“I have an obsession with old nylon stockings, with different intonations, shades of nude, and fake tan colors, some quite horrible. The idea that in order not to show naked skin one covered it with another layer of fake skin, a form of restraint that did nothing but excite the fascination with what lay underneath.”
—Victoria Bartlett on VPL
When I was 15, I worked in a store whose corporate policy stated we had to wear pantyhose with everything, skirt or pants, it did not matter (trouser socks!) In the blazing oven heat of a desert summer, it was painful, like taking a blow dryer to a pair of nylons and permanently melting them to your skin.
This being the early-to-mid-nineties, there were a handful of supervisors who had not yet given up their ‘suntan’ L’eggs supply from the late eighties.
VPL just surgically removes the suntanned legs and leaves it for your bum, like a reverse tanline. Scientific progress!
When you’re living in New York: How young is too young to be acting old (staying in, hosting dinner parties, eating a fiber-rich diet) and how old is too old to be acting young (leaving the house for a party at midnight, drinking beer at a venue that uses plastic cups instead of glasses, hustling work)?
And if one clocks in at either end of age-inappropriate activity spectrum, is it a sign of weakness or a victory of self-assurance? Or is it just sad?
This is the eulogy my uncle Paul gave at my grandpa’s funeral in Albuquerque, NM, on Saturday, September 12, 2009. It’s the story of a great storyteller, a teacher, a father, a grandfather, a rancher, an adventurer, a fixer, a hard worker, a legacy. And, here’s a beautiful photo set by my brother Dominic (and the nunu web designer!) of the tools in his garage, Ted’s Tools.
My father was born 86 years ago in Del Norte, Colorado, a small town at the northern end of the beautiful San Luis valley in the southern part of Colorado. For his parents, Patrick Espinosa and Josefina Chaves, my father was the ninth child of thirteen. Five of his siblings would die in childhood. He was the last surviving sibling of his family.
Despite a bout of typhoid fever which had him in the hospital for months, my father flourished as a child. His family lived in the small ranching community of La Garita, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. His great grandfather had moved there from New Mexico prior to the Civil War. My father took great pride in knowing about the family’s history and through his love of storytelling, he was instrumental in preserving and transmitting our family’s story to later generations.
Can hard times and their associated misery ever be an acceptable theme for a fashion show? And if the clothes don’t really attempt to explore legitimate modes of American dress, and instead remain on the surface—a little faded and ripped denim with rhinestone sandals—isn’t that somehow worse?
“Excuse me works,” he says, perched on Isaac Mizrahi’s “Astaire Case” set piece. A woman is wielding a camera with a long lens and she’s battling her way backstage. “Say, ‘excuse me.’”
She pauses.
“Oh, I thought you were security,” she says, and elbows him again.
“Don’t push me with your cheap camera, you stupid bitch.” His voice even and calm, he stabs her. “Yeah, I said it.”
Her voice becomes venom. “You don’t belong here with language like that.”
What a day, I lived this first day of fashion week as if it were my last (!). It went something like this: Woke up late (of course), dashed to the tents for BCBG (snooze…..everyone–models, the audience–had the energy level of zombies and I’m pretty sure the collection was designed in someone’s sleep). Jumped on the F train for an office fly-by where I vented to Dana about various serious and trivial matters.
Hopped into a taxi, Milk Studios-bound, for Vena Cava where I met Aileen; we were treated to shades of Katherine Hepburn, the French Riviera and Yves Saint Laurent on a starry holiday in Morocco (my interpretation of the collection, not necessarily theirs) while The Fiery Furnaces played an acoustic set that sounded like a young Patti Smith (she comes up a lot for me these days…Breedlove and I have a secret project in the works with her as our muse).
The Fiery Furnaces
I walked over to the Chelsea Hotel, a breath of fresh old New York air–the interior smells exactly like my first dorm room on 116th Street and Broadway. I would bottle it if I could and call it Nostalgia. In room 710, Tom Scott presented pulp noir tableaux
At Tom Scott.
where the sunlight dripped off curtains worn by both windows and models alike.
Tom Scott at the Chelsea Hotel
Ran into mon cherie Sarah and we dined on Japanese food at Haru while I quietly vented about various serious and trivial matters.
At Tom Scott.
