FASHION’S NIGHT IN
THREE BEST FRIENDS EXPERIENCE FASHION’S NIGHT OUT ON THEIR OWN TERMS
Black. Is it the color of luxury? Black caviar, black pearls, black truffles, black diamonds, black stretch limos, Black Amex, Black Label, black Agent Provocateur underwear, Giorgio Armani Crema Nera. The greatest living golfer is black, and I think Leigh Lezark's black hair might just be more elegant than Grace Kelly's strawberry blonde tresses. As I am pondering these things, my BlackBerry starts blinking. A text from Myf Polykrom-Aufrère, she is in her Land Rover, Soho bound, headed my way.
Pilar, who is sitting across from me, expresses her skepticism about my contemplations by reminding me of the fact that I am wearing a camel turtleneck cardigan, a sand silk-charmeuse camisole and ecru knot-front jersey shorts, all by Alexander Wang, finished off with my beige leather Acne booties with a hickory wood platform. I pretend to be offended that she doesn’t agree with me by making a joke about the hickey she got from this cowboy looking guy at the Standard Hotel the night before. That doesn’t seem to shame her enough, so I ask her how many scabs and blisters she has on her feet from walking around in her cowhide Alaia hiking boots.
Of course Myf is an hour late and the only sensible way to make time pass in New York is to go on a culinary adventure so we take a cab to Babbo. Pilar orders the piccata al limone. I get the cappellacci with thyme and ricotta and in my boredom ask the waiter if he could serve the fifteen balls of doughy origami in arrangements of six and nine, telling him something about ancient Greek numerology. After yelling and gesturing around for fiveteen minutes he surrenders.
We realize that Myf might be hungry too, so we prepare for her arrival by separating the two entrées into three portions by any persnickety means necessary. Pilar’s plate, containing only six minuscule piccata, is easily split into three portions of two, but I worry that the waiter might get upset that I wasted his time if I reconfigure my 6-9 arrangement of cappellacci into three sets of five. However, the more immediate issue is that the plate contains four sage leaves.
Myf arrives and she is wearing a neoprene jacket over a sheer black Givenchy blouse, black satin shorts and some Hermes equestrian boots in the softest creamy caramel leather. Myf would never leave her boyfriend Dakota, but the way she looks I have to flirt with her.
“Hey priceless masterpiece that should be placed on top of the mantle for everyone to see and appreciate the greatness which is you,” I say before offering her the food that we have arranged on a plate we stole from an empty table because the waiter would not give me a third plate after he saw what I had done to my cappellacci.
She tells me she can’t eat, her waistline is expanding quicker than Israel’s borders from 1949 to 1967. I tell her that’s not funny, hasn’t she heard what happened to Galliano? She says that she didn’t mean it that way, it’s ok to make tasteless jokes as long as you’re just being ironic. Pilar and I finish our plates and share the plate we had so painstakingly prepared for Myf.
It’s Fashion’s Night Out and Pilar heard that the Face Hunter will be at Opening Ceremony, so that’s where we’re headed. It’s quite a walk but there are so many wonderful characters walking around the New York streets that we get there before I even know it. But when we arrive I begin to panic. There’s no line to get in, instead there’s just a crowd of people filling up the entire street, all waiting to see the Face Hunter and all the other things Opening Ceremony have prepared. I feel like I’m fated to never get in anywhere, Jack Kerouac always seemed to end up in Denver and I always seem to end up standing in line for boutique parties all night. Everybody seems just as desperate to get in as we are. One guy claims he’s Martin Margiela. Myf explains to me that the joke is that nobody has ever seen Martin Margiela’s face, but Pilar thinks it’s not a great joke either way.
