Role Models

by John Waters

  You, too, can have an iconic signature. It’s not about money; it’s about a look. Angela Davis, the beautiful black radical who helped free the Soledad Brothers in the sixties and ended up on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list is, much to her chagrin, remembered today more for her amazing Afro hairdo than she is for her radicalism. “It is humiliating because it reduces the politics of liberation to a politics of fashion,” she complained in a Baltimore speech, now wearing blond dreadlocks, which made it hard to feel much sympathy for her. But just because you are identifying yourself as a communist, as she is these days, doesn’t mean you have to be dreary. You can be smart and be known as “The Hairdo,” if you play it right. Think Mao—nobody refers to him as “The Jacket,” maybe because he never complained about being labeled a fashion influence. Or Che, who may have known how to wear a beret but was a homophobe in real life who rallied against “longhairs” and homosexuals. He was a sexual reactionary, not a “friend of Dorothy,” but cool people refuse to believe the truth because of his iconic look, which proves all ideology can be embraced if the leader dresses well. You can be a committed Marxist and a fashion enthusiast. Remember the Cockettes? Those bearded San Francisco drag queens from the late sixties who, high on LSD, read Lenin, put on their outlandish makeup, and actually believed “the revolution” was going to happen? They were influential and left-wing, and their amazing take on female impersonators liberated drag queens everywhere.

  You don’t need fashion designers when you are young. Have faith in your own bad taste. Buy the cheapest thing in your local thrift shop—the clothes that are freshly out of style with even the hippest people a few years older than you. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents—that is the key to fashion leadership. Ill-fitting is always stylish. But be more creative—wear your clothes inside out, backward, upside down. Throw bleach in a load of colored laundry. Follow the exact opposite of the dry cleaning instructions inside the clothes that cost the most in your thrift shop. Don’t wear jewelry—stick Band-Aids on your wrists or make a necklace out of them. Wear Scotch tape on the side of your face like a bad face-lift attempt. Mismatch your shoes. Best yet, do as Mink Stole used to do: go to the thrift store the day after Halloween, when the children’s trick-or-treat costumes are on sale, buy one, and wear it as your uniform of defiance.

  But past the age of forty you need all the help you can get. Now is the time for designers and, believe me, Rei Kawakubo has made it possible for older people to be as fashion daring as the young. “Too rich? Too nuts?” Yesiree, these are Rei’s customers, and we are proud to be her cult members on “Planet Rei.” Rei Kawakubo was “the first to make polyester cost more than silk,” the model Linda Evangelista told me when I met her at a film festival in France. Rei is not a fashion designer; she’s a magician.

  All celebrities would look better dressed by Rei Kawakubo. Why do all female movie stars show their tits at the Oscars? Pamela Anderson, Traci Lords, Mariah Carey, even Jessica Rabbit would look so much sexier dressed in a Comme des Garçons creation, one that showed confidence in being smart by purposefully downplaying their curves and looking, as a Washington Post critic described them, as though “they had a bad night and gone to bed sweaty and smelling of smoke.”

  Even Aretha Franklin could benefit. She may be the “Best Soul Singer Ever,” but she designs her own clothes and someone should intervene. Lady Soul even wore a black version of Divine’s red fishtail gown from Pink Flamingos but forgot to bring the humor. Wouldn’t it be great if Aretha surprised us all by showing up at her next gig wearing Rei Kawakubo’s most notorious design—the “bump” dress, dubbed the “Quasimodo look” by the fashion press? “The ugliest dress of the year,” as Vogue reported the reaction. The dress with built-in pads that “deformed the stomach, hips or shoulders,” the very parts of the body most fashionable women go to the gym to eliminate. Not since Chanel introduced the “sack dress” in the fifties had a garment caused such a fury. Wouldn’t Aretha shut up her severest fashion critics by wearing the Comme des Garçons “hunchback” look! Don’t try to be sexy at three hundred pounds, Aretha; be cutting edge. Exaggerate the bulges in your body through fashion and nobody will see the real weight. Anybody that calls herself “the Queen” and hopes to get away with it has to have nerve.

