Why don’t more men go to fashion shows?
Picture formations of stunning women parading backstage, changing with little regard for privacy and without even a hint of self-consciousness. Maybe such superficial concerns always melt away in the frenzy of preparation for the runway's glare. Or maybe those are merely the hang-ups of ugly people, or normal looking people, who compared to these superhuman people don’t look normal so much as ugly.
The models you encounter at a fashion show are like gazelles, with torsos so thin and legs so endlessly long, they seem to bounce on air, their backs arched in the signature concavity of a runway strut from thrusting their hips so far forward, utterly weightless, which, come to think of it, is probably not too far from the truth.
Yeah I know the common complaint among men. I’ve got plenty of friends who say they like their women with curves, that Kate Moss and her skeletal ilk are about as attractive as lampposts. These are the guys who have never stumbled under the circus-like tent of a show during fashion week and beheld the electric beauty of what looks like a sublime eugenics experiment.
Last Friday I had the privilege of attending the Nicole Miller show at Lincoln Center. Yet for all my excitement I found myself quickly bewildered by the chaotic scene of fast paced preparation.
Squinting my way through a thick cloud of hairspray, I stumbled into Kevin Ryan, the head hair stylist for the show, who was busily putting what appeared to be the finishing touches on one of the models. Her hair was similar to the look he had created for many of the others, parted down the middle and held back with small clips and prodigious amounts of styling gel and spray so that it fell behind the shoulders. It looked good, but what did it all mean?
“Rock and roll is the theme,” he told me.
Ryan, his own hair tied back in a ponytail, seemed to handle the pressure well, engaging in small talk even as he worked fastidiously to put on the finishing touches. He asked me how old his 14-year old daughter, who was standing by his side observing the action, should be before he allows her to start dating. Caught in such an obviously unwinnable position I quickly deferred to his judgment.
“18 it is,” he said, eliciting a look of disappointment from his daughter.
No wonder he felt comfortable bringing her to the show.
In the large changing room, where the models would soon exit onto the runway in front of a packed audience, the show’s designer, Nicole Miller, hovered.
“I did have the whole kind of glam rock theme going,” Miller said. “I didn’t want the girls to look sweet. I started with kind of a minimalist art idea and put a glam rock spin on it. Sol LeWitt meets Ziggy Stardust.”
But what I really wanted to know was how come more guys weren’t trying to infiltrate. I mean you see these girls in the subway and it's like sighting some rare animal. Look there she goes! Getting off at 66th Street. See I knew she was a model! And now here they are, one ten out of ten after the next.
“I used to have a pack of guys I would try to sneak backstage,” she said. “They don’t let them in anymore. Once the models start undressing, the guys have to go.”
They didn’t seem to care when I was there.
