In 1963, Beene was in the vanguard of designers who opened their own companies, and a year later the first of his pieces was featured on the cover of Vogue, worn by Jean Shrimpton. A bred-in-the-bone maverick, Beene had ornery relations with the fashion press, who were busy fawning over Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent; his adversaries included Diana Vreeland and John Fairchild, with whom he had a legendary thirty-seven-year feud after Beene refused to let Fairchild’s Women’s Wear Daily get an early look at the wedding dress he designed for first daughter Lynda Bird Johnson.
Beene remained open to new ideas throughout his career, reinventing the connection between clothes and lifestyle many times over. He included softly draped shirtdresses from his earliest collections onward—debuting in 1967, for instance, his famous evening dresses that resembled sequined football jerseys while continuing with the gowns made from gray flannel. But in the early 1970s, after The New Yorker’s fashion critic Kennedy Fraser likened the somewhat stuffy “architectural” dresses Beene had become known for to concrete, he moved decisively toward more fluid silhouettes. A modernist who had much of the visionary about him and little truck with nostalgia (he embraced synthetic fabrics before others, only to discard them when they failed to hold up, and eventually did away with runways and models, preferring to send his clothes out on professional dancers in unconventional spaces), Beene had an essentialist view of fashion that lifted it from the realm of the frivolous. “The more you learn about clothes,” he observed, “the more you realize what has to be left off. Cut and line become increasingly important.”
This season, it’s impossible not to think of Beene’s legacy—his innovative pairing of haute and humble materials, his obsession with the contemporary applicability of a given design—and the way it has been funneled down to a freshly minted generation of designers, whether or not they’re aware of it. We trust Alber Elbaz, Narciso Rodriguez, and Francisco Costa to have a centered point of view about who women are and how they want to dress, but a newcomer like Prabal Gurung might as well be channeling Beene when he talks about his muse: “I’m designing for a thinking man’s sex symbol. What makes a woman interesting is her brain.” Beene’s work was “thought-out without being too tortured,” Gurung goes on, with “the right amount of sex appeal.”
Michael Kors, who proves once again this season that he’s a master of classic American style, describes his customer as “opinionated, a woman who’s going to put her own spin on what I do.” His effortlessly elegant separates are done up in dreamy fabrics such as cashmere, crepe, matte jersey, and glove leather, and the emphasis on black and white with touches of crimson and cobalt is eminently Beene-esque. Kors believes that we’ve come to expect more from fashion than ever, in part because the financial crash made everyone “reassess things.” These days, he says, “thought has to go into fashion, not just time. There’s a concern with mobility—can I get it into a suitcase?” Kors points out that “intrinsically, separates are based on function. Without function, a design can be beautiful but not intelligent.” He sings the praises of sportswear designers, citing “the Proenza boys,” Phoebe Philo, and Stella McCartney. Evening wear is the last bastion of form over function, he notes, a genre in which the woman is still seen in an old-fashioned decorative light, but even here the rules are changing.
* * *
The closest I got to Beene the designer was when I wore Beene Bag, the impeccable bridge line he started in 1971 and gave as much care to as he did his higher-priced collection. The line retailed for somewhere between fifty and two hundred dollars when he introduced it, and I recall the blouse and skirt I bought—in a navy-and-white silk, printed with a graph-paper-like pattern—as one of my more expensive purchases. The only flourish was a discreet ruffle punctuating the sleeves, which were becomingly cut not too short, and I remember feeling like the height of style—of “shik”—when I wore the ensemble, which was often.
The closest I got to Beene the man was when I chanced to be seated next to him at a lunch given by Paper magazine during the late 1990s to honor Eleanor Lambert, the elderly doyenne of fashion PR. When the day arrived, I woke up feeling gray and internal, hardly the right mood for a fashion event. I shrugged on one of my black, baggy outfits meant to suggest the artiste that lurked beneath and taxied over to the downtown bistro with Eleanor. The place was bobbing with intricately outfitted women from the fashion press as well as besuited ladies who lunch, but somehow I got seated next to The Man himself. I must admit he took absolutely no notice of me when I introduced myself, offering me the most frigid of smiles before turning to the person on his other side, with whom he appeared to be warmly engaged.
