I don’t know if I felt calmer after I woke up the next day. Maybe I had just grown numb. It was day nine. My brain throbbed with fashion after watching it day in and day out for almost a week and a half straight. I felt like I was in a deprivation tank, seeing, touching, and smelling nothing but clothes. I had tried varying the pace, occasionally worming my way backstage, huddled inside the mass of television crews that pushed past the groupies to ask the designer, what had inspired the magic? On one such adventure I found myself within spitting distance of Claude Montana. The Paris designer had been hot in the 1980s. Space-age chic, I think he had been known for. I had forgotten about him, but, standing close to him, I could see where he had gotten his ideas. He definitely looked as if he was from another planet. He had dyed blonde hair that looked like a toupee covering one eye. His skin was shockingly red and leprous. He spoke with a lisp. At one point, I thought I saw him drool. To me, he was utterly repellent.
A videographer from Montreal recognized me from the press bus that had taken us from the Louvre to some of the shows staged in various sites across Paris, the Moulin Rouge and Trocadéro among them. “He murdered his model wife, you know, pushed her out the apartment window. This show is his comeback,” he whispered in my ear.
“From prison?” I gasped, perhaps a little too loudly. A press attaché was soon at my elbow, ushering me away.
I had taken the press bus again that day. The afternoon show, to which I had a real sit-down invitation, was being held at the Grand Palais, the ornate glass-roofed exhibition hall located near the Place de la Concorde. There was another interminable wait for the show to begin. None of the shows ever started on time, and this one was no exception. It was a brilliant sun-soaked afternoon. To pass the time, I stood outside under a plane tree, observing the carved figure of Apollo sitting on top of a corner of the belle-époque building. He was holding the reins of a chariot pulled by galloping horses—a figure of arresting beauty. I turned to look at the Seine, sparkling in the distance. The grass was green despite the season. Around me were bushes shaped to resemble full-skirted evening gowns. It was the first time during the entire trip that I had stopped to admire the external loveliness of Paris. And it was lovely. Breathtaking, in fact. Even the buildings seemed to shine. I thought I would weep. Why had I been feeling like a trespasser? The gifts of Paris were for the taking—why had I lost sight of that? I felt a surge of happiness. I wanted to call someone and shout the news. I was in Paris, and Paris was beautiful. But who would I call? Canada was just a dial tone away, I thought, and pressed my wafer-thin cell phone to my ear.
How life had changed since my first trip to Paris twenty-two years earlier. Was it already that long ago? Making a call home used to be so arduous. I had had to line up for hours in a post office for a long-distance line to open up. Paris once seemed far away from home, but now there was so much of North America in it. Even some of the PR people who gave me a hard time were from my side of the Atlantic. Paris had joined the global village, and I didn’t know if I liked that. I looked at the phone in my hand. I thought to call my mother. It would be easy to do; she didn’t know I was in Paris. I had deliberately not told her. That’s how much things had changed between us. I punched in the code for Canada and with a start, recalled the tirades. I remembered how dejected she made me feel. I stopped myself—it wasn’t worth the risk. One false word and she would ruin the moment. It was no longer enough just to travel far to get away from her. I had to get her out of my heart, out of my mind. Be disciplined. I wished I could stop thinking of her, wished I didn’t care. I flipped the phone shut.
I continued to wait for the fashion show to begin, but then a show of sorts erupted around me. The Japanese. They had taken out their cameras and were raucously photographing everything around them. I had spent the week watching them. They were a formidable group of fashion victims and players who moved in packs as they hunted down the latest look for their fellow consumers in Japan. I couldn’t comprehend where they got their money. They were the only ones who arrived at the shows conspicuously toting shopping bags from Louis Vuitton and Chanel. They actually bought the big-ticket items. They didn’t line up for the freebies. They didn’t have to. They were filthy rich.