  I modeled for Rei Kawakubo once. In Paris. In those tents outside the Louvre where collections are unveiled every year. I was really surprised to be asked but leaped at the chance for a new job. Me? A model? I guess Rei had seen press photos of me wearing some of her outfits to openings, or maybe the salespeople told her what a fan I was. Before accepting, I begged that Comme des Garçons consider my age (forty-six at the time) and maybe let me wear some of her more conservative outfits, not the most ridiculous ones. I loved the most ridiculous, but, please, let the “real” models strut their stuff in them. However, I soon learned there were no “real models.” Rei likes her menswear modeled by amateurs—boys off the European street—who are somehow rounded up to wear her amazingly ludicrous and beautiful clothes on the runway.

  Arriving backstage for rehearsal the day before the show, I realized I was the fattest model among the scrawny, gorgeous, blasé street urchin skeletons who were trying on their outfits and pointing at each other and laughing good-naturedly at their Comme des Garçons makeovers. My first outfit was a relief—a black suit with flood-length trousers and a white shirt with an exaggerated shirttail partially worn outside and hanging halfway to the knees. But then I saw the crazy hat. No man looks more stupid in a hat than I do. Oh God, I wondered, could I talk Rei Kawakubo out of the hat? When I saw her enter, I trembled in my Comme des Garçons boots. There she was—dressed all in black with that Louise Brooks bob hairdo and looking like she had been locked in a cell for months meditating on the deconstruction of the concept of hemlines. Bald-headed girls, who I think were her assistants, hovered around her. When I was introduced, I just told her how proud I was to be there and then begged her to let me not wear a hat. She frowned deeper, then without a word, switched my hat to one a little less ridiculous. Suddenly I thought, What the hell! She flew you over here first class, is paying you, giving you some free clothes. So just shut up, wear a hat, and do what you are told.

  The day of the show, I’m backstage with all the motley cool pretend models who looked more like drug-addled janitors or concentration camp victims (Rei later got in trouble for designing pajama-type outfits that some misguided critics claimed were reminiscent of death camp uniforms) and I realized that here were the kind of boys I like best—my type if there ever was one. I could hear the buzz (or was it the venom-dripped whispers?) of the A-list fashion press on the other side of the curtain and suddenly I got up my nerve. Until I was told I had to go out first. Talk about terror. Right before I had to go on, I had to pass through the stylists and end up later under the hawk eye of Rei herself for a final inspection. She took in my entire look in one critical glance and suddenly grabbed the collar of my shirt and yanked it sideways so it hung clumsily. Whatever courage I had managed to work up vanished instantly, but she gave me a severe pat of confidence and shoved me through the curtain onto the runway.

  Jesus Christ, I’m a model in Paris. Don Knotts meets Mahogany. Cover of Spy magazine, here I come. But be brave, I thought, hold your head high and look unafraid. I walked to the end of the runway, turned around, and people applauded, quietly and severely. Other models followed me. No one laughed. It started to feel kind of great. It’s a long way from Lutherville, Maryland, to the runways of Paris. How did this ever happen?

  Later that evening, after the show, there was some kind of party for the models, and boy could these Comme des Garçons recruits drink! Few could speak English, but who cared? Maybe it was their newfound fashion aggression, but they sure were friendly. I was in hog heaven. I can’t remember much about what happened after the party except driving to the hotel in the backseat of my limo with a gang of crazy, young, drunk street models who were hanging their heads out the wi
ndows and howling at the moon before being dropped off. What a great Paris memory! Isn’t fashion fun? And you know what? I didn’t end up on the cover of Spy magazine but on the cover of DNR, the men’s version of Women’s Wear Daily, and I looked…well, not so bad.

  So now, when I get dressed every day, I pretend I’m a model. Even in Baltimore, where people I love insult me daily over my fashion choices. “That’s a shame about that coat,” a big bruiser blithely told me, eyeing my meatball-brown, permanently wrinkled polyester sports jacket as I stood next to him on a Friday night in a favorite biker bar, the Holiday House. The jacket my old dry cleaner had tried to “fix,” unaware it had been designed by Rei Kawakubo so it could not be ironed or pressed no matter how hard you tried. True, this great little coat had dry cleaning instructions inside more complicated than the ones for assembling the atomic bomb, but who could figure them out? Only I knew that this Value Village look-alike garment had actually cost a thousand dollars. “Thank you,” I answered, as I ordered the biker a drink and caught him shaking his head at my pinstriped shirt, which was permanently stained with what looks like oil. Since I was in a blue-collar bar, I thought for sure I’d fit in better in this Comme des Garçons tribute to grease monkeys everywhere. If I was lucky, maybe somebody would rub more grease on my shirt after the bar closed. “It comes like that,” I tried to explain before he noticed the Comme des Garçons Shirt Line pants, the ones with panels sewn in the bottom of each leg in a different material and that seem to have been hastily altered because you had mysteriously grown in height. “I’ll take a beer,” he chuckled, mercifully not commenting on my Rei Kawakubo–designed brown oxfords that came with shoelace holes, but no laces, just elastic underneath the tongue that kept them magically on your feet and eventually was copied by every tennis shoe designer in the world.

