The Asylum

by Simon Doonan

  Meanwhile, back in Capri.

  Despite the toenail fungus, Jonny and I are having a luscious time. Capri is a great place for skipping. Thanks to my Birkenstocks, my affliction goes unnoticed by the international glitterati. Until . . .

  Out of the blue, we receive an unexpected invitation to dine with the velvet mafia aboard an extremely long yacht. Whose yacht? I refuse to name names. As you can tell, I am a very sensitive, private person who would never divulge the details of his personal life.

  The truth is I don’t want to annoy the velvet mafia by blabbing too much. If they became annoyed, they might break my kneecaps, and then I could no longer skip. However, I will tell you this: To skip from one end of this particular boat to the other would take at least twenty minutes.

  If there is one thing I know about the velvet mafia, they all get regular pedicures. So I prepped for the occasion by Ped Egging my tootsies, sloshing on an extra layer of ciclopirox and donning my Birkenstocks.

  But my cunning preparations were all in vain. When we arrived at said boat, we were—horror of horrors—immediately told to remove our shoes!

  Cocktails on the poop deck!

  “What the hell is wrong with you,” hissed my Jonny a few minutes later. “You look like Ratso Rizzo with his gimpy leg.” I looked at my reflection in an adjacent lacquered wall. (Yes, the velvet mafia lacquers the walls of their pleasure boats, that’s how velvety it gets.) One leg was pretzeled awkwardly around the other, my left foot mashing onto my right foot in an unsuccessful effort to conceal the grotesque digit.

  And suddenly—Ciao! Dolce vita! Arrivederci, Roma!—there’s Tom.

  Tom Ford, fresh from the triumphant opening of his severely chic new store in Milan, is lounging on a mound of cushions and he’s talking eyebrows. Eyebrows! Eyebrows! Eyebrows!

  He takes no interest in my afflicted toe. He only has eyes for my eyebrows, and everybody’s eyebrows. Eyebrows, it quickly becomes apparent, are his new canvas. He has moved on from the moist lip and is now devoting himself to a tenacious pursuit of the perfect tweeze.

  The handsomely browed Mr. Ford is, as it turns out, a font of tips and information about the improvement and shaping of brows. He vehemently cautions my Jonny, a gritty potter who has never even thought much about his eyebrows, against sloppy dye jobs and overtweezing.

  Suddenly, and without warning, Tom ditches the eyebrow seminar. He grabs me and begins to physically deconstruct my outfit. I permit him to restyle me. First, he’s Tom Ford, so why not? Second, if he’s focusing on my outfit, at least he won’t be looking at my toenail.

  Tom is of the opinion that I look much too uptight and “tucked in.” I am sure he is right. I have never been good at doing the rumpled sauvage look. I was born mod. I came of age in a mod world. I will die mod, and we mods don’t do degagé. We do neat. In addition to which I think the rumpled look only works if you are tall and tanned, and have a moist lip and a dewy six-pack. On a short, dry-lipped person such as myself, messy looks tradge.

  Despite my protestations, Tom is determined to crease up my shirt and pull it out of my pants, and maybe even tie the two front shirttails into a sassy knot. This is not easily accomplished since I have painstakingly tucked my shirttails neatly inside my underpants. Okay, I know that’s a seriously naff thing to do, but that’s just how I am. I need to know that my shirt will remain in place no matter how much skipping I do.

  So Tom is yanking my shirt—hard, very hard. Somehow he also has hold of the waistband of my underpants. Elastic is straining. Buttons are flying. Beads of sweat are accumulating.

  “Tom! Leave him alone!” yells Tom’s lovely boyfriend, Richard Buckley, adding, somewhat disconcertingly, “Maybe he likes the way he looks!”

  But Tom keeps on sauvaging me. The more he yanks, the more my underpants ride up.

  Suddenly, I realize the full horror of my situation: Tom Ford is giving me a wedgy in front of the entire velvet mafia. It’s only a matter of time before one of them notices my toe. ’Ere long I shall be walking the velvet plank.

  Valentino, swathed in linen and pastel cashmere and clearly enjoying his well-deserved retirement with unapologetic Italian élan, clocks my fungalicious tootsie and freezes.

