Back to school for the art and fashion worlds…today I hit the F.I.T. Couture Council’s luncheon honoring Dries Van Noten, the Belgian designer who knows how to take the hippie out of bohemianism, fusing disparate ethnic and historical references to create clothes for the wandering poet in all of us. I “bumped into” Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was there to present the award to Dries. She had never met him, she admitted, but he did design her wedding dress earlier this year– “Oh my god, this is not what we talked about, what am I going to do?” she remembers thinking when she first saw the results. “I’ll wear that dress in my closet from 2005…then I took it with me to Italy, put it on and I had never been in a dress more beautiful. I think he knows much better than me what will look sexy on me. Obviously he’s not designing just for me, but I imagine a lot of women must feel that way.”
Typically all us journalists needing a soundbite on the first day or two of fashion week will ask what a celeb’s plans are for fashion week. It’s a litmus test for whether they are A, B, C or D level; the more things they plan to attend, the lower the grade. “I’m juggling so much right now, but I’m going to try,” said Gyllenhaal, on whether she’d attend Proenza Schouler’s show (she’s a big fan of them, too). She said she’s busy with her daughter who just started school. A-/B+?
At the luncheon I sat next to Lynn Yeager and Marilyn Kirschner, two of my favorite fashion writers. I think that’s a good omen for the week (and Mercury is even in retrograde!) Kirschner and I discussed feeling disenchanted with the whole fashion brouhaha, though clearly she loves what she does otherwise she would not still be doing it (her first job in fashion was at Seventeen in the seventies). It’s in her blood to be a magazine editor, she said. And when she’s feeling down, her favorite thing is to get dressed up in one of her vintage Pucci dresses. When she said that, suddenly my brain was flooded with a sense of clarity and I remembered why I love fashion. Why, I love dressing up, too! But I think it’s important for the things you wear to have meaning (as with everything one does in life). So when I put on a certain pair of shoes, I remember walking a mile in them in Paris to hear Patti Smith perform at a fashion show, or when I wear a certain belt I think about how many fashion functions it got me through, because it was the only new accessory I could afford that season, and the next season, and the next….
Tonight I will celebrate my final night of “Renata Time” by flipping over to my former world, art. I’ll meet Aileen, in town from San Francisco, for a photography show at Jen Bekman, then off to Invisible Exports for genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE: 30 Years of Being Cut Up:
…a three decade retrospective of photomontage and Expanded Polaroids, which includes many works never exhibited before, as well as a sampling of P-Orridge’s early Mail Art. The show will mark the culmination of a new, re-emergent phase in BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s life. He/r career — and most particularly he/r recent pursuit of pandrogyny — tests the limits of transgression and traces the tragic fate of the underground, proving again the expressive power and pervasive influence of those artists who take the world not as it comes to them — sensible, orthodox, predictable — but as they would like it to be.”
Electric Newspaper, Issue Two, 1995, Mixed media 9 x 9 inches on 15.25 x 12 inch paper
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