  The next day it’s Saturday, so I go to visit my parents and I hesitate while choosing an outfit. They know about “that lady whose clothes you like,” but I try not to start a fight by wearing Rei’s most insane, like my gold lamé sports jacket similar to one Elvis wore on that album cover for 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Well, Ten Fashion Casualties Can’t Be Wrong either, but I decide to spare my parents this debate. Similarly rejecting my off-white shag rug favorite—the sports jacket that looks so much like a dirty bath mat that strangers always laugh in my face—I also pass by the blue shirt with the pink splotches all over it. “You bought that?!” my dad (who died in June 2008 at the age of ninety-one) had bellowed when he first saw it, and I must admit, a shirt that makes you look like a moving target for a paintball gun did have a certain fashion edge. Even I hesitated before leaving the house wearing it, but some days you just need fashion gall.

  Today can’t be that day. I lunge for and then reconsider my favorite CDG pants, the ones with the seams that have the threads hanging off, the trousers that literally unravel without falling apart as you wear them. “Don’t worry, they get worse,” the salesperson told me with a fashion wink as I signed the credit card slip. And I certainly knew better than to wear my pink leather pointy-toe Comme des Garçons tennis shoes, which I also have in bright orange. Matter of fact, I bought all six colors in the canvas style, too. I can’t get enough of Rei’s pointy-toe tennis shoes, and in the summer in Provincetown I line them all up on the floor like some kind of art installation, but today I’m dressing for the family so I’d better be careful. Pink shoes and Dad are a fight waiting to happen.

  Trying to be conservative, and remembering my parents’ hoot of derision when I showed them the press clipping of me being named to the Best Dressed Men list when it was written by the late Eleanor Lambert of Women’s Wear Daily, I slip into my gray pinstripe jacket designed by Rei to look normal on the outside. Underneath was a whole different story, of course—coffinlike blue satin ruffles that made you both fat and ready for the undertaker give the jacket an inner lunacy that you could keep secret as long as the coat remained buttoned. Finally choosing my “inside-out” Comme des Garçons shirt with the pockets sewn inside, therefore making them impossible to use, I figured this “fashion theory” was too complicated to be noticed by fashion civilians like my parents. I took a chance and wore tennis shoes from the same inside-out line. I knew my mom and dad wouldn’t notice the size and model number painted on the outside of the shoe and hoped they wouldn’t pick up on the shoe tongue flapping in the wind over the laces. Being inside-out fashionwise is the best way to visit your parents if you can be stealthy about it and slip away before they get pissed off at the whole idea.

  Now it’s Saturday night and I’m headed to the Kitty Kat Bar, my favorite ska/punk-rock saloon, filled with non-racist skinheads and punk-rock boys, even angrier and cuter because they are too old to be in a band. If it’s summer, I know I can get away with the jacket I wore to the new Hairspray movie musical premiere at the Kennedy Center, the one The Washington Post called “the ugliest sports jacket in the world.” I might get beaten up if I wear this hideous Rei-designed Dunkin’ Donuts–like patterned jacket on the street, but at this great dive bar nobody notices, because the boys here dress like IRA members at the height of the conflict. I remember a New Year’s Eve at the Kitty Kat Bar when I was there in some ridiculous outfit—probably my green plaid Comme des Garçons jacket that was shrunken hideously by Rei throwing it into the washing machine instead of having it dry cleaned. With my favorite two-toned Comme des Garçons tie that featured bad stitching and pseudo rips, I felt all ready to ring in the New Year. Right at the stroke of midnight, all these kids suddenly wrapped scarves around their heads like terrorists, put on ski masks, zipped up their hoodies, and ran outside into the streets and set off the most frighteningly insane display of fireworks I’ve ever seen. Industrial-strength ones. All noise and no beauty. Bomblike explosions on a tiny street instead of a stadium. The neighbors flipped, the cops came, and everybody scattered in fashion terror. If Rei Kawakubo had been there that night, she would have been so inspired.

