I came up here for last week’s fall fashion shows prepared to be outraged.
Instead, I found myself dazed. Staring at fully half of Cindy Crawford’s bare bottom can have that effect on one.
I was ready to be outraged because I’d heard that the global fashion cartel was about to pull another of its famous fast ones.
For two years, the designers have been pushing the frumpy, ankle-length, Edwardian hobble-skirt, suffragette “long look” on the American woman-proclaiming it the hottest, newest dernier cri in fashion. American women by the millions have been duped into filling their closets with these duds, though much of the cri has come from hapless males who’ve had to help foot the bills for this equippage.
With the closets now full of “long,” the designers were said to be coming back this season with, of all things, the miniskirt.
That’s what the reports said, and last week, under the big tents in New York’s Bryant Park, where all the fashion shows were held, that’s what proved to be the case. What the reports had failed to say was that not only are hemlines going up this season, but they’re going up and they aren’t stopping.
The global fashion cartel works six months ahead, don’t you know, and the clothes in last week’s fall shows were perforce supposed to be for next spring.
But these frocks aren’t for spring. They’re for hootchy-kootchy dancers to wear in mid-July in the equatorial tropics at the height of greenhouse-effect global warming. With the oven on.
I should have realized what was in the offing here last week when I saw actress-model Kate Moss sitting at ringside at the Todd Oldham show. As memory serves, she barely wears clothes in her Calvin Klein Obsession commercials.
Perhaps she was doing a little shopping for a sequel. I hope that was not the case for her seatmate, actor Jaye Davidson, who played the “heroine” in the film “The Crying Game.” Christian Slater was there, too, looking even more dazed than I-with good reason. He’s dating Christy Turlington, one of the other models in the show.
When Cindy Crawford was not exposing the top of her bottom in Oldham numbers such as “Greece II,” the other ladies were letting ample bottom portions of their bottoms protrude through the nearly waist-high pants “legs” of short short short-shorts. Above such “pants,” some wore tops called, in self-explanatory fashion, “spider bras.”
A model named Roshumba wasn’t so lucky. She had to go up and down the runway wearing a “top” that began sedately at the throat and went all the way down to the collar bone, compelling her to keep her hands over her breasts the entire trip.
Of the 91 garments in the Oldham show, there were by my count only 11 that wouldn’t get you arrested in Indianapolis.
Maria Snyder, who designs ultrasophisticated clothes for the woman who’d like to find a (rich) husband fast (Ivana Trump was sitting in front of me), produced a somewhat more refined collection with more classic lines, but she, too, had a drop-leaf Cindy dress, and a whole bunch of sheer little Greek nymphet dresses, under which the ladies wore absolutely nothing!
How do I know? As each model made a right turn to go backstage after completing the trip down the runway, the breeze blowing in from 6th Avenue wafted up the backs of their little skirts, revealing what you might call the rest of Cindy. It seemed almost like part of the choreography.
Oldham and Snyder are noted for pushing the edge of the envelope, but the more mainline designers were exposing thigh lines, navels and other fleshly acreage too. One Nicole Miller A-line micromini with black thigh-high stockings brought back a style not seen since the Navy closed down the “temples of Venus” in New Orleans’ storied Storyville.
Where will all this lead? You need look no further than Cindy to see exactly. What’s the point of it all? Well, if the American man is sitting there as dazed as I was, he probably won’t be quite so obstreperous about footing the bill.