  He shudders. He closes his eyes and clutches imaginary pearls.

  I am totally busted. All eyes are on my hideous toe. Including Tom’s.

  Val then turns his gaze across the Med toward the hilltop ruins of the villa where the Emperor Tiberius—perverted, herpes-encrusted and hideous—lived out his final sordid years.

  Val’s gesture was a salutary reminder to all of us that there is always someone more grotty, more leprous than oneself.

  toxins are the new cargo pants

  BACK IN THE 1950S, stylish girls would do anything to achieve that rail-thin, society-bitch, Babe Paley silhouette. It wasn’t enough to torture your innards into a long-line girdle, you also needed a little helper, or, more specifically, a tapeworm. This was the midcentury version of a gastric bypass. You were nobody unless you had your own live-in parasite.

  If you think this is grotesque, then hang on to your gizzards. There is stuff going on today which makes all that tapeworm swallowing of yesteryear seem positively cutesy. The history of fashion and food, and the relationship between the two, is both fascinating and disturbing. Every decade I have observed new foodie fads and disorders arrive on the scene, searing the gorges and scraping the bowels of every fashion person in their path, and every decade things get more insane . . .

  Let’s get the gnarliest trend out of the way first. I am not going to sugarcoat it for you. I am just going to come right out and say it: There are fashionable people walking among us who are drinking their own urine. There, I’ve said it.

  Unsurprisingly, this particular fad first reared its head in the late sixties when hippies spent their spare time sitting in orgone* boxes, drilling holes in one another’s heads—it’s called trepanning—and swallowing extremely long rags, all at the insistence of their hollow-eyed yogis. It was an all-bets-are-off era of consciousness-raising, experimentation and, yes, urine drinking.

  The goal of drinking your own pee? Mental clarity, spiritual and physical well-being and, last but not least, beauty. Among the notables who gave it a whirl was J. D. Salinger. You could say he liked to take the piss out of himself.

  The great hippie revival started at the end of the twentieth century and continues today. Caftans, communes, organic food co-ops, greenmarkets and music festivals all came back into vogue, and so did . . . gulp . . . urine drinking. Convinced of the health and beauty benefits of this transgressive activity, style mavens began enthusiastically partaking of their own piddle on a daily basis.

  I became fascinated by the return of this taboo-busting practice. In a desperate attempt to understand the phenomenon, I sought out and interviewed several fashionable guzzlers. I wanted to get inside their heads, if not their bladders.

  “I’m a devotee,” a magazine editor told me on condition of the strictest anonymity, “and I never get colds. My Japanese uncle taught me how to get the best results, but it’s not the subject of dinner-party chat. It’s between me and my pee.”

  “It’s healing and cleansing and, yes, I think it’s really catching on,” said a fashion consultant and stylist. “If you do drugs or booze, you can taste it the next day. I’m very careful about who I tell. If word got out, I could never show my face at the Four Seasons again.”

  Others were more out and proud.

  “What’s the big deal?” said New York–based photographer Johnny Rozsa. “Urine therapy has been around for so long and the benefits are so well documented. I’m not a golden-shower queen: I started doing it to help my psoriasis. During that period, I noticed my skin was like a baby’s bottom—a clean one, I might add. People think of piss as dirty, they associate it with poop. What I’ve discovered, along with many others—incl
uding Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri—is the pure magic of pee. It’s mostly urea, which has so many gorgeous properties!”

  Mr. Rozsa grudgingly admitted that “the whole thing is a bit of a palaver,” adding, “You see, you have to drink the middle pee when you wake up.”

  Middle pee?

  “You pee out the first bit, then clench, then pee into a glass, clench again and pee the rest down the toilet. I add apple juice to the ‘middle’ urine and gulp it down.”

  After encountering all these rabidly pro-urine opinions, I started to wonder why I was not giving it a whirl.

