The Asylum

by Simon Doonan

  Was this a visionary flesh-positive gesture or one of calculated cunning?

  The always charitable British tabloids wasted no time in accusing Mrs. Beckham—they have referred to her as “Skeletal Spice” for years—of opting for larger gals in order to make herself look thin when she trots out to take her catwalk bows. You know, that age-old trick.

  Whatever the reason, Mrs. Beckham reignited a frenzied debate about fat.

  This is by no means the first time this has happened, and it certainly won’t be the last. Every so often fashion has a pang of fat guilt. Once in a while somebody shines a revealing light, as La Beckham did, on the chasm between the thinness of the runway models and the fleshy abundance of real women, and fashion, God bless her little cotton socks, is forced to respond.

  On these occasions, fashion goes into spin mode.

  Fashion starts by very publicly castigating herself for always depicting/hiring/photographing such thin girls. Naughty fashion!

  Fashion then promises to mend her ways.

  Fashion vows to use bigger girls.

  Fashion insists that she will henceforth check the body-mass index of those for-god’s-sake-give-that-skinny-bitch-a-ham-sandwich models.

  And so it was on this occasion . . .

  Statements were issued. Commitments were made. A debate about thinness started to rage and threatened to turn this particular Fashion Week into a veritable fat summit. This was a good thing: it gave us fashion folk an issue, something really meaty, upon which to chew while waiting for those three-hundred-plus shows to begin.

  For a fat researcher of long standing, this moment presented a sizzling opportunity. I lost no time in soliciting opinions about the Beckham-instigated fat fracas.

  “I thought models were supposed to be skinny,” said a remarkably svelte Carson Kressley, when I cornered him before the John Bartlett show and asked his opinion about the latest eruptions of anorexia/fashion hysteria. He was wearing a formfitting primrose cardigan and skinny jeans tucked into riding boots.

  “I myself live on a steady diet of Ex-Lax and grapefruit juice,” hissed the lovable Carson, as the first model came striding down the runway.

  After the show, I headed backstage in the hopes of checking the body-mass index of the skinnier models. I also wanted to see if Mr. Bartlett had followed the CFDA’s newly issued bulimia-battling guidelines, in particular the one suggesting that designers “supply healthy meals, snacks and water backstage and at shoots, and provide nutrition and fitness education.”

  After scouring the backstage area for snacks and seminars—and finding none—I congratulated the beefy Mr. Bartlett on a great show and asked him for the male perspective. His response was chilling.

  “I’m surrounded by girls, gorgeous models, and they all think they are fat. Guys don’t get crazy about that stuff.”

  Hmm. If girls are somehow predisposed to succumb to self-punitive eating disorders, maybe it really is time for intervention at a higher level? Maybe Congress should follow the example of the Spanish authorities and start calibrating limbs and counting calories for girls at risk.

  “The government has bigger fish to fry. Pardon the expression,” opined Mr. Kressley.

  Sunday afternoon: The DVF show.

  Diane von Furstenberg knows a thing or two about fat. Her wrap dresses perform a specific lard-retaining function, to a point. If you are fat, the wrap will not make you thin. But if you are normal, i.e., you have those wobbly bits around your middle because you deem it necessary to ingest the occasional meal, a wrap dress will sharpen up your silhouette.

  As we waited for the show to start, a fevered seminar raged as the fashion insiders divulged what they had eaten so far that day. (It was but four o’clock.) Some interesting patterns emerged. British fashionistas seemed to have a less neurotic relationship to food than their American counterparts. Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Glenda Bailey, who had already eaten a poached egg on toast and a bowl of soup, revealed all, in her signature North English lilt.

  “Ooh, luv! At Harper’s Bazaar, we looove food as much as we looove fashion.”

  Fellow Brit and Marie Claire editor in chief Joanna Coles—she has just gone to Cosmo at the time of writing—proudly declared that she had just eaten a bowl of mashed potatoes “with lashings of butter.”

  Of all the women I spoke to, supermodel-turned-commentator Veronica Webb had eaten the most. “Chicken satay, french fries, yogurt and this amazing stuff called Bagel French Toast.” This confirmed my suspicion that African-American fashionistas enjoy a more easygoing relationship with food than their Caucasian co-citizens.