Just being outside of Opening Ceremony is astonishing. They’ve hired some artisan food trucks and one of them is selling the most wonderful fried chicken and biscuits. I wish I had some truffle butter for the biscuit, but Whole Foods is probably closed by now. The chicken is still perfect though, it has the crispiest crust and it comes with a sauce that words can’t describe. It’s like Heinz ketchup is the Walkman, obsolete next to the iPod Touch that is this sauce. They’ve also decorated the street with some grandiose statues. They’re like Greek statues, but made of papier-mâché. The real Greek statues survived to this day, but these ones have a beautiful ephemerality to them. People say fashion is meaningless but these statues make a bold statement about mortality and they’ve been dressed up in the clothes that Opening Ceremony made for the blockbuster movie Tron Legacy, as well as the three way collaboration bag, a Three as Four x Tron x Opening Ceremony revival of the classic circle bag. Opening Ceremony has also hired somebody to put makeup on the statues. Pilar doesn’t like that because she thinks historical accuracy is important, but Myf disagrees.
A few people are getting in, yet everyone seems to be standing in place and we aren’t moving forward. Everything has stopped moving, slowed down to a glacial pace, the occasional phone light is blinking but everything else is the same, it’s as if we’re in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 at the cruising altitude of 40,000 feet except we’re not jetsetting anywhere. We’re not getting into Opening Ceremony tonight, I’m sad about missing the Chloe Sevigny exhibit which is accompanied by Charles Wing’s art but we have to make new plans. I overhear someone mentioning a party at the Soho Grand but I doubt I would fit in with the 20 dollars I have in my Bottega Veneta wallet. People with lots of money can gamble and people with little money shouldn’t gamble but I have no money at all so gambling is the only option I have. A house party it is.
I’m so upset about not getting in that I call my mom, I feel like it’s my fault because after all others were strutting in without even standing in line so I need some questions answered. I ask her if I ever slipped out of her hand as a baby, if she ever dropped me, perhaps on my head. But she has heard that question hundreds of times because I’ve asked her hundreds of times, so often that it has become a lifetime mother-daughter-in-joke, of course I know that she protected me as if I was her own eyeball which she would doubtlessly have stabbed in some ocular equivalent of seppuku had anything ever happened to me.
We are still a bit upset that Fashion’s Night Out wasn’t what we expected it to be, but we have to make the best of it. We decide to go to Pilar’s friend’s apartment, they didn’t want to come out and I kind of envy their decision. They live on 1st and A, ages away, if a New York minute is a second then we must have walked five New York hours, and my Acne booties are making me regret the joke I made about Pilar’s feet earlier. We buy some dollar slices of pizza on the way and suddenly any pain my feet might be in seems inconsequential.
We make it to the apartment and Anja, the friend from the previous paragraph, welcomes us. She lives there with her friend Antonella. They have a dog called Fox, who actually kind of looks like a baby fox. They tell me that he’s a real baby fox and not a dog but I’m not sure, someone played the same trick on me once with a dog that looked kind of like a baby polar bear even though he was really a German ice dog. There are a bunch of other people at the apartment and they all tell me that the dog is in fact a baby fox but they might be in on the joke.
Anja and Antonella both go to Parson’s, and they’re having a Gossip Girl marathon because the next season is starting in a few days and the plotline is so convoluted that they have to watch every episode again. They think Chuck is kind of hot, and although I personally prefer Dan’s witty sarcasm I don’t say anything because of how nice they have been. I also don’t tell them that there’s a flashback of all the relevant parts before each episode because I’m worried that they might get insulted.
The rest of the night we talk about fashion and their life in New York, I can’t believe all the things they know and all the misconceptions I had about New York and New Yorkers. Before I leave the apartment, they give me some great shopping recommendations and let me take a picture with them to put on Facebook. My Fashion’s Night Out certainly wasn’t what I expected: I didn’t visit any fashion shows and didn’t see any models traipsing around the East Village streets, but I had the best Fashion’s Night In of my life and learned that I sure have some model friends!
July 28, 2011
Is it the color of luxury? Black caviar, black pearls, black truffles, black diamonds, black stretch limos, Black Amex
via figment.com