  Fortunately, just in the nick of time, I happened upon a balanced assessment of urine drinking written by a bloke named Robert Todd Carroll. He lays out the pros and cons in a straightforward manner, ultimately labeling it a fairly harmless practice. Pee is, after all, 95 percent water; the rest is nitrogenous waste from the liver, including a few excess minerals and nutrients that might get absorbed if you gave them a second chance. His conclusion? “As a daily tonic, there are much tastier ways to introduce healthful products into one’s bloodstream.” Mr. Carroll does, however, highly recommend drinking pee “for those rare occasions when one is buried beneath a building or lost at sea for a week or two.”

  Less cringe making than urine drinking, but no less incomprehensible, is the new mania for eating raw. Yes, fashion folk are hanging up their pots and pans for good. The raw-food trend is, even as I write, sweeping the alimentary canals of the modishly spiritual.

  The original hippies were always much too busy skipping through the glades of Golden Gate Park to be bothered with elaborate culinary preparations. It was inevitable that they would go raw. As with urine drinking, the revival of all things counterculture has triggered fresh interest in the whole notion of not cooking.

  I was made aware of the raw-food revival by my old pal designer John Bartlett. He adopted this diet after a trip to the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Patagonia, Arizona, where he’d gone to do battle with what he called his “toxic mucus buildup.”

  “It accumulates in our intestines and colon, and then diseases get trapped,” explained John, adding, “So I went there to eat raw and cleanse myself completely.”

  The raw-food rage, as practiced by John, has two basic rules: First, eat a vegan (nothing from an animal) diet, and, second, never turn on the stove. Cooking is evil because it destroys the food’s enzymes. Et voilà! A raw cucumber lasagna! Bon appétit!

  Mr. Bartlett denies any candy-bar lapses. He does, however, enjoy a few quick puffs on an American Spirit, the preferred cigarette of the fashion woo-woo set.

  Stylish American Spiritualists are often to be seen lighting up—and hacking up toxic mucus—outside Quintessence, a restaurant on East Tenth Street. With an additional catering service in Manhattan, the Quintessence mini-empire is the epicenter of the New York raw lifestyle.

  Upon Mr. Bartlett’s recommendation, I spent an evening at the Tenth Street location and quizzed the regulars to find out what, other than a fear of disease-laden mucus, was behind this bizarre trend.

  “It’s such a big movement—literally!” chuckled fashion consultant Robert Forrest, while chewing on a Quintessence sun burger. “Delicious. It’s made from sunflowers and flax seeds and other stuff,” raved the healthy-looking sixtyish executive. “I never travel without them.”

  While most diners shared Mr. Forrest’s positive feelings about their meal, a few neophytes could be heard losing patience as they waited for their food.

  “If it’s all raw, then what’s taking so long?” kvetched one rag & bone–clad female, not unreasonably.

  “The chef is massaging your kale. Yes, boiling would be quicker, but it kills all the enzymes,” chirped the waitress.

  All this talk of kale massaging gave me a sense of urgency. I had no intention of waiting until the wee hours while the chef harangued my snap peas into edibility. Time to order.

  The menu consisted mostly of ingenious quote-swaddled facsimiles of regular cooked meals (e.g., “pasta” and “shrimp wonton”). I ordered the “burrito” and found it light and quite bearable, if a little heavy on the avocado.

  For dessert, I tucked into Mr. Bartlett’s favorite dessert, a “mudslide.” This strange triple-decker fantasia consisted of pecan, carob, dates, mesquite powder, coconut and—hello, again!—avocado.

  I fired probing questions at the now replete Mr. Forrest about the specific benefits of the diet. He mumbled something about “releasing toxins,” ordered a couple of sun burgers to go for his upcoming trip to Dubai and left.

  What’s it all about, alfalfa? Why are fashion people so fixated on toxins and the vanquishing thereof? Is it a metaphor for self-loathing or just a passing fad?

  I scrutinized the menu for clues and found the following screed: “We believe that by eating uncooked food long enough, we will regain the fifth element and the mystical powers of our ancestors.”

  I resolved to cut through the mucus once and for all and get the real story. I called the Quintessence HQ. I tracked down one of the three owners, a Chinese lady who goes by the Lord of the Rings–ish name of Tolentin Chan. Miss Chan was less than keen to talk about that “fifth element” or her ancestral mystical powers. She was, however, a lot clearer about the overall benefits of raw food than some of her Seventh Avenue clients.