  Robin Givhan of The Washington Post weighed in on this issue: “We black women aren’t so hung up about food,” declared the Pulitzer Prize winner, adding, “That’s why I happily ate a bowl of pasta this morning. But the fashion person in me did not allow me to eat the bread which came with it.”

  The show began, finally, with an intriguing black-taffeta version of the signature wrap, worn by a gal who definitely looked as if she could use a cheeseburger or seven.

  So where were all the plumper gals?

  They were hauntingly absent.

  As the late great Franco Moschino once said, “Fashion is full of CHIC!”

  Sunday five p.m.: It was so bloody cold that I bagged any further shows and ran home to catch Super Bowl XLI. After staring at all those haunted, wraithlike models, the adorable Indianapolis cheerleaders were a real picker-upper. With their 1950s physiques, these doll-like cuties possessed an optimistic joie de vivre not shared by those poor stringy melancholics in the Bryant Park tents.

  As I watched the Colts–Bears game, I thought of all the blokes across the country boozing, belching, farting and munching their way through the Super Bowl. How different from the perverse fashion front row. Unlike sports, fashion is not about bracing fresh air and blood-pumping physicality.

  Fashion is perverse. Fashion, foncy elitist designer fashion, has always, and will always be, an arch, sick, twisted bitch. High fashion has never been a cozy, caring sister. She has always been a tortured, idealized freak.

  Elizabethan women wore corsets with wooden slats.

  Victorian women dilated their pupils—they wanted their eyes to appear sparkling and engaging—with drops of belladonna (deadly nightshade).

  Chinese style addicts bound their feet into rotting, misshapen little hooves.

  Turkish women wore neck corsets!

  Looking for healthy role models in the world of fashion, or trying to legislate them, is a total waste of time. This situation will never change, because fashion is not in the business of selling the bouncy, the smiley, the feel-good, the inclusive and the kumbaya, my Lord.

  Fashion is about selling the esoteric, the fantastical and the wickedly fabulous.

  Every once in a while, dame fashion will have one of those guilt spasms and go through the motions of pretending she’s strawberry shortcake. And then, just when you’re getting comfy, she’ll do a total volte-face. She will slam her town-car door shut, drive off peeling rubber and become more fabulously freaky, more unhealthy and more gloriously demented than ever.

  Where does that leave the plus-sizer?

  I sympathize with the bouncy broads of the world. I feel the pain of the chunky chicks. You gals are tantalized and mesmerized by the mirage of fashion, but if you dare to go shopping with the intention of purchasing nice-ies and ice-ies for yourself, you face certain disappointment and rejection. (As a dinky male, I have faced the same marginalization.) The world of designer fashion is unwelcoming to you. My stylish-but-zaftig girlfriends voice their complaints to me all the time.

  “Plus-size stores are a waistless land, a ghetto of boxy clothes in horrid prints and cheap fabrics.”

  “You come out of the fitting room looking like you’re wearing a pup tent.”

  “Last week some
shop assistant in Zara asked me if I was the star of the movie Precious.”

  Starved of designer fashion, my pals satiate their fashion cravings with oversexed stilettos, jeweled Pashminas, huge tribal necklaces and outré purses and bags.

  It’s a measure of the stupidity-bordering-on-retardation of many people who are working in the fashion industry that they remain oblivious to the opportunity represented by the growing, and I do mean growing, number of fashion-starved broads who are size twelve and rising. This situation represents a massive opportunity. To paraphrase Samantha Foxx: Bigger broads need designer clothes too.

  So fashion, listen up! I’m talking to you.

  You can stay in your twisted, sick, codified, freaky zone of creativity. We need you to stay there in order to generate insane and provocative new ideas. And you can use all the skinny skeletons you want. Just do me one favor: Please make designer drag in bigger sizes. (And smaller sizes for men!) That’s all I ask.

  manischewitz? j’adore!

  RECENTLY A FRIEND OF MINE, a successful luxury retail exec, was bitching about his demanding and highly strung clientele.