They swarmed unsuspecting pedestrians who were passing alongside the Grand Palais, and then bowed and giggled behind hands held tightly to mouths, as if revealing their fangs would constitute an offense. They had been acting this way all week, and with this ersatz show of modesty appeared to stand apart from the flashy vulgarity of the fashion shows where everything, quite literally, had been hanging out. And yet of all the nationalities at the Paris fashion shows, the Japanese seemed the most besotted by all the flash and trash. They wanted it for themselves, as if it were some kind of forbidden fruit. They squealed the loudest when rock chanteuse Gwen Stefani took her front-row seat at Christian Dior. They chased Hollywood celebrity Renée Zellweger around the runway at Balenciaga, begging her for a portrait. It was shameless idol worship, and they showed no restraint. They seemed single-handedly to feed the incongruous relationship that lately had been developing between high French fashion and middlebrow Western culture. They were so hungry for anything pop culture that a few of them were suddenly swarming me, demanding a photograph. Having been ignored all week, I felt flattered.
“What you wearing?” a young Japanese woman asked of me. She seemed to be a reporter. She had a notebook and a pen in hand. A cameraman stood behind her, clicking away. I was having what in fashionspeak was known as a moment.
“Ka-na-da,” I shouted, looking at the lens from over one shoulder, a wave of nationalism coloring my cheeks. “To-ron-to.” The scribe with the Mickey Mouse knapsack recorded my every word. She bowed. I bowed back. I would be famous in Osaka.
After the show at the Grand Palais, something forgettable by Karl Lagerfeld, the madness continued back at the Louvre, where again I took to watching the Japanese. I had read about a street in Tokyo where the young pay homage to Western pop stars, dressing up like them in full costume. I had marvelled at the photographs of wannabe Madonnas, wannabe Elvises. At the Paris fashion shows I was surprised to find among the Japanese a wannabe Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue, nicknamed Nuclear Wintour for her reportedly devastating management style. The real Anna Wintour routinely sat Nero-like still in the front row of all the important shows, shielded behind large black sunglasses that had everyone guessing as to her reactions. The Tokyo Wintour often sat across from her on the other side of the catwalk, also in the front row, with her idol’s look down pat. She had the same inky bob, the same eyebrow-concealing fringe, the same wiry thinness, and the same inscrutable smile. It must have unnerved the real Wintour to see herself parodied so accurately, and by a woman of some prominence. She was said to head a leading fashion magazine in Japan. Was imitation the best flattery? I found it instead rather creepy, and yet she intrigued me. I decided that day to shadow her. I had nothing else to do. I had no more invitations.
I was hot on her trail as soon as the crowd that had come to see the latest offering by the house of Paco Rabanne had disgorged onto the Rue de Rivoli. I hadn’t a clue where she was going. But I saw that she was clutching a large black invitation and was walking toward the Carrousel entrance of the Louvre, where a throng had already gathered outside. There was an unmistakable smell of excitement in the air. I could tell that the scent led to a killer collection. But what was it? I pushed in close to my Asian ally. I had in mind an image of the Tokyo subway, where professional people-pushers squeezed people like sardines into cars. I thought she wouldn’t mind me sticking to her coat. It was part of her culture. When Tokyo Wintour peered at me from over the upturned collar of her mink, her eyes hard behind her own dark sunglasses, I smiled at her. I pretended nothing was the matter. I towered above her. But she was the fashion behemoth and I the parasite on her back, getting close, closer, closest to something that seemed red hot. Fashion incarnate.
The Paris shows, the exclusive
ones anyway, were protected by big burly bodyguards, who made sure that the wrong people didn’t get in. This show was no exception. Two commandos formed a muscle barrier at the entrance. They were ruthless about eyeballing people’s invitations. There were shouts of anger and outrage. And then I heard the words Viktor & Rolf. I was at Viktor & Rolf? No wonder the crowd was going wild. This was the show no one could get into. And yet my girl had a ticket.
I was now practically on top of Tokyo Wintour. I couldn’t squeeze left. I couldn’t squeeze right. I felt the crowd tight behind me, pushing forward as if to break down the ancient walls of the palace itself. It moved like a collective breath, in and out. Soon I was within reach of the door. Tokyo Wintour had shown her invitation. I tried to hold onto her sleeve as she breezed in, but she shook me off. One of the bodyguards looked at me, expectantly. I made like I had the invitation somewhere in my Made in Canada purse. I fumbled, stalling for time. I wondered what to do. I was now so close to the entrance. I felt there was no turning back, and besides, I would likely get killed, trampled on by a stampede of Christian Louboutins, no less.