  “I ate a standard American diet, and my health was terrible,” said Tolentin, who in her pre-raw days suffered from asthma, thyroid problems and continuous colds. “Starch and dairy had coated my lungs with mucus.”

  Now, thanks to raw food, Tolentin enjoys an asthma-free life. Her health issues now are stress-related: running a restaurant without the profit margins from liquor sales is working her nerves. Why no booze?

  “Alcohol creates yeast, so we can’t sell it. We are not making a lot of money, but it’s okay. My motive is to share my knowledge about enzymes.”

  Enzymes?

  “A high-enzyme diet will rejuvenate the body, energize you and make you feel like a newborn.” According to Tolentin, aging is synonymous with a reduction in metabolic and digestive enzymes. Raw food replaces these enzymes.

  Suddenly, I realized why the fashion flock has embraced the raw lifestyle. Mucus, schmucus! Toxins schmoxins! It’s all about vanity. The raw craze is nothing more than a smoke screen for that age-old quest for eternal youth.

  Now I remembered something John Bartlett said regarding his Arizona retreat. “The guy who runs this place is sixty and looks thirty-five!” No wonder Alicia Silverstone and the Playboy Barbi Twins have gone raw!

  • • •

  WITHIN THE FASHION ASYLUM, foodie fads come and go faster than a chicken vindaloo flies through a senior citizen. Urine guzzling and raw food are now waning in popularity. They have been eclipsed by a sinister, plaguelike phenomenon.

  I’ll never forget the first time I saw one of those freaky, sinister, dark green things. It was sitting on somebody’s desk in the Barneys corporate office. And then the next day I saw another one and another. It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Every time we had a meeting, more of these mysterious objects would appear.

  “It’s a mixture of seaweed, plankton, wheatgrass and vitamins.”

  “But you seem to be drinking nothing else.”

  “It takes seven days. I’m on a cleanse.”

  “Why? What’s it supposed to do?”

  “I’m getting rid of all my toxins.”

  (Here we go again!)

  “What’s a toxin?”

  “I’m not sure . . .”

  “You look great.”

  “I’ve lost seven pounds. My goal weight is 105 pounds.”

  “You will look like a cadaver.”

  “Hopefully, soon.”

  The fashion world has embraced “the cleanse” with a vengeance. Here, finally, is a socially acceptable way to ensure that
you get all your vitamins and minerals while maintaining the terrifyingly low body weight of a Ukrainian fashion model. And, as if that isn’t fabulous enough, you will also be ridding yourself of all those toxins, whatever the hell they are.

  Gradually the cleanse has proliferated—kombucha, mandrake, aardvark spittle, celery, kumquat and aloe—and the absence of a sludge-filled bottle is now more noteworthy than its presence. It is important to note, however, that the cleanse has yet to achieve global acceptance. There are wicked toxic holdouts and some really naughty pockets of resistance.

  A couple of years back . . .

  Julie Gilhart, the former fashion director of Barneys, and I had scheduled a lunch meeting with three female execs from the House of Lanvin who were in town from Paris to discuss plans for Alber Elbaz’s tenth anniversary as designer for the house.

  Julie was stuck in traffic so the girls and I went ahead and ordered.

  “Steak frites.”

  “Moi aussi.”

  “Make zat trois.”

  Françoise, Solange and Brigitte all ordered the fattiest thing on the menu, and I chose a lesbian lentil salad.

  Françoise, Solange and Brigitte rolled their eyes at my healthy choice and then ordered a vat of vin rouge to wash down their steak frites.

  Julie arrived in a flurry of air kissing and apologies. She sat down, rummaged in her Balenciaga bag and pulled out—you guessed it!—a plastic bottle containing what looked like green bile.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” whispered Françoise.

  Waving away the menu politely, Julie announced that she was “on a cleanse” and would not be eating. She unscrewed the top of her lichen-and-beet-and-bergamot bowel purge, or some such thing, and began slugging it back.

  “Pourquoi?” asked Solange.

  “I need to release my toxins.”

  The three Frogs looked at one another.

  “Les américaines, elles sont vraiment folles, non?” opined Brigitte, and forked a juicy slice of steak into her bouche.