  “These are my people, but they are such a bunch of annoying JAPs.”

  I asked him about his WASP clients: “Aren’t they just as quixotic and high maintenance?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never had any.”

  Though clearly indulging in a little playful exaggeration, he was nonetheless making a point. Jews are synonymous with fashion. Jews are the glamorous gasoline which has powered the fashion industry through the last century. Whether flogging schmattas or buying them, they are integral to the vitality and well-being of La Mode.

  I thought about my Jews a lot during the whole Galliano debacle.

  John Galliano, for those of you who just flew in from Mars, was the fashion designer—nay, the brilliant magician—at the illustrious house of Christian Dior, convicted of making anti-Semitic comments during a drunken rant in a Paris bar.

  It was a horrible implosion, like something out of a Zola novel. The mighty creative impresario, the bloke who would take his deserved curtain calls with such stylish and often hilarious panache, reduced to a ranting mess in the corner of a bar. Watching the video, I was reminded of Gervaise, the booze-addicted, downward-spiraling heroine of L’Assommoir, and also of some of my Irish relatives, namely my uncle Dave and, yes, my Belfast grandpa.

  Of all the oaths and notions that could have popped out of Mr. Galliano’s mouth when he was out of his skull, it struck me as strange and illogical that it should have been that Jew stuff. Why not rant about the unfairness of the British class system or the snooty superiority of the French? Or the annoying, eavesdropping concierge in his Paris apartment building? Why the Jews?

  Did John believe the stuff he was saying? I am sure he did not. It was the drink talking. Nonetheless, in the aftermath of l’affaire Galliano I found myself thinking a lot about how much I love my Jews. Yes, I married a lovely and talented one too, but there’s more to it than that. Much more.

  Jews have been good to me. Jews helped me find refuge in the fashion asylum. Jews paid me to do stuff when I was barely qualified to do anything. Jews have always put a roof over my head. They helped me back when I was young, feral, unwashed and ridiculous. I am what you might call a major, lifelong mitzvah recipient. There is not enough space here to kvell about all the fabulous Jews who recklessly and generously enabled my shenanigans over the years, but here are some edited highlights.

  In the mid-seventies I dressed windows for a glamorous Jewish couple called Shelley and Tony who had a chain of fashion shops dotted about the London area. These kicky, affordable stores were named—wait for it!—Sheltone Fashions. I would travel from store to store, changing the merch in the windows and szhooshing up the store interiors.

  Being young and stupid, I decided one fine day to give myself a raise. Without telling either Shelley or Tony, I increased my hourly rate and without further ado sent in my weekly invoice.

  Instead of stapling my scrotum to the nearest telegraph pole, Mr. Tony called me and very sweetly explained that any raises would need to be negotiated and that they were not something which one could simply award oneself.

  While working for Shelley and Tony, I picked up extra clams moonlighting at a Jewish-owned office-lady fashion boutique in the City of London named City Girl Jennifer. I never met Jennifer. But I did meet a cast of hilarious Jewish salesladies who taught me the meaning of many strange words, including “yenta,” “mieskeit,” “verputz,” “shonda,” “sheitel,” “shykel” and “meshuga.” These high-street jobs gave me an extensive knowledge of Yiddish and a wealth of display experience.

  In the late seventies I was plucked from this chiaro-obscurity by a brilliant, creative, eccentric Jew named Tommy Perse, who sponsored my green card and gave me a job at his store, Maxfield, an iconic temple of chic in West Hollywood.

  To say he took a leap of faith is no exaggeration. Back then I was wilder, younger and even more disaster prone. I relied heavily on my Jewish safety net, and Tommy always came through. When the engine fell out of my ’65 Dodge push-button station wagon, Tommy good-naturedly coughed up the dough for repairs. When I got busted for drunk driving while wearing a plaid bondage punk outfit, Tommy helped me find a lawyer.

  I would still be working at Maxfield if the equally creative and brilliant Gene Pressman had not given me my job at Barneys, where I have schlepped happily for more than twenty-five years.