What can I say? I felt a bit hurt that Beene, who understood that fashion was about more than being fashionable, had dismissed me with barely a nod. I told myself that I should have dressed more carefully, had my hair blown out, put on more than my usual haphazard coating of makeup. But, as fate would have it, I looked like me rather than the fashion writer, muse, and mega Beene collector Amy Fine Collins—and when you come down to it, no one is capable of peering beyond the trappings into your soul, not even a genius who can make clothes tell a story. I realized that among his many complicated qualities, Beene was something of a snob, no matter how unconventional his approach to the fashion system, and on that day, at that lunch, I didn’t meet his standards. I forgave him, though, and continued to watch his development with a fascination bordering on awe.
If I had to state it in a nutshell, I’d say that Geoffrey Beene made it okay for me to take fashion seriously. His layered and self-reflective aesthetic made it clear that fashion wasn’t just an obsession of dimwits and airheads. You could practically see the twinkle in his eye as he scattered brightly colored pom-poms across the lace netting of a cocktail dress or subverted the flowery pattern of a chemise by adding a graphic polka-dot fabric at the neck and hem. These days I no longer have quite the pure, contemplative passion for fashion I once had—there have been too many tricks masquerading as innovation, too many borrowings pretending to be informed referencing—but this season’s offerings are way too tempting to ignore, reminding me of why I looked up from my reading in the first place to embrace the unexpectedly cerebral pleasure of clothes.
OUR MONEY, OURSELVES
1999
I have never understood money. More than that, I was trained in the hazardous, complex art of not understanding money at an early age. This isn’t to suggest that everything about my relatively privileged childhood was a pleasant pecuniary blur—that my desires as a girl weren’t regularly deemed too expensive, or simply excessive, or that the rudiments of saving against a rainy day were not imparted to me. My favorite piggy bank was a chubby, cloudy-white glass milk bottle (labeled with my name, in big block letters, to distinguish it from my sisters’ piggy banks, which were otherwise identical) with a slot in the middle of its round tin lid. I remember the satisfying noise, like the clink of good china, that the bottle made when it was weighty with change; I would pick it up and shake it, feeling well accounted for. But since my mother, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, didn’t believe in giving her children allowance (she considered this to be one of many misguided Americanisms), I never accumulated enough money to buy anything ambitious, and there came a time when I realized that the piggy bank’s value was more symbolic than actual. Indeed, one of those piggy banks still resides on a closet shelf in the room I shared with my sisters in our parents’ apartment. The pennies and nickels and quarters in it are more than three decades old by now, and I find it odd that such elderly coins aren’t worth more—having been around for so long and witnessed so much.
My parents were affluent, although the word “affluent” had not yet, in the 1960s, replaced the simpler and more viscerally descriptive term “rich.” We lived on Park Avenue, in a duplex with a curving staircase, and spent the summers in a house that was an hour outside the city, several blocks from the ocean. The staff included a stern woman of Dutch origins who looked
after the six of us, a cook who presided over the kitchen, and a chauffeur. There was also Willie Mae, the laundress, who loudly cracked chewing gum as she ironed my father’s underwear and custom-made Sulka shirts. For tailoring needs, there was Mrs. Kaabe, a short square woman who was able to hold entire conversations with straight pins in her mouth.
And yet such was my family’s inordinate, even pathological, discretion on the subject of its own wealth that I continued to believe my father sold chairs, rather than shares, well after I had outgrown other Gidget-like malapropisms. The larger meaning of money—its social potency—was kept deliberately veiled, as though it were a secret weapon, a force that could send things spiraling fatally out of control. There was so much hemming and hawing around the basic economic facts that I was surprised the first time—I was ten years old and at sleepaway camp—I heard my family knowingly referred to as “rich.”