Before L.A.M.B. I sat in a park overlooking the Hudson River and penned my assessment of BCBG and ate an oatmeal cookie from Billy’s Bakery.
L.A.M.B. suffered from cheap fabrics, silk cargo pants and denim shorts that looked like diapers. Some bonus points for its homage to Vivienne Westwood, but that was probabaly unintentional. However, any and all of it would work for either an outdoor M.I.A. concert or a Lady Gaga Halloween costume–lots of tribal prints, hoods and missing pants.
L.A.M.B.
Gwen Stefani has cute blonde kids with faux hawks, who were there with her husband, that guy Gavin from Bush.
Gwen Stefani and Child.
We sipped a glass of champagne and Aileen said she felt like she was in that episode of Gossip Girl when Taylor Momsen’s character has a fashion show at some society party. Yes, I said, that pretty much sums up nearly every fashion event in this town. Remember when the reference for such things used to be Sex and the City? Dinosaurs.
Another office pitstop, where I saw Godfrey. We talked about The September Issue and Fashion’s Night Out. I joked that I’d become a fashion conspiracy theorist. “Maybe fashion companies should fail,” I said, “until they can figure out how to give people what they want. Maybe people have stopped shopping because they have a low threshold for crap.” Yikes, do I tell you that it my low blood sugar talking? Quick, somebody feed me a purse.
At this point, my feet hurt. A lot. And my hair looked super frizzy.
Next stop, Fifth Avenue, Dior store. Charlize Theron would be signing her very own September issue of Vogue downstairs,
Charlize Theron signs her face on Vogue at Dior.
while upstairs legendary Vogue photographer Arthur Elgort conducted photo sessions with Dior customers who spent $2500 or more. He looked the part of “legendary fashion photographer” down to his knotted neckerchief and flirtatious winks. He buys his t-shirts from L.L. Bean, he said, but “I’m sure there must be somebody out there who buys this stuff.”
Arthur Elgort at work in Dior.
Anna Wintour showed up to say hello to Charlize, wearing a trench coat, its hem flipped up at the bottom the way a tag sticks out of a shirt. I was surprised that no one in her entourage had bothered to mention it to her or smooth it down. Maybe they were afraid to, but I think it’s probably because she moves too fast. A nice humanizing detail.
Charlize and Anna.
Marilyn rescued me at Dior and we walked arm and arm to Prada, where Arthur Elgort had tipped me off that “his friend Grace Coddington” would be appearing. Grace is my new personal hero after seeing The September Issue, but when we got there she’d already left. It was off to Barneys instead. En route Marilyn nudged me to look at a couple of dudes walking in front of us. What? Where? I had no idea who she was pointing at. Is it Ted Danson? I thought. (Dominic had a Danson and Jason Schwartzman sighting at Vinegar Hill House recently). No, it was Mark Badgley and James Mischka of Badgley Mischka. “Let’s follow them!” said Marilyn. “Maybe they’re going to Barneys!”
They were not, so we left them and crossed the street at Calvin Klein, where their designer Francisco Costa stood on the street and signed the official Fashion’s Night Out t-shirt for anyone and everyone who wanted him to. And posed for pictures! Marilyn took a few.
At Barneys we snapped photos of Waris (he’s a jewelry designer for his own House of Waris, but most people know him as the Indian guy in all of Wes Anderson’s movies). He would not smile for the camera, but smiled quite brightly immediately afterwards. He was there representin’ House of Waris, of course. Lovely stuff.
We went downstairs to look for my fragrance god Frederic Malle, but he had already left for the evening, so we stopped by the second floor to say hello to Isabel and Ruben Toledo, who are quite simply the nicest, most brilliant people in fashion. They were signing copies of the book that accompanies her exhibition at F.I.T. Ruben, fashion illustrator extraordinaire, even drew portraits of the person whose book he signed.
On the third floor, however, something quite special happened. Intrigued by some very loud salsa music playing in the corner–I can tell you with complete certainty I have never heard salsa played at Barneys. Wise Latina Women ahoy! Is it the Sotomayor effect? In from L.A. especially for the event, designer Juan Carlos Obando was all set to give salsa lessons, except, a sales associate sadly informed us, nobody had taken him up on the offer! Que lastima! So guess who decided to take a lesson? Pretty soon lots of ladies were joining in.