The guard was now glaring at me, as if reading my mind. I had been thinking of ducking under his large forearm and running. And then I remembered the wolves at the Alexander McQueen show held earlier in the week at the Conciergerie. The feral beasts had been tethered to high-stepping models who pulled them along the catwalk on long chains. The animals tried to cower, terrified by the flashing lights of the photographers. When applause broke out, one of the wolves howled. Yes, fashion can be cruel, and fur was back with a vengeance that season. McQueen had made that trend palpably real. I worried that in Paris there could be more animals at the shows, and they’d send them snarling after me. And so I hesitated. Just then, as luck would have it, it started to rain, a sudden downpour. The crowd roared its displeasure. Suddenly there was a frantic push forward. I had to steady my fishnet-stockinged legs because I could feel myself being lifted by the maniacal energy of the mob. They wanted in, and out of the rain.
“Il pleut,” I said, absentmindedly, unaware that anyone was listening.
“But Madame,” said the burly guard, regarding me with a bemused look on his face, “it always rains in Paris.”
The crowd pushed harder and harder. We were like a battering ram. And then I was airborne. But still I had my wits about me. Instead of settling back on my feet, I fell forward and onto my stomach, just beyond the reach of Hercules, who was busily fending off an invading horde of fashion barbarians. I was in battle position and I shimmied forward, crawling under cover into enemy lines. A fight erupted behind me. I could hear expletives and the sickening thud of flesh on flesh. I had made it, I thought. And then to my horror I saw another line of security guards inside the building. Wow. This was some hot show. I told myself not to look at them. They were big and black, and they could probably crush me beneath their combat boots. I adopted the hauteur of the Paris fashionista. I made like I owned the joint. Fashion is all about appearances, remember. I walked disdainfully past them. Lucky for me, at that moment another interloper, obviously not as smooth, had gotten himself caught between their paws. It was my chance to slip by undetected, and I did, with my heart pounding.
I thought that the hounds (human and otherwise) might still come after me, and so was careful not to look too conspicuous, and not too cowardly, either. This fashion business was a fine art. I skulked toward a dark corner and bumped right into the fashion reporter from The Toronto Star. Our newspapers were supposed to be rivals. He had been keeping his distance from me the entire trip. But when he saw me, he practically fell into my arms. “Omigod,” he said. “I am soooo embarrassed. I sneaked in, and I am not one to sneak into any place where I am not invited, but this is supposed to be a shit-kicking show and…” I told him to relax, that I had sneaked in, too. He laughed. When the lights finally went down for the start of the Viktor & Rolf show, he stayed by my side “en standing” (we didn’t dare try to rush an empty seat) and allowed me to hold onto his arm so that I could raise myself up on tiptoe to see the extravaganza unfolding on the runway.
That was the show to have stormed. It was magnificent, from start to finish. If what Balzac wrote is true, that dress is the expression of society, then what I saw at Viktor & Rolf suggested a communal need for escape from the ordinary, for transformation and absolution through an exaggerated means of scale. Called Black Hole, the collection of “conceptually glamorous” clothes, to quote the program handout, was both black and oversized, with blouses featuring shoulders that puffed out grotesquely like giant soufflés and dresses with bustles cut like enormous pincushions. Viktor & Rolf interpreted the mutton sleeve almost literally. The emaciated models wearing them looked like overfed creatures, freaks of their own flocks. Necklines riffed on a theme of the Elizabethan ruff. The clothes steamrollered down the runway in strict silence. Only the sound of jaws dropping at the sight of such a novel presentation could be heard.
Augmenting the performance-art aspect of the show was the fact that the faces of the models were painted completely black. The thick inky mask of makeup highlighted the principal hue of the collection itself. Later some American fashion journalists, perhaps sensitive to their country’s slave-trading past, said in print that the Viktor & Rolf show was in poor taste. They believed that the blackened faces were a comment on minstrelsy. But I thought that the blackening was about eliminating the personality of the wearer to draw increased attention to the clothes, in particular the heft of their silhouette. The distortion of human scale suggested to me a promise of endless possibilities, while black implied wiping the slate clean. It was the beginning of the new millennium. Over the past year, people around the world had been venting their doomsday fears in the media. Black was also a funereal color. Were the designers, a Dutch duo with a background in visual art and theater, also lending expression to the inevitability of death? And yet the stateliness of the procession, the air of quiet dignity, not to mention the impeccable tailoring, made me feel uplifted by the clothes, as if they were acts of faith.