Rich? I didn’t feel remotely rich. For one thing, I shared a room with my two sisters; it was only from my friends who lived in smaller apartments, without staircases, that I learned it was desirable—virtually an upper-middle-class standard—to have a bedroom of your own. These same friends had more Danskin outfits than I did, in an enviable array of colors, and seemed far more casual about spending money. My mother may have ordered one or two expensive dresses apiece for us to wear to synagogue, when we were on display, but she was indifferent about what we wore to school, where no one she cared about saw us. She briefly campaigned for uniforms at the Jewish day school I went to and ceaselessly inveighed against the clothes obsessions of adolescent girls. I can remember desperate arguments over the purchase of an extra pair of shoes: we were allowed one “good” pair, for Shabbos, and one everyday pair, and any more than that was deemed frivolous. At dinnertime, my five siblings and I often argued over seconds, and our refrigerator never burst with fruit; there were no inviting mounds of cherries, peaches, and plums like the ones stocked in the Short Hills basement of Brenda Patimkin’s parents, in Goodbye, Columbus. (Even if it had been full, we weren’t allowed to range freely in the kitchen and open fridge doors at our whimsy.)
It was as though my mother were acting the part of being the wife of a rich man without really believing in the role. Or she believed in it schizophrenically, with one ledger kept for my father—for whom nothing was too good or too much—and another ledger kept for us children. This tendency was undoubtedly exacerbated by the differences in my parents’ backgrounds, which were subtle but important: they were both German immigrants, united by their Orthodox Judaism, but my mother’s father was a lawyer and a philosopher, a member of the Kant Society in Germany, while my paternal grandfather was a canny businessman, a fur merchant who would have preferred his grandsons to go into the sechoira (merchandise) business rather than what he called “the paper business” (Wall Street).
Although I don’t believe my mother ever balanced a checkbook, and I know that she was never confined to a weekly budget, I can still hear her saying “Cherries are expensive!” on a summer weekend when one of us protested the meager amount she had bought—as though someone somewhere were keeping close watch on her expenditures. My mother scorned the randomly acquisitive habits of upper-middle-class Americans; she never threw leftovers away, and she loved to intone penny-wise, pound-foolish phrases like “Enough is as good as a feast.” (My father’s peccadilloes, which included a tendency to warehouse electric shavers and eyeglasses, were lovingly exempted from these strictures.) She was so careful to convey the message that she was not entirely at ease with the lifestyle she’d come into when she married my father—or, more to the point, that she in any way endorsed “marrying up”—that I came to believe, unlike the Bennet daughters in Pride and Prejudice, that there was something intrinsically admirable about men who didn’t make money.
There was another factor that added to the confusion, and that was my father’s prominence as a philanthropist. A generous dispenser of funds to charities large and small, he sat on the board of countless Jewish institutions—from rickety, fanatically religious yeshivas in the backwaters of Brooklyn to big-city hospitals with gleaming secular reputations—and endowed any number of scholarships and chairs in the family name, both in New York and in Israel. Throughout my childhood, my parents attended an astonishing number of dinners on behalf of these institutions, where they frequently took a table that cost tens of thousands of dollars and often had the honor of being seated on the dais. (Actually, in the segregated men’s-club atmosphere of these functions, my father would sit on the dais with other honorees in starched shirtfronts, while my mother had to make do at a more plebeian table below.) My father was also capable of throwing the odd donation to a political candidate and of suddenly being pressed into service on behalf of some non-Jewish cultural organization. By the time I reached my teens, it had become clear to me that my siblings and I were viewed by the world as having been born with silver spoons in our mouths, no matter that we had developed an intricate system of hiding food—especially sweets—from one another at home, in case there wouldn’t be enough to go around. This faux reputation as an heiress has dogged me ever since; it took a firm hold when I was in my twenties and my father, as part of his ongoing commitment to a Jewish school of the arts, endowed a concert hall on the Upper West Side.
At the time, I was renting a dark subterranean apartment all the way over on the East Side that would eventually be robbed, twice, by the super, and by then I had all but given up on making the two parts of the picture fit together in my own mind, much less in other people’s: the shame and contempt that attached to the subject of money within the family versus the public recognition and deference accorded my parents. Who, one might wonder, was I in all this? Someone looking in on a scene of plenty, her nose pressed wistfully to the window, or someone who was born into the scene, nestled in the silken folds of privilege?