I think I could have cried right then and there, to be salsa dancing at Barneys. I felt so happy that I actually felt like shopping. Wow, so this Fashion’s Night Out thing might work after all.
“I wish they would do this every fashion week,” said Marilyn. “I feel like I’m going out clubbing!”
Of course, the fun could not last; we both had a long night of work ahead of us. And I have a plane to catch in a few hours. I made a fuel stop at Tiffany & Co. where they passed out free coffee from a cart on the street. Really, I just wanted the paper cup.
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….
…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
Anyone read The New Yorker profile on Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio this week? He’s the guy that is conducting a pathological crackdown on illegal immigrants (and there is rampant racial profiling of people who are legal) and employs prison tactics designed to humiliate – you may have heard of his parades of prisoners in pink uniforms—and also dresses them in archaic black and white striped uniforms—or his chain gangs in the blazing furnaces of Phoenix and his “tent city” prisons in the desert (with interior temps nearing 130 degrees, reports William Finnegan in the piece). Per New Yorker style, the piece lets Arpaio dig his own hole by showing what a pathetic publicity hound he is while also illustrating his appalling orchestrations of this “theater of cruelty.” Reading it, I found it shocking that a bigger deal hasn’t been made of him in the conversation about torture.
Earlier this summer, I got a very small, but potent taste of Arpaio’s Phoenix, just as I was leaving, in the airport. I gave my I.D. to the homeland security agent before going through security, as usual. He looked at my driver’s license, then looked at me, then looked at it again—again, pretty standard—then he looked up at me again and said, “And you are?”
I looked at him, completely confused—because he’s holding my I.D., right, so, why is he asking for my name? (Isn’t that the usual response to a “And you are” question?) So I say, “Um, I am…Renata Espinosa?” I phrase it as a question because I’m not sure what kind of answer he is looking for. “I can see that on your I.D.,” he says, and then he repeats the question again.
I realize that he wants to know my ethnic background—though here I am with a valid form of U.S. identification—and I’m annoyed that he doesn’t just ask, or that he insists on asking such a vague question. It makes me wonder if this is designed to unsettle the person who is being asked, so that they automatically get nervous and look guilty…of something. This time I respond, “I am going to New York City,” which is still not the answer he is looking for.
Again he asks the same stupid, vague question.
“That’s a very open-ended question,” I tell him.
He’s not being particularly mean, just insistent, and I start wondering if he’s just messing with me for fun, because he’s bored. He’s actually smiling and I don’t know whether I’m supposed to smile, too, like this is some big joke, or whether I’ll get in trouble if I do. So finally I say, “You want to know my ethnic background?” He nods yes. “Mexican and Spanish,” to which he says, “That’s what I thought,” and then he lets me through.
My dad seemed hopeful that I’d suggest an activity for us to do today—a hike on the mesa? Coffee in town, where we’d make fun of dippy Santa Fe types?— except that I was in the midst of some Michael Jackson-related work today. TV was on, Twitter was open to the LA Times and I periodically checked an AP reporter friend’s Facebook updates from the scene at Forest Lawn. He was skeptical of my interest in the media blitz, but, I argued, this was the first newsworthy event since his death nearly two weeks ago. He eventually chilled out and even turned up the volume when Stevie Wonder started to sing. Then, between Al Sharpton’s impassioned speech and Brooke Shield’s teary one, he made us something to eat. The funeral luncheon: Quesadillas filled with sauteed swiss chard with carmelized shallots; a salad of mixed lettuces, radishes, green beans and lemon vinaigrette and seared wild salmon. We ate in silence.
Este amor apasionado
Anda todo alborotado por volver.
Voy camino a la locura
Y aunque todo me tortura, se querer.
Nos dejamos hace tiempo
Pero me lleg el momento de perder.
Tu tenas mucha razon;
Le hago caso al corazon
Y me muero por volver.
Y volver volver volver
A tus brazos otra vez;
Llegar hasta donde estas;
Yo se perder, yo se perder;
Quiero volver, volver, volver.
—
This impassioned love
Goes on, compelling me to return;
I’m on the road to madness
And although everything tortures me,
I know how to love.
We parted ways some time ago
But the moment of loss arrived.
You had every reason;
I heed my heart
And I’m dying to return.
And to return, to return, to return
To your arms again
I will arrive where you are
I know how to lose, I can take it
I want to return, return, return.
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