Black represented the end and the beginning of all things. The gargantuan dimensions of the clothes suggested something otherworldly, something bigger than me and this whole crazy Paris scene. I left Viktor & Rolf finally knowing my theme.
I had unearthed the trend of the season, and it was black. All the colors I had seen over the past week and a half had, in the recesses of my exhausted brain, bled into one dark-as-night hue. There had been black at Chanel and at Yves Saint Laurent, at Issey Miyake and Comme des Garçons. It was a rich metaphor to play with, and I found that I could apply it to many ideas that I had had about the collections in general. Black was night. Black was sin. Black was the obliteration of all rules that had previously dictated what constituted fashionable dressing. Black was mystery. Black veils suggested piety. Black leather made you think of kinky sex. I thought of the French obsession with film noir. There had been gangster looks on the runway and Mafia molls in the audience. Quentin Tarantino, the postmodern American cinéaste, was then a popular topic in French intellectual circles, discussed also in the Paris newspapers. His film Reservoir Dogs, in which the entire male cast was dressed in black, was then being rereleased in France. I drew a connection between his latest movie, Pulp Fiction, a noir-ish brew of a mixed-metaphor film, and the mixed messages offered up by the Paris shows. In the end I called the Paris collections for fall 2001 “Pulp Fashion.”
I thought it clever at the time. But after my laptop crashed in the middle of the night following a power outage, and I had to frantically rewrite the article on the backs of napkins in a late-night brasserie located next to my hotel, fearing I would forget what I had just said, I felt vanquished by my own inability to rise to the occasion. Paris fashion, for all the tomfoolery of the last ten days, was still a kind of ideal. It symbolized the unrivalled artifice of Paris, what had long held me in thrall. I had wanted to do it justice. But I felt frustrated by my efforts. Once more Paris made me feel
that I didn’t quite reach the mark, that I wasn’t good enough, that I needed to try harder. I worried that I hadn’t adequately described Paris fashion as a mirror of life’s vacillating elements, its essentially changing nature. I felt disappointed in myself.
After I rewrote and emailed my story at about four in the morning Paris time, I collapsed into my bed, and fell into a fitful sleep. I dreamed that the wolves had found me hiding under a silk-wrapped chair at one of the by-invitation-only shows. A bodyguard dressed like a member of the gestapo, head to toe in Hugo Boss, hauled me out by the scruff of my neck. I would be publicly punished, forced to walk the runway and kiss Claude Montana fully on his liver-colored lips. I did so, and then he slapped me, calling me an idiot. “Dunt you know anysing?” he shouted in accented English. “It goes like zis!” And then he shoved his tongue down my throat, almost suffocating me.
I woke with a start, thinking that I needed to get out of Paris before I, too, toppled out a window. Because I had filed my story, I didn’t feel a need to go to any more shows. I had two days left before I returned to Toronto. I thought I would go shopping, hunt down some of those bewitching ensembles I had seen on the runway. Most wouldn’t be in the stores until the fall. But I had had a sneak preview of what would be “in,” and I thought I could find some pieces that would enable me to replicate some of the styles for myself on the cheap. I was quickly discouraged. I had been living in such a make-believe world these past ten days that I had lost sight of the fact that all this so-called interpretive chic actually cost a fortune to create and maintain. In Paris a ruched dress such as I saw on the runway at Cacharel cost upwards of $3,000. I was beginning to think that I had written the wrong article. I had become seduced by the image of French fashion and hadn’t noted how out of touch it was with the reality of most women’s lives. Who wears the million-dollar jewel-encrusted jeans I saw on the runway, anyway? A distributor told me they were popular among princesses and other consorts living in the oil-rich Arab countries. I swallowed hard. I was no princess, but at the Paris shows I had lived the illusion. It was time to crash back down to earth.
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