightly. Paperwork frightened me. My personal motto was taken from “Private Life,” a popular Grace Jones song at the time: “I am very superficial. I hate anything official.”
Monique hoisted herself onto the corner of my desk and gulped her cup of joe.
“This is our union contract. I took it home last night and read it.”
While contract reading was like crack cocaine to Monique, the same could not be said of me.
“Oh, God. Poor you. Quel bore!”
“I am assuming that you, being the big limp-wristed pansy that you are, have never bothered to read it.”
I went over to the interior window which looked out onto the studio floor and waved encouragement at my busy creative colleagues. They were a frenzy of papier-mâchéing, stapling, and glue gunning. In the near corner a window dresser was ratting an auburn B-52s wig, stabilizing it with can after can of superhold hairspray while another queen tried to attach a chicken-wire tiara onto the top.
“I am more interested in fluffing wigs and figuring out ways to make showgirl lashes out of ostrich feathers than reading contracts.”
“Let me give it to you in a nutshell,” said Monique, hooking her thumbs into her belt loops and puffing out her bound chest. “This contract details our pay-raise guidelines and pensions and medical. The works.”
She picked up a ratting comb which happened to be on my desk and tweaked an organic sesame seed out of her teeth using the point and then continued.
“It’s a great contract, by which I mean it’s a great contract if you happen to be over sixty,
which none of us motherfucking are.”
“Except for one person . . .”
“Morty! Morty wrote this contract.”
Not only was Morty a member of my display team, but he was also, as chance would have it, the head of the window dressers’ union. Yes, I kid you not, there was a window dressers’ union. And we, the flotsam and jetsam of humanity who constituted the display department, along with the gals and gays at every other store-display studio in town, were all members of Morty’s window-dressing union.
Monique proceeded to show me how the contract was only beneficial to a certain girdle wearer.
“What’s to be done?”
“We need to decertify out of the union.”
Suddenly I saw Monique on the ramparts, like a reverse Norma Rae. I saw placards too.
WINDOW-DRESSER FREAKS LEAVE UNION.
STAPLE-GUN QUEENS AND GLUE-GUN DYKES GO ROGUE.
HEAD WINDOW DRESSER KNEECAPPED AFTER ATTEMPTING TO DEUNIONIZE.
“Grab your clutch-purse. We have a meeting in HR in five minutes.”
Monique threw all of her considerable weight behind this new cause. Over the next few days, she and I spent entire afternoons locked in meetings with union lawyers and store personnel. She banged the table a lot while I stared into the middle distance. I had no idea what they were talking about. I missed my wigs.
It was a tense time. Morty took off his girdle and replaced it with a foot cast. He walked around with a knowing smirk on his face, saying nothing, doing nothing.
Then, without any warning, he dropped a massive bombshell.
Morty announced that our display union was being swallowed up by the United Steelworkers. I had no idea what this meant. It sounded terrifying.
According to Morty, there was no way in hell we were going to be allowed to secede. And if we knew what was right for us, we would “not fuck with the big boys.”
“But what if the big boys want to fuck with us?” joked Priscilla.
Chuckles aside, we knew there was no denying the fact that Morty had played an ace. How could Monique, just a simple dyke with psycho-killer daydreams and a fishing rod, go up against the biggest union in the history of unions?