My mother went to great lengths to convince me and my siblings that money was not only intrinsically poisonous but not ours to claim by virtue of blood ties. What were we to my father’s money, and what was it to us? We were connected, she implied, only by sheer happenstance. None of us was ever offered a strand of pearls or a jazzy little sports car or some other gift on reaching a signpost of maturity, like college graduation. (Once my father took me to buy a fur coat, but the only one who emerged from the showroom wearing fur was him.) It wasn’t as though we weren’t thrown the occasional perk, of a kind my parents deemed worthy—a trip to Israel, say. But in my experience, it’s pretty much a rule of thumb that no one compares downward. In the world of Jewish princes and princesses that I inhabited, I didn’t look to friends who had less than I did; I looked to those who had more, who seemed to glide on a surface made shiny and smooth by parental largesse. At some point I took to muttering darkly to my mother that charity began at home, but she would always fix me with a contemptuous look and ask, “And what exactly is it that you lack?” She managed to make me feel ungrateful and grabby at once, as though my bad character doomed me to be a scheming Goneril rather than a selfless Cordelia.
* * *
This ambivalence about money—its rightness and wrongness, when it was meant to be a visible facilitator and when it was supposed to hang back shyly—led inevitably to an atmosphere of self-consciousness and false restraint both at home and in the world. Well before I had heard the term “conspicuous consumption,” it seemed to me that being genuinely rich entailed a certain compulsive delight in spending and accreting. As a girl, I was a devout reader of Archie comics, which featured Betty and her rival, the “gorgeously rich” Veronica Lodge, as well as the brilliantined, ever-scheming Reggie, who was also “lumpy with loot.” Its pages were filled with wisecracks about the allure of wealth and the importance of finding a rich boyfriend. (“Let’s do something romantic!” one character says. “Like counting money or watching armored cars unload.”) Beneath the jokes, however, lay a serious mid-century appreciation of the mercantile ethos. “If it draws people and shows a profit,”
explains the perennially put-upon Mr. Lodge to his daughter, “that’s good business.” I also watched The Beverly Hillbillies on television—this was a decade and a half before money lust came out into the open with Dynasty and Falcon Crest—and noticed an insouciance about living high on the hog that was nowhere in evidence in my own family, despite our maids and our fancy address. (The glamour of a good address has been brought home to me many times since, of course. Once, when I was in my late twenties and having lunch with Philip Roth, he asked me where I grew up. When I answered, hedging as I always did, “On Sixty-Fifth and Park,” he leaned across the table, his dark eyes blazing with curiosity, and asked, “On Sixty-Fifth? Or on Park?”)
Although my family’s now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t approach to money may have been particularly heated, I slowly came to realize that this private obfuscation was embedded within a larger cultural evasiveness. I noticed that other people were caught in a similarly ambivalent grip, however different their circumstances. No one was honest about the subject of money; worse yet, not many people seemed to recognize that they were being dishonest. People either deified money or demonized it—conducted themselves like Ayn Rand characters, as if the profit motive were the only thing that mattered, or pretended that they didn’t give a fig for worldly wealth and that those who did were beneath consideration.
The latter type tended to strut around the groves of academe, where a spirit of apology for being white and the beneficiary of the American system of free enterprise was standard among the Columbia University humanities faculty in my student days, and the one English professor who wore bespoke suits was rumored to be on the payroll of the PLO. Then again, anyone who has been exposed to a basic humanistic education in the last fifty years has absorbed money’s bad reputation. Rich people rarely came in for a kind word in the novels we read for our courses, although the preoccupation with the simple fact of money was so much in the forefront that, as Lionel Trilling observed, “the novel is born with the appearance of money as a social element.” Most of us came of age with the sense that money was inherently impersonal, if not morally suspect; we were raised to believe that financial success can’t compensate for loneliness and may even be conducive to it.
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