  How far can you push fashion in blue-collar Baltimore? My onetime favorite bar, Kildaire’s, is still there, but under a whole different management these days. For a very short while this watering hole held a special place in my vodka-soaked heart. I liked to go there alone. Then stuff can happen. Never bad stuff, because I dress appropriately. Comme des Garçons can be subtle, especially if danger is lurking. I have on one of Rei’s jackets that looks sort of normal from a distance, but up close the blue material looks stained. Some might say with a semen-like pattern. Spurted. Glamorous “pecker tracks,” if you will. The mostly all-male, heterosexual clientele, who are white, dress like Eminem, and dance feverishly and by themselves to gangster rap music, don’t notice my sartorial detail. But I know I have on a killer jacket, and as I sit alone at the bar marveling at the scene before me (where are the girls?), I feel accepted. Sure, they know who I am, but they don’t seem the slightest bit impressed. The DJ, the only black man in the house, honors my presence by playing Eminem’s “Puke” every time I come in the door, but this small tribute hardly qualifies him as a star fucker. “Hey, John,” a hopped-up but scarily cute redneck guy says as he makes eye contact, “watch this.” Suddenly he slam-dances the table near the dance floor with all his might, splintering the wood in front of me. As he gets up off the floor and gives me a sheepish grin, I applaud his destructive dance steps and feel so happy to live in Baltimore, secretly dressed by Rei Kawakubo.

  But wait, down some steps at the back of the entrance hall is a whole other bar. And guess who that’s for? The Hells Angels! For real. The true fashion leaders of the universe. They’ve always been nice to me, no matter how unbutchly I was dressed. The Fat Boys, too—another local biker gang I’ve known for years from hanging around another bar up the street. I even went once to the Fat Boys’ secret clubhouse that was so Scorpio Rising. One of the main Hells Angels, though, was a tougher nut to crack. It took him ten years to finally say hello to me, but after agreeing to appear in A Dirty Shame he was downright cordial. “Wanna
come downstairs with me and have a drink?” I ask the cute slam-dancing “wigga” upstairs, marveling at the fact that this is a convertible bar—two in one! Downstairs: bikers; upstairs: white-boy gangstas. Could there possibly be a better setup?! But “Noooooo,” the imitation African American answers in fear, “I’m not going down there. No way!”

  What the hell. I go downstairs alone in full fashion confidence. I mean, bikers have the best possible look, but it is a style that is vanishing. Young bad boys don’t want to be bikers anymore; they want to be black. Unfortunately, for the young these days, Hells Angel is a trick-or-treat outfit. It’s a confusing look, too. In the one store in Baltimore that sells custom-made biker leathers, there are two very different breeds of shopper: the straight bikers and the gay sadomasochist crowd, and both are going through the same midlife crisis. S&M men are having a hard time recruiting, too! Young gay people don’t feel guilty about being homosexual—they don’t need to be paddled or whipped anymore. Still, the middle-aged enthusiasts of both biker and gay culture ended up wearing the exact same look with very different intentions. They have no choice but to shop side by side, avoiding all eye contact. No wonder the bikers didn’t punch me out for wearing Comme des Garçons.

  In some Baltimore drinking establishments, the patrons are so happily drunk you can model your most ridiculous Comme des Garçons outfit and no one will be sober enough to see it. Dimitri’s, at last call, is the perfect place to wear my ludicrous Burberry-like brown plaid sports jacket with a panel of the same material sewn on the bottom, making it too long. The plaids don’t line up and this extra material added in by the designer gives the jacket the embarrassing suggestion of a skirt. Many nights I put it on before I go out, look in the mirror, and chicken out. But not tonight; it’s late and what the hell, I need some new stories. After all, this is the tavern where I stupidly asked a guy, “What do you do for a living?” and he said, “Can I be frank?” When I answered, “Sure,” he replied matter-of-factly, “I trade deer meat for crack.” You can’t make this shit up. Screenwriters are paid a fortune in Hollywood to come up with this kind of dialogue and I get it for free. The only problem is, in Dimitri’s, many of the karaoke customers are so sloshed and have such Baltimore accents that when they try to have conversations, they can only yell at top volume in your face in a kind of excited gibberish that only a local (and I mean four-blocks-away local) could possibly understand. It really doesn’t matter to me and I yell back, having no idea if my answer addresses their question. One thing I do know for sure—no one has noticed my ridiculous brown plaid Comme des Garçons coat that looks like a stupid skirt. And I’m sixty-three years old!