  My transition into a writing career has also been Jew-inspired. In 1998, Peter Kaplan, now at Fairchild and formerly of The New York Observer, read my first book, a book I assumed would be a one-off writing venture, and bravely offered me the opportunity to write a regular column. Ten years later, courtesy of Jacob Weisberg, I skipped onto Slate.com. The book you are holding in your hands would not exist without the vision and chutzpah of publishing-world Jew David Rosenthal and demi-Jewess Sarah Hochman. Mazel tov to moi!

  Why did my Jews feel compelled to extend a helping hand to this flailing feygele? Maybe it is because they too are members of a marginalized and oft-reviled group. The difference between a pink triangle and a yellow star is, after all, only a color switch and three more points. Which very much brings us back to the fragile, talented Mr. Galliano.

  I suspect that John Galliano could tell a very similar story to mine. How many untold numbers of Jews have supported him over the years? How much of his success does he owe to the kindness and support of Jewish mitzvahs, machers, schmatta kings, fashionistas and, most important, customers. News flash: WASPs don’t shop! Without the passionate and genuine support of style-obsessed Jewesses, Galliano would probably have ended up stitching frocks for City Girl Jennifer.

  I earnestly hope for a positive outcome for John and feel very optimistic about his impending reinvention. In my experience, Jews are magnanimous by nature and will give him the thumbs-up.

  Regarding Jewish magnanimity: Back in the nineties I attended the infamous Jean Paul Gaultier fall/winter Jew-inspired runway show. Incorporating bejeweled yarmulkes; oversize, fur-trimmed Hasid hats; and prayer shawls, Jean Paul put his cheeky postmodern spin on every stylish flourish of Orthodox Jewry. Christy Turlington rocked the runway sporting silky payos, and rabbi chic was born. One strapping young model wore a fun-fur Hasid outfit, accessorized with a matching fur-covered ghetto blaster which played “Hava Nagila.” This JPG pastiche was strangely beautiful but unquestionably outrageous.

  As Jean Paul took his curtain calls, there were a few audible tut-tuts of disapproval.

  “I’m offended by that,” said the Jew on my left.

  “No, you’re not,” laughed the Jew on my right.

  “Okay. You’re right. It was great,” guffawed the first Jew.

  At the time of writing, fashion luminaries are speculating about the status of John’s career. According to Cathy Horyn of The New York Times, “S
ome in the fashion industry are wondering if it isn’t time to forgive the self-described drug addict and ‘lost soul’ and offer him a second chance to return to the fashion fold.”

  Does John need the forgiveness, or otherwise, of the fashion world? In my opinion, he needs something much more beautiful: he needs sobriety. Rumor has it that he has achieved it. With sobriety will come clarity and a new creative chapter.

  Call me crazy, but I see him attending a nice synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiday of atonement, and explaining in his own words how he fell into the abyss. Jews need to hear it from the man himself. They need to hear that the things he said were part and parcel of an addiction, a madness, an illness from which he has now fully recovered. I think they will listen to him. John is a poet, an artist, a bloke with a sweeping vision, and Jews like that.

  plato ripped my blouse

  “SHE IS A LITTLE TOO FAT, but she has a beautiful face and a divine voice.” Thus spake Karl Lagerfeld when some journalist or other asked him for his opinion of Adele.

  Karl’s now legendary quote set the blogosphere afire. The response was explosive and immediate. How dare he? Why is he hating on her? Why is he drinking haterade? Just how full of bile is his daily glass of Châteauneuf-du-Hate?

  Karl-gate-hate was major. That relatively innocuous comment, enrobed in praise for Adele’s beauty and her voice, was treated as high treason. If he had pulled out a revolver and shot her, he would have received a less outraged response.

  I cannot help feeling that the Adele brouhaha would never have gotten any momentum if those young bloggy folks had been more familiar with Karl’s gloriously bitchy history. Compared to the other things Karl has said about people over the years, this comment about Adele was so straightforward and so wildly vanilla as to be almost albino. In many ways, Adele got off very lightly.

  Karl Lagerfeld is an enduring genius and a true fashion icon. He is also a tart-tongued Teutonic legend of long standing, a guy who is so bitchy that he can be bitchy in six languages, no less. He is the sultan of sarcasm.