Having tired of backgammon, baccarat and bezique, my friend the Countess Barat took me to a really hot haute couture New York fashion show last week
–the Adolfo show, which is the the fashion show–and, as I`d even be happy to say over a beer and a shot at Mongo`s Tavern and Auto Parts on Super Bowl Sunday, it was a gas. In fact, I think I now prefer fashion shows to Super Bowl games, certainly to those watched at the bar at Mongo`s.
This is mostly because I go to fashion shows for a much different reason than do the women, and certainly the men, who regularly attend them. I go to look at the girls. At one point at the Adolfo, the Countess was complaining that the steam from my heavy breathing was obscuring her view of a plaid jacquard with white charmeuse collar, camellia trim and blouson top.
Yes, fashion models do come in only three sizes: long, longer and extruded. They tend to look and move like reincarnated Salukis, and they`re not exactly prone to that lusty embonpoint that was such a rage in the 1950s, especially at Mongo`s. But they eat, I think, only lettuce, a great virtue in a Big Apple where they charge $3.50 for a cup of coffee. And anyway, who wants to lumber onto a tea dance floor with Linda Ronstadt or, worse, Linda Ellerbee?
THANK GOD FOR DIANNE
As the Adolfo is the the fashion show of the season, the runway models were the most the the in New York, particularly the star of the show, the delightfully dazzling and delicieuse Dianne deWitt. If God is a woman, She had better look like Dianne, and probably does.
There are other reasons for going to fashion shows besides watching delicieuse Dianne pivot and gavotte (give me a week, and I`ll think of one, ha ha). The best is probably that you get to watch the spectacle of rich women drooling.
There are probably only about 3,000 women in the entire world who actually buy frocks and finery created specifically for them by top designers. For the Adolfo, about a hundred or so of these 3,000 super-elite crowded into the St. Regis Hotel`s crystal-chandeliered Versailles Room. (You`ll recall that Versailles was where Marie Antoinette lived before Robespierre and the boys rendered her a sliced tomato.) These included Old Money types like the ethereal Evangeline Bruce; Much Newer Money types like Judy Ney, wife of the ad king; and Not Really All That Much Money types like C.Z. Guest and her professional deb daughter, Cornelia, who I think now has a weekly section about herself in People magazine, if not Rolling Stone.
Nearly all arrived in de rigueur furs–principally mink. In fact, there was so much fur around that the initial seating resembled the opening of the bear act at the Moscow Circus. The men came largely in furs as well, including an elderly chap with cane and lavender scarf and, of course, the de rigueur Andy Warhol, who stood in the doorway instead of taking a seat and who kept snapping photos of something, I think possibly the opposite wall.
SNIFF, SNIFF
In the program, Adolfo gave credit for the perfume used in the show, and it played a vital role. The fur coat of the woman next to me smelled awfully of mothballs.
Every so often, the audience burst inexplicably into spontaneous applause, as happens at bullfights, though the frocks so honored looked to me just the same as those that weren`t. At the end, Adolfo himself came out, wearing old shoes and white wash pants and he was applauded. I think he was also awarded the hem and two shoulder pads, if not the ears and the tail.
I did actually notice the clothes. I had little choice. My front-row seat was up against the runway right where delicieuse Dianne and the girls made their first pivot, and I had eye-level views of their, er, hips at about 10 inches distance.
What I noticed most about the clothes was how ridiculous they would look actually worn by all those women in the room who supposedly are going to buy them–even though, as the Countess pointed out, Adolfo designs them with billowy little fronts to hide billowy little pot bellies. A couple of outfits that featured low-cut strapless tops and short-short bell-shaped frou-frou bottoms would make even, or perhaps especially, Cornelia Guest look like the hippopotamuses doing the ”Dance of the Hours” in Walt Disney`s ”Fantasia.” In fact, I think that`s why the rich ladies were all drooling. Not because they can`t afford the frocks (which I`m sure they can buy by the boxcar load, and do), but because of the beautiful bodies within them, which cannot be bought even with all the charge accounts at Bergdorf`s.
As usual, my Best Blond In Show award went to delicieuse Dianne, and, as usual, not to Andy